Dear Future: Batteries will be a thing of the past

[MUSIC] Utilities are a thing of the past. It's only a matter of time before they're not a use to society. Because everyone's gonna have their own ability to make their own power. And so it's gonna be communities where they have their batteries It's in the garage. And they have their solar panels on the roof, and they have their electric cars in their garage. And so they generate their own electricity. The growing demand of the grid is. At to a point right now, where the utilities can't handle it. We have to do this because we don't have a choice. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [NOISE] [BLANK_AUDIO] People call me a wannabe. They call me a farce. They call me charlatan. This is an off grid system so we're not connected to the grid. It's a rogue set-up, because there's a ton of people that don't want you to do this right? And starting from the Government, starting in the utilities they don't want you to run off good systems when your in the City. They say that's for people that are way up their in the mountains, right? But we wanna take control of our energies, so that's why we're doing off good systems. My name is Jehu Garcia. And I'm a hardcore DIYer. [MUSIC] A Powerwall is a term that Tesla came up with. It's essentially a battery for building, for a home, or for business. These are the solar charge controllers. This cable here goes to my roof where I have solar panels. And this charges all these batteries. You send all that power from your solar panels to charge your electric car or just to watch TV, right? I think it's a growing number of people that seem to be interested in energy. Energy's a big thing moving into the future. We have a variety of capabilities here because we're a maker space, where we're trying to accommodate as many customers as possible in their attempts to make different batteries. [MUSIC] A battery in any form, is an electro-chemical energy storage device. [UNKNOWN] and batteries are Pretty much everywhere that you have a rechargeable device right now. Your cell phone, your tablet, your laptop computer. There is just a lot of technology that is being enabled with batteries. Cleaner burning vehicles, longer lasting Existing devices that increase our productivity and electric vehicles. Anything that we use that's electronic has some sort of energy storage in it. I think it makes more sense as we continue to incorporate batteries into more and more aspects of our life to start really focusing on secondary life of these cells so that they could just be made into another new battery If we don't come up with a good way to recycle batteries, the future is going to get rough. [SOUND] I don't have any training. I'm not a technician. I'm not an electronic engineer. I'm not even an engineer, you know by degree. But I do a lot of engineering. [MUSIC] Here's how you make a DIY powerwall. Now I fired up the soldering iron. We're gonna wire all these batteries together. We're gonna do it the way Tesla does it. When I look back in my life Every single thing I do I do it different than everyone else. [MUSIC] The DIY [INAUDIBLE] really started early with me, growing up as a kid I wasn't allowed to go to school and so my parents were forced to give me an education. The way that I learned stuff was not a common way, right? It wasn't like everyone else. No one else. I'm a full time YouTuber now and I'm doing battery stuff all the time. This morning the comments are already funny, people saying that I'm gonna blow up. It's a weird thing because battery, who thinks about batteries like are not existing until they go dead. Once you realized that batteries are just a container for like energy then your realize that the applications are a lot more. [BLANK_AUDIO] Four years ago I decided I was going to DIY an electric car. So this is the electric motor that I installed in my bus. It's a 100 horse power and it goes forever without any maintenance and I did it all by myself here in my garage. Right where it sits right here. The biggest problem the biggest issue in building a DIY electric car is the batteries. That really led the path to just like diving in there exploring what kind of batteries, which ones were the best batteries. And I started looking at what the best guys were doing. That eventually led me to To the 18650 battery. [MUSIC] Very quickly I figured out that the same batteries that were on my bus and that I've been working for a couple years, you could do the same. You out them in a box. In your garage and it can run your entire house. Traditionally, it was only hardcore guys like me, crazies that were managing their battery. We like looking at what our battery's doing, what our voltages are. Crazies that are not afraid to solder a bunch of stuff and You know, blow some stuff up, every once in a while. [MUSIC] We're getting to a point where everyone's interested. Lithium ion batteries can be dangerous. You're storing a lot of energy in a small space. And when you're talking about building something the size of a power wall It's not a small problem, you lose your house, you could lose your life. It can be very dangerous to build a battery. You'd have to really do your homework, and check each battery and test it, double test it. There's projects all across the world. They're messing around with batteries, they're salvaging from That lack of batteries. I hear in America we're about the most wasteful nation in the world. We don't just want to have batteries and power our homes, and doing cool gadgets, but we also want to do the responsible thing that's environmentally for the planet, you know. I realized that the best way was gonna be in this large scale recyclers. Surplus batteries. They're brand new batteries. The recyclers get those and then those, they make them available to us. You can literally grab those and **** a few of those in your wall and that's a big enough pack to run your entire home. There's a lot of study into what we can do with end of life batteries. The DIY market is huge because these are guys who are taking advantage of the fact that it's a less expensive alternative from buying new. More people are thinking about how to use batteries The better. If they weren't being picked up by the secondary market, they'd either be recycled or just scrapped into a landfill. Let's get on the road. There's a lot of other people that I work with like Michael at EV Westright. He's converting old classic cars and putting a little bit of future in them. [MUSIC] There's been a market that's been developing for a few now, where you pick your favorite car then you electrify that, because not only is electrifying a car is good for the environment, but it's actually very, very at performance. That's what the EV These guys are doing great. Some of our favorite cars, the most iconic cars that you can think of, and they're electrifying. [MUSIC] [SOUND] No way. Yeah buddy, what's happening? All right. Yeah she's still running really good. In the middle of the day we're not even really pulling out of the battery anymore we're pretty much pulling everything solar. Straight from the solar. Yeah straight from the solar. So I think when we started. Our own projects. Were kind of doing is a proven concept we didn't really know for ourselves how viable it would be and if we could actually use just the power wall to drive. Lately the the growth has been exponential. Experts will agreee in the next decade most all of our transportation will be fueled by electricity. There's a lot of people that express their individuality through their car or a classic car. And as the number of electric cars increaes, the number of used batter packs available to us increases. And it just opens up a whole host of applications for the product. So this is the first Bug that has Model S batteries? Yeah. Here we have a Tesla Model S module in the front. We're gonna do a total of five modules in this car, so we're gonna do two in the front, three in the back and that will give us a total of 25 kilowatt hours, so this car will go about 130 miles on that. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [LAUGH] [BLANK_AUDIO] People are actually looking at can we have a battery operated airplane? But more than that we're talking about quality of life improvements at the most basic level. Every time I think, they're not gonna come up with something more that we do with batteries there it is. And it's cool. This battery technology has the potential to change the world. But with current things like what's happening in Puerto Rico right now, where people are without power for six months, if you have solar panels in your roof and a battery in your wall, then you don't have to rely on these systems that could go down at any time. Seeing a bunch of people get together on the Internet and using what some people would deem useless parts, in creating something that actually has a use And only I use but kind of a philanthropic use. It reduces emissions and it stabilizes the grid. I think energy is important as the next big frontier. I think that we as a society need to figure out. Everybody is gonna have batteries at home. Everybody is gonna use this technology. It's gonna shape the future. Well you know when they care about it.it can be fabulous [MUSIC]