Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. I hear a lot about the death of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) and the death of Elon. Elon's not dying, and neither are his products because his products are pretty good.
I happen to have solar panels here at home. And Tesla provides this Powerwall battery option as well. You immediately download the app and that app will track in real time exactly how much solar your solar panels are converting into energy and how much your home is consuming.
Again, all this in real time.
And then how much excess solar is being sold back to the energy grid. Of course, when the home needs more power than what the panels are able to distribute, then it'll show you how much the grid is actually contributing to the home.
So every month on my utility bill, I'll show me how much power the home used. And then it'll give me a credit for the amount that I sold back to the grid, all the excess power. Obviously, it's more effective in the spring and summer here because it's sunnier.
The app is fantastic. I mean, I'll give it to Tesla. It'll tell me in real time, every day, every week, every month, every year... I go back through the history of the system... how much the solar power offset my energy usage. And it'll tell me exactly how many kilowatts per hour my home consumed.
And it's helpful. It's actually been educational to me, because it's interesting some of the things that you don't associate with a lot of power consumption. Running a blender is a small example of that. And just being able to turn things on and off and seeing in real time how many more kilowatts your home needs now, it has been pretty interesting to me.
The second product that it offers — the Powerwall — is needed for situations just like the one that we had in Texas recently.
So what the Powerwall does is... it’s a separate system that ties into the solar panels. And it will store power for you, so if the grid fails, depending on the size of your Powerwall, it will keep you running.
And they sell systems that, sure, they may cost $50,000 or $60,000, but they'll keep you going 15 to 20 days with stored solar energy.
I look at it as a solar energy generator, as opposed to the traditional kind. And they have systems as cheap as $7,000 or $8,000 that will keep you going overnight, every day, as long as the sun comes out. So you decide on your risk level and your comfort level, and then just scale out your Powerwall backup system and track all of it in real time.
It's why Elon's not dying. It's why he's not going away. It's why he's the richest guy in the world.
We can have a discussion about his over-promising and under-delivering, but as products go thus far, from the cars to the panels to the Powerwalls, I have nothing but good things to say about them. |
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Nick Hodge: You're calling it a solar power generator, but the proper name is a virtual power plant.
And one of the ideas in the future — and in some cases to a certain extent now — is to tie them together.
So your home outside of Austin has solar panels and a battery, and so do a couple of your neighbors. And so if your neighborhood goes out, you could potentially share power in the future if you wanted to. Instead of having to have a centralized power plant, this is like a decentralized power plant, in the same way that cryptocurrencies are decentralized currency to the centralized dollar.
And it's a very real thing. I couldn't actually believe it. I was scrolling in the news just yesterday. And I saw that Shell — Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS) — bought a virtual power plant company.
This isn't a made-up thing, the Bloomberg headline was, "Shell Makes Virtual Power Plant Acquisition." It acquired a company called Next Kraftwerke, which is operating a virtual power plant, similar to what I just described, in Europe. And in Europe, they're doing so to the tune of multi-gigawatts.
So to just put it in context, a nuclear power plant is like a gig, a thousand megawatts. And so if you're managing a virtual power plant that’s multiple gigawatts, it’s displacing the capacity of two nuclear power plants.
It's a very clean solution. And it's definitely, I think, part of an all-of-the-above approach that I’ve been saying we need in energy for a decade now. That's a solution to the grid problems we've been seeing here in the States.
And there is going to be a lot of investment opportunities in that space. So keep an eye out. |
Nick Hodge is the co-owner and publisher of Daily Profit Cycle and Resource Stock Digest. He's also the founder of Hodge Family Office, the umbrella organization for his three premium services: Hodge Family Office, Family Office Advantage, and Foundational Profits. He specializes in private placements and speculations in early stage ventures, and has raised tens of millions of dollars of investment capital for resource, energy, cannabis, and medical technology companies. Co-author of two best-selling investment books, including Energy Investing for Dummies, his insights have been shared on news programs and in magazines and newspapers around the world.
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