By accident, this week on Architect This City seems to be turning into Elon Musk week.
Yesterday, Musk announced something called the Powerwall home battery. Measuring about 3′ x 4′, the shield looking battery pack will charge using the electricity generated from solar panels (or from the grid when rates are at their lowest) and then power your home.
It’s designed for consumers and will cost between US$3,000 - $3,500 depending on capacity. The individual Powerwalls can also be daisy chained to increase capacity. It will be available starting this summer.
A wall battery may not seem all that interesting to some, but I think this is actually a big deal for a few reasons.
Renewable energy is often both intermittent and produced when you don’t need it. Here’s a great chart from Tesla that shows what I mean:
During peak solar hours, most people aren’t home and most people aren’t consuming at peak levels. That’s why it’s important to be able to store the energy that you collect, whether it be from solar, wind or other renewal energy source. And from what I hear from my friends in the industry, storage has been a bit of an Achilles heel for adoption.
It will also help to further decentralize energy production. What is produced locally (from say solar panels) will be stored locally for when it’s needed locally. This is in contrast to centralized production or producing energy locally and then feeding any excess capacity into the grid for use somewhere else. That requires transmission and will be by definition less efficient.
Finally, the other interesting thing about Powerwall is that it closes the loop on two of Musk’s businesses: SolarCity and Tesla. SolarCity is about the production of renewable energy and Tesla is about the consumption renewable energy. But as the chart above shows, storage is often needed to link those two activities in an efficient way.
All of this makes me excited about Powerwall.
If any of you are an expert in this industry (which I am not) or you just have additional thoughts, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.
Images: Tesla
By accident, this week on Architect This City seems to be turning into Elon Musk week.
Yesterday, Musk announced something called the Powerwall home battery. Measuring about 3′ x 4′, the shield looking battery pack will charge using the electricity generated from solar panels (or from the grid when rates are at their lowest) and then power your home.
It’s designed for consumers and will cost between US$3,000 - $3,500 depending on capacity. The individual Powerwalls can also be daisy chained to increase capacity. It will be available starting this summer.
A wall battery may not seem all that interesting to some, but I think this is actually a big deal for a few reasons.
Renewable energy is often both intermittent and produced when you don’t need it. Here’s a great chart from Tesla that shows what I mean:
During peak solar hours, most people aren’t home and most people aren’t consuming at peak levels. That’s why it’s important to be able to store the energy that you collect, whether it be from solar, wind or other renewal energy source. And from what I hear from my friends in the industry, storage has been a bit of an Achilles heel for adoption.
It will also help to further decentralize energy production. What is produced locally (from say solar panels) will be stored locally for when it’s needed locally. This is in contrast to centralized production or producing energy locally and then feeding any excess capacity into the grid for use somewhere else. That requires transmission and will be by definition less efficient.
Finally, the other interesting thing about Powerwall is that it closes the loop on two of Musk’s businesses: SolarCity and Tesla. SolarCity is about the production of renewable energy and Tesla is about the consumption renewable energy. But as the chart above shows, storage is often needed to link those two activities in an efficient way.
All of this makes me excited about Powerwall.
If any of you are an expert in this industry (which I am not) or you just have additional thoughts, I would love to hear from you in the comment section below.
Images: Tesla
Given what is going on in Baltimore and other cities in the US right now, I thought it would be worthwhile to share an interesting article from City Observatory talking about income disparity and racial segregation in cities.
There are significant racial income gaps in the United States (as well as in Canada). According to City Observatory, the average black household earns 42% less than the average white household in America. There is, of course, lots of regional variation, but this is what it looks like nationwide.
The interesting thing about this racial income gap though, is that there’s one factor that seems to account for the bulk (up to 60%) of the variation: residential segregation. In other words, the more segregated a city becomes, the more this black/white income disparity increases.
Here’s a snippet from Joe Cortright of City Observatory:
…there are good reasons to believe that high levels of segregation impair the relative economic opportunities available to black Americans. Segregation may have the effect of limiting an individual’s social networks, lowering the quality of public services, decreasing access to good schools, and increasing risk of exposure to crime, all of which may limit or reduce economic success. This is especially true in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which tend to be disproportionately neighborhoods of color.
We also know that there are all kinds of negative externalities associated with income inequality. Therefore, there’s a strong case to be made for addressing segregation and the spatial organization of our cities.
I recommend you read the City Observatory article for a more nuanced explanation of the above relationship.
Today I’m thinking about extraversion and third places within cities.
As many of you I’m sure know, the idea of a third place is that after your home (first place) and your work (second place), cities have what are known as third places. This could be a coffee shop, a barber shop, or a public space (to name only a few examples).
This, of course, is not a new idea. For decades people have been arguing that third places are essential for establishing a sense of community, place, and belonging. In fact, this emphasis on third place is one of the ingredients that made Starbucks so successful.
But with the rise of the internet and freelancing, third places are becoming even more important. That’s why coffee shops have become arguably the best example of a third place in today’s cities. They’ve even become the new second place for some (many?) people.
But beyond just a place to meet and socialize, I’ve been thinking today (while I was at a third place) about the psychological benefits of these spaces.
For example:
One of the key differences between extraverts and introverts is where they draw their energy from. For introverts, they tend to draw it from within. In order to recharge, they often feel the need to retreat and be left alone. Extroverts, on the other hand, draw their energy from the outside world. They charge up by being around other people.
When I was completing my MBA at Rotman, one of the things they had us do at the beginning and at the end of the program was complete the Myers-Brigg personality test.
In both instances, I was as extroverted as they come (I am consistently what is known as an ENTJ). And from experience, I can say that I definitely feed off the energy of other people.
But the interesting thing about this – to tie both of these topics back together – is that there appears to be a clear correlation between extroversion and a preference for living in urban centers. And given what I just said, that probably makes sense to you.
So if you too classify yourself as an extroverted person, then third places are more than just a busy coffee shop or a vibrant public space. They are where you derive your energy and where you feel alive. And that’s a pretty powerful thing in my view.
Given what is going on in Baltimore and other cities in the US right now, I thought it would be worthwhile to share an interesting article from City Observatory talking about income disparity and racial segregation in cities.
There are significant racial income gaps in the United States (as well as in Canada). According to City Observatory, the average black household earns 42% less than the average white household in America. There is, of course, lots of regional variation, but this is what it looks like nationwide.
The interesting thing about this racial income gap though, is that there’s one factor that seems to account for the bulk (up to 60%) of the variation: residential segregation. In other words, the more segregated a city becomes, the more this black/white income disparity increases.
Here’s a snippet from Joe Cortright of City Observatory:
…there are good reasons to believe that high levels of segregation impair the relative economic opportunities available to black Americans. Segregation may have the effect of limiting an individual’s social networks, lowering the quality of public services, decreasing access to good schools, and increasing risk of exposure to crime, all of which may limit or reduce economic success. This is especially true in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, which tend to be disproportionately neighborhoods of color.
We also know that there are all kinds of negative externalities associated with income inequality. Therefore, there’s a strong case to be made for addressing segregation and the spatial organization of our cities.
I recommend you read the City Observatory article for a more nuanced explanation of the above relationship.
Today I’m thinking about extraversion and third places within cities.
As many of you I’m sure know, the idea of a third place is that after your home (first place) and your work (second place), cities have what are known as third places. This could be a coffee shop, a barber shop, or a public space (to name only a few examples).
This, of course, is not a new idea. For decades people have been arguing that third places are essential for establishing a sense of community, place, and belonging. In fact, this emphasis on third place is one of the ingredients that made Starbucks so successful.
But with the rise of the internet and freelancing, third places are becoming even more important. That’s why coffee shops have become arguably the best example of a third place in today’s cities. They’ve even become the new second place for some (many?) people.
But beyond just a place to meet and socialize, I’ve been thinking today (while I was at a third place) about the psychological benefits of these spaces.
For example:
One of the key differences between extraverts and introverts is where they draw their energy from. For introverts, they tend to draw it from within. In order to recharge, they often feel the need to retreat and be left alone. Extroverts, on the other hand, draw their energy from the outside world. They charge up by being around other people.
When I was completing my MBA at Rotman, one of the things they had us do at the beginning and at the end of the program was complete the Myers-Brigg personality test.
In both instances, I was as extroverted as they come (I am consistently what is known as an ENTJ). And from experience, I can say that I definitely feed off the energy of other people.
But the interesting thing about this – to tie both of these topics back together – is that there appears to be a clear correlation between extroversion and a preference for living in urban centers. And given what I just said, that probably makes sense to you.
So if you too classify yourself as an extroverted person, then third places are more than just a busy coffee shop or a vibrant public space. They are where you derive your energy and where you feel alive. And that’s a pretty powerful thing in my view.
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