I don't think "the Tesla of..." is going to catch on the way "the Uber of..." did.
Or, for that matter "the Saudi Arabia of..."
From the Wall Street Journal, July 19:
The appliances of the future will protect us from power outages—and could share energy with our neighbors too—if bets on new battery tech pay off
What if everything in your life had its own battery—not just your phone, but your stove, house, and neighborhood?
That’s the idea behind a crop of startups that use batteries to tackle a surprising variety of challenges: upgrading appliances, deploying fast-charging stations for electric vehicles, keeping homes running during power outages, and making the U.S. power grid more robust.
What’s inspiring these companies is the growing view that electricity is the best way to power everything from cooking to driving, and that America’s infrastructure is inadequate to distribute that electricity—all the way down to the wiring in the walls of our homes and businesses.
To put that mismatch in perspective, start with the fact that the grid is already strained in many places, even though electricity use in the U.S. has grown only about 9% in the past 20 years. Now, consider that over the next few decades, America’s demand for electricity will grow at a faster pace, as it displaces fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. In one of the most aggressive projections, by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the growth of artificial intelligence and the electrification of our homes and industries could mean demand grows by as much as 50% in the next 15 years.
Electric induction cooktops are replacing gas-powered ranges amid rising costs of maintaining old gas lines, the health issues attributed to chemicals from gas ranges, and the fact that, by many accounts, induction cooktops are just better. The state of New York (along with about a hundred municipalities) has banned gas ranges in new buildings.
Making that swap often means installing a new, 240-volt plug—the kind you might use for a washer and dryer. And depending on how much electricity everything else in your house is already drawing, it might also cost thousands of dollars more to upgrade your central electrical panel.
This is where batteries come in, by way of a pair of two-year-old startups called Copper and Impulse. Both are based in the Bay Area, have CEOs named Sam, and share roughly the same goal to sneak big batteries into our homes by sticking them inside of cooktops and—in the case of Copper—stoves. The batteries in their products can charge continuously from a traditional outlet, and then push out far more electricity than a regular outlet can provide, whenever it’s needed for cooking. This means their systems can be installed without upgrading a home’s electrical system.
That’s an interesting trick on its own, but these companies have larger ambitions. Impulse’s system can be integrated directly into a home’s wiring in a way that allows it to push electricity back into the home—and onto the grid. This means the cooktop could charge when electricity is cheap, and then a third party could sell that stored power back to the utility company when electricity is expensive, at times of peak demand, as part of what’s known as a virtual power plant....
....MUCH MORE
