Tesla Energy

You'll find about 50 million people in middle class in India, who'll earn about $1k a month. Once you buy it, ship it, install it etc, I think $5k is a pretty typical cost figure.

That's quite steep. It's nearly 50% of your income. Also consider that as a rule, generally, the less affluent you are, the smaller percentage of income will be 'disposable' income. i.e. if you make $100k, you might have $60k in essential expenses, the remaining 40% of your income can be spent on savings or non-essential consumption like holidays. But if you make $5k like an average person in India might, you'll be hard pressed to not spend the vast majority on essential spending. So an investment that's 50% of a 1-year income may sound reasonable, but not when 95% of your income normally goes to essential expenses. That'd mean that you'd have to forgo 10 years of your entire disposable income to finance this.

Now how essential is it? I've traveled both in Africa and Asia and am familiar with powercuts (hell, I'd get em monthly in Montreal, too!) Generally though, it's not something I'd spend a lot of money on to fix. Cooking and heating is still gas powered. Essential lighting tops out at 100W, no need for a $3.5k battery that can deliver 20x that power. My smartphone/laptop are battery powered.

I mean, don't get me wrong, power cuts suck and nobody likes them. And for businesses (different story) they can be a disaster. (e.g. check out the World Bank 'Doing Business' reports [0], they look at power cuts affecting industry. It's a big factor)

But for homes? Most people cope just fine. You lose your TV and maybe your wifi if you don't have mobile internet, the rest can be managed.

Anyway India is obviously going to become a huge market, but that's a pretty long-term thing. You have hundreds of millions of middle class consumers in OECD countries who have the purchasing power and different motivations (environmental), backed by governments that are shifting to pro-solar, and huge profits-first industries that are seeing solar drop to super competitive prices within the next 10-20 years. India probably won't be a huge market in comparison. China perhaps, they're bigger, have more solar capacity and more purchasing power.

As for the scooter, you can buy 5-6 of them for the price of installing one of these, new, let alone second hand. And they're an essential part of transportation for which having nothing, or public transport is often not a viable alternative.

[0] http://www.doingbusiness.org/reports

I thought about boats as well.

Do you know the weight and dimensions of this?

It looks like it is equivalent to 835 Ah @ 12V. That is 10 lead batteries. You probably can buy more than 3 lead batteries for 300 dollars, but the weight and 10 year warranty does look attractive.

> There was another alternative on HN recently. Basically a super-deep hole in the ground with super heavy object falling into it, but suspended by a rope.

Or a train going up and down a hill...

http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

Both are basically the same concept as pumped hydro which has been in use for a long time... pump water up a hill when energy is cheap, let it fall down and turn a turbine when energy is expensive. And hey, if it rains, free energy!

The rail/hole in the ground approach have the advantage of taking up less land I suppose, but I suspect are less efficient.

I'm amazed at the price. This actually makes it competitive with whole house generators at least for backup electricity.

And you'd get a free backup power system too. That's worth something.