What if I told you I could make tuition cheaper...
Ok guys, I apologize. I gave one of those Huffington Post, super misleading tag lines that draws people in, only to show them that they have been mislead into watching an ad for cat food. Although, that's not to say that the content following this won't somehow effect our Harding financial struggles (don't act like you don't have any).
I want you to imagine a world without power lines. A world where, while you're writing that last crucial sentence in your essay, or coding that final line in your semester-ending, 99% of your grade project, when a tree falls onto a power line connecting campus to the main grid, you won't lose your paper. You won't lose your program. In fact, you probably won't even know the tree fell over. Or when campus completely freezes over, and classes are cancelled because Arkansas' only ice truck flipped over AGAIN, you won't have to have that worry in the back of your head about losing power to Netflix, your game systems, or even just the lights in the washroom (I'm from Canada and I will continue to say washroom as I please).
Friends, our generation is one of fumes. Smoke from factories, cars, trains, it's pretty standard to see in our lives. We are dependent on burning fossil fuels in order to accomplish many day to day tasks, oftentimes with no alternative. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no hippie. I believe that industrialization has done WONDERS for humankind. But I am someone who believes in human progress, in spreading across the world and taking care of it as God intended for us to do. I just feel like what you'll see in a picture below, has gone on for far too long. We are capable of so much more, humanity. We are capable of finding different, more efficient ways of getting what we need in order to survive.
I want you to imagine a world without power lines. A world where, while you're writing that last crucial sentence in your essay, or coding that final line in your semester-ending, 99% of your grade project, when a tree falls onto a power line connecting campus to the main grid, you won't lose your paper. You won't lose your program. In fact, you probably won't even know the tree fell over. Or when campus completely freezes over, and classes are cancelled because Arkansas' only ice truck flipped over AGAIN, you won't have to have that worry in the back of your head about losing power to Netflix, your game systems, or even just the lights in the washroom (I'm from Canada and I will continue to say washroom as I please).
Friends, our generation is one of fumes. Smoke from factories, cars, trains, it's pretty standard to see in our lives. We are dependent on burning fossil fuels in order to accomplish many day to day tasks, oftentimes with no alternative. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no hippie. I believe that industrialization has done WONDERS for humankind. But I am someone who believes in human progress, in spreading across the world and taking care of it as God intended for us to do. I just feel like what you'll see in a picture below, has gone on for far too long. We are capable of so much more, humanity. We are capable of finding different, more efficient ways of getting what we need in order to survive.
Does anyone remember in Man of Steel, when Superman flies through the terraforming machine and starts coughing like an 80 year old coal worker? That's what this makes me think of. Ew.
Well, don't you worry your pretty little heads about doing any of the thinking on how to get to the next step. Our pal, Elon Musk--you know, the guy who wants to send people to Mars and had a hand in designing the coolest electric car on the market--has taken care of that for us.
Here's the man himself, unveiling his creation
That box in the middle there, that is the Tesla Powerwall. The Powerwall is designed to work in conjunction with solar panels in order to harness the power of the sun, and place it in one convenient location (and he did it in a much better way than Doctor Octopus tried to do). The Powerwall, literally designed to just hang on the wall in your house, was released with a 10 kWh option originally. Your more electricity-conservative family (let's go based on a two bedroom, two bathroom house with two parents and three children) will use roughly 60 kWh a day during more mild times of the year, with the number growing in the winter and shrinking in the summer (depending on your lifestyle). I know, right off the bat you're thinking "that's just barely 1/6th of my average power usage, I'm still going to have to be on the grid!" But now, let's not jump to conclusions so quickly! These Powerwalls can stack onto each other (although I feel like stack is the wrong term to use, because they basically just slide in next to one another), with up to 9 being "stackable". This means you'll have 90 kWh of juice at your fingertips, waiting to fuel your every electrical need.
As I'm sure we can all assume, however, Harding is not going to run on 90 kWh of power. That might be enough to power the Science building before 8 am (I swear, everything is always on in there!) if we're lucky. So, right now, this is seeming like a gigantic waste of your time.
But wait, there's more!
As I'm sure we can all assume, however, Harding is not going to run on 90 kWh of power. That might be enough to power the Science building before 8 am (I swear, everything is always on in there!) if we're lucky. So, right now, this is seeming like a gigantic waste of your time.
But wait, there's more!
Guys, let me tell you right now, this would make one heck of a scary Transformer.
This thing is big enough for a person to live inside, I know, but guys, this is it right here. This is the PowerPack. These things, on their own, can store up to 100 kWh. This big buffoon, sitting in your basement, could easily power your whole house for the day, possible two, on a single charge. What's more, they're infinitely stackable. Yes, if we took every seat out of the Benson and replaced it with a PowerPack, we could probably power all of Searcy solely off of these giants. Imagine, no power lines at all in Searcy. If every building had a solar panel on the roof, a place that 90% of the time is just sitting collecting heat and being enjoyed by the birds, and had one of these sitting in the basement, a place where spiders cook up their next master plan to scare you out of your bed in the middle of the night, you could bid farewell to the electric company.
In the keynote introducing these objects (which I'll post at the end so Elon can explain everything I just explained but with infinitely more confidence), Mr.Musk cites a couple of pretty astonishing numbers. 10,000 of these could power the entirety of Boulder, Colorado. 160 million PowerPacks could take the entire United States off grid. With 900 million PowerPacks, the entire world could primarily be run off of solar, stored energy. So, those fumes I posted earlier, there would be significantly less, if not none at all. Those long drives through Kansas where there is literally flat for what is seemingly hundreds of miles, would no longer have the eyesore of a trail of power lines trying guiding you to the next town. And Harding, well who knows, maybe the extra money they could make could be for putting a third floor on the GAC (we could put an ice rink in there!), or for ADDING parking instead of taking it away, or...dare I say...REDUCE OUR TUITION?!
Folks, I'm no expert. I've known about the Powerwall for a while, but haven't really looked into the nitty-gritty details. Who knows, it could entirely be a dud. But Australia has officially started adopting the Powerwall, and Tesla is going to be shipping to them fairly soon. And, frankly, this is the first commercial iteration of the wall. Imagine the other possibilities. A battery shift of this magnitude could be huge. Electric cars that have solar panels on their roofs, that store the energy into the battery as you drive during the day and can last all throughout the night, laptops that charge while you're sitting outside at high noon (insert The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme song here), or schools that can put money towards even faster internet, a cafeteria that serves filet mignon and creme brulee on the daily, or moving walkways to help us get to and fro classes. Or even imagine an engineering service project, where the engineering students get to go to a town without power and literally give them light.
Oh one more thing, the picture below shows how much surface area of solar panels the United States needs to go totally off grid.
In the keynote introducing these objects (which I'll post at the end so Elon can explain everything I just explained but with infinitely more confidence), Mr.Musk cites a couple of pretty astonishing numbers. 10,000 of these could power the entirety of Boulder, Colorado. 160 million PowerPacks could take the entire United States off grid. With 900 million PowerPacks, the entire world could primarily be run off of solar, stored energy. So, those fumes I posted earlier, there would be significantly less, if not none at all. Those long drives through Kansas where there is literally flat for what is seemingly hundreds of miles, would no longer have the eyesore of a trail of power lines trying guiding you to the next town. And Harding, well who knows, maybe the extra money they could make could be for putting a third floor on the GAC (we could put an ice rink in there!), or for ADDING parking instead of taking it away, or...dare I say...REDUCE OUR TUITION?!
Folks, I'm no expert. I've known about the Powerwall for a while, but haven't really looked into the nitty-gritty details. Who knows, it could entirely be a dud. But Australia has officially started adopting the Powerwall, and Tesla is going to be shipping to them fairly soon. And, frankly, this is the first commercial iteration of the wall. Imagine the other possibilities. A battery shift of this magnitude could be huge. Electric cars that have solar panels on their roofs, that store the energy into the battery as you drive during the day and can last all throughout the night, laptops that charge while you're sitting outside at high noon (insert The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme song here), or schools that can put money towards even faster internet, a cafeteria that serves filet mignon and creme brulee on the daily, or moving walkways to help us get to and fro classes. Or even imagine an engineering service project, where the engineering students get to go to a town without power and literally give them light.
Oh one more thing, the picture below shows how much surface area of solar panels the United States needs to go totally off grid.
Ya, that blue square there. That's America on Solar. But wait...
You probably can't see it, but there's a single pixel in that blue square that's red. Let's zoom in...
Oh hey, there IS a red pixel in that blue square!
That red pixel represents America being Solar and Battery powered.
Solar power can be an awesome tool, but I admit I don't know the in's and out's. I'm just excited about never having to worry about a moose getting it's antlers caught in power lines ever again (Yes, this actually happens).
Here's the keynote, let Elon explain it to you and decide for yourself.
Solar power can be an awesome tool, but I admit I don't know the in's and out's. I'm just excited about never having to worry about a moose getting it's antlers caught in power lines ever again (Yes, this actually happens).
Here's the keynote, let Elon explain it to you and decide for yourself.
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