Silicon Valley-based Tesla Motors, led by South African-American billionaire Elon Musk, plans to open an office in South Africa in January to develop large-scale, industrial-size energy storage solutions for local consumers and businesses.
The local Tesla office will be run by Evan Rice, a former CEO of GreenCape, an organisation formed to help develop the market for renewable energy in the Western Cape.
Tesla South Africa will have one employee to start, Rice told htxt, “but if we can find some solid business cases and get them going we will be expanding.”
If things go well, there could be some more announcements later in 2016, Rice said.
Rice said his role will be to develop the market for Tesla’s industrial-scale batteries, Powerpack, which were introduced earlier this year by Musk.
At the launch, Musk said Powerpack wasn’t necessarily aimed at supplementing renewable energy sources but at general grid management.
“Of course we are great believers in renewable energy, but that is not the gating function for stationary storage,” Musk said during an earnings report call, htxt reported. “Ultimately storage allows utilities to turn off power plants or defer new ones… You can basically, in principle, shut down half of the world’s power plants if you had stationary storage.”
Tesla said in November that its Powerpack batteries were being produced at its Gigafactory in Nevada, Fortune.com reported.
The batteries can be plugged into the power grid, connected to buildings, or paired with solar panels. Utilities can use them to operate their grids more smoothly and avoid having to build more expensive power plants that create pollution.
Rice said he has already spoken to municipal energy providers through GreenCape about feed-in tariffs which would allow customers to sell energy back to the grid. This would help to encourage private capital, he said, according to htxt.
“At the moment we’re seeing the majority of solar going into shopping malls or retail parks where all the energy produced can be used on site,” Rice told htxt. “If you could sell some back to the grid it would make (investing in storage) a much more attractive business case and help to leverage private capital.”
Earlier in 2015 Tesla told htxt it had no plans to bring Tesla vehicles to South Africa. However, a spokesperson for the company told MyBroadband in May that its Powerwall home battery system would be in South Africa in 2016, BusinessTech reported.
The Tesla Powerwall is a home battery charged with solar energy that powers homes when the sun goes down. Tesla already has distribution deals in place to sell its Powerwall product through several renewable energy companies in South Africa including Dako Power and Rubicon, htxt reported.
Tesla Motors was founded in 2003 by a group of Silicon Valley engineers who wanted to prove that electric cars could be better than gas-powered cars. They designed a powertrain for a sports car built around an AC induction motor patented in 1888 by Nikola Tesla. The Roadster set a new standard for electric mobility.
Forbes puts Musk’s net worth at $13 billion. That makes him one of the two richest people in Los Angeles.
Born in 1971, Musk grew up in Pretoria. His father was an engineer; his mother, a model and dietician with roots in the U.S. and Canada.
Musk attended college in Canada before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania in the U.S. and then moving to the west coast. He sold his first startup, a company that provided maps and business directories, to Compaq Computer for $22 million. An interest in online banking led him to co-create PayPal, which eBay bought for $250 million — enough to bankroll Musk’s interests in space and green technology, according to a review of the latest Musk biography in the NewYorkTimes.
Musk’s company SpaceX is one of only two private companies to have docked with the
International Space Station.
Here’s how biographer Ashlee Vance described Musk — who was severely bullied as a child — in the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”:
“He’s the possessed genius on the grandest quest anyone has ever concocted. He’s less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to … well … save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.”
Tesla Motors turned its first profit in 2013, according to Forbes.
