The Real Reason Tesla Developed The Heat Pump!

Tesla's mission statement has always been to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy in the newly revealed part 3 of their master plan to achieve this goal the company identified three key pillars that will eliminate the vast majority of fossil fuel use in our global economy one of those is electric vehicles obviously a second is solar power generation and battery storage also no surprise but the third pillar was revealed to be the heat pump according to Elon Musk and his crew at Tesla the mass adoption of heat pumps for home and Industrial heating will be just as impactful as electric vehicles for reducing fossil fuel consumption but the complete transition to heat pumps will come in at just a tiny fraction of the cost of replacing every car on the road with an EV so let's talk about how Tesla's heat pump could take over the world so it was definitely interesting to see the heat pump identified as the third most important factor in Elon musk's new master plan part 3. the new master plan is essentially presented as a road map to a sustainable future where we have eliminated 100 of our fossil fuel dependency Elon promised that if we can accomplish this goal then we can have an abundant future with more than enough energy to power a global civilization which sounds like a great deal in order to get there we need to stop burning things for energy coal gasoline and Diesel are obviously the major culprits here but a full transition to sustainable energy is going to require us to ditch natural gas as well yes that means no more gas stoves in the future get over it but what's going to be more difficult to move past is the Reliance on natural gas to heat our homes business and industry if we can break this dependency the master plan promises that Global fossil fuel consumption will drop by 22 percent for some context there the master plan indicated that transitioning every vehicle in the world to Electric will reduce fossil fuel consumption by 21 so the impact of the heat pump would be equal if not slightly higher than a fully electric Global vehicle Fleet that is a big deal and when you run the numbers for cost the potential for the heat pump gets even better Tesla identifies the cost of manufacturing investment for replacing every vehicle in the world with a battery-powered electric version at seven trillion dollars but they identify the cost of investment for a full transition to heat pumps at just 0.3 trillion dollars or 30 billion so your cost slash benefit ratio for heat pump manufacturing is pretty epic by far the cheapest way to save the world so how does that work a heat pump is a high efficiency electric heater and the reason for that efficiency is that they do not create heat they simply move it hence the pump so it's Gathering that heat from outside your house and moving it inside this is where people get tripped up the whole reason that I want to use a heater is because the outside is cold so how could I possibly get heat from out there to make my house warm there's a very long explanation in here that we won't get too deep into but there are a couple of basic fundamentals at play for one hot and cold are relative so you will perceive something as hot if it was a higher density of heat energy than your body and likewise you perceive cold as anything with a lower energy density the greater the difference in energy the greater the sensation of hot or cold it's why when you jump straight from a sauna into a pool the water feels ice cold even though it's not the variation between the temperature of the water and your body is just much greater than normal and as you stay in the pool for a longer period the sensation of cold is going to dissipate that's because the heat energy in your body is coming down to match the energy in the water energy will always try to find its own equilibrium the second law of Thermodynamics essentially states that hot will always move towards cold or in other words energy will always flow from higher densities to lower density this unbreakable law of nature is what heat pumps exploit to move energy from outside your house to inside your house but if energy always moves from hot to cold and it's cold outside the house and warm inside then that still doesn't make any sense how the pump works so a heat pump doesn't actually pump heat it pumps refrigerant the heat just comes along for the ride a refrigerant is essentially just a liquid with a very low boiling point so at room temperature it would already be vaporized refrigerants are also the thing that made that big hole in the ozone layer back in the 80s we screwed that one up pretty badly but in modern chemicals like R134a do not create the same damage to our atmosphere as far as we know modern refrigerants are harmless the moving part of your heat pump is the compressor by compressing the vaporized refrigerant you are increasing the energy density and thereby increasing the temperature that that hot gas is then pumped inside your house to a wall mounted blower system where a fan will blow room temperature air over a coil of the hot gas hot always goes to cold so the heat energy from the compressed gas will follow the airflow into your room now since the heat energy from our hot gas is escaping into the house the refrigerant is starting to cool down but it needs to get even colder to do its next job so if compressing a gas and increasing its density raises the temperature then rapidly decompressing a gas will likewise reduce the temperature think about those cans of compressed air you use to clean a keyboard releasing the pressure makes the can ice cold the refrigerant flows through an expansion valve that rapidly reduces the pressure and brings the temperature all the way back down to the point where the chemical is liquid again usually around negative 20 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 30 Celsius depends on the chemical now that Ultra cold liquid is pumped to the outside coil of the heat pump where it's going to collect energy from the outside air remember that hot and cold are relative even if the air temperature is zero degrees that's still hot in relation to our liquid refrigerant and hot will always go to cold so the refrigerant will gather energy from the outside air it will rise in temperature it will boil into a gas which will then be compressed to heat it up even more and then pumped into our house makes sense if not that's cool just remember that a heat pump is an air conditioner that runs backwards and you should be fine Tesla introduced their first heat pump with the model Y in 2020 prior to that they had been using electric resistive Heating in every car which is not ideal because it is a very low efficiency heating method unlike a heat pump the resistive method actually does create heat it sends energy from the battery into a coil of metal the resistance of that metal concentrates the energy the same way that damning a river will increase the water level that increase in energy density of the metal increases the temperature then a fan blows cool air over the metal coil into the car hot goes to cold the cabin heats up that sucks power from the battery and decreases the vehicle range and it's one of the reasons why people still think that electric cars don't work in cold climates heat pumps fix this and Tesla's heat pump is a very unique and special of engineering our favorite crusty old man Sandy Monroe and his team did a full tear down of Ford's electric Mustang Mach e which also uses a heat pump except the heat pump in the Mustang doesn't look anything like the heat pump in the model y the Monroe team found that the Ford thermal system was vastly more complex and spread out over a much larger area than the relatively compact Tesla unit Sandy called the fort heat pump a nightmare and here's why the Mustang heat pump uses 35 individual components while the Tesla has 10. the Mustang has 18.4 meters of Hose while the Tesla has 6.3 and the weight of fluid required to operate the Mustang thermal system was 22 and a half kilograms while the Tesla used 9.2 so even comparing Apples to Apples Tesla's heat pump design is significantly more simple and efficient than their direct rival going back to investor day Tesla's manufacturing team spoke about how they accomplished this Tesla Engineers were inspired by the design of a circuit board where all of the necessary components and connectors are built onto one piece the engineers wanted to compact an entire dispersed thermal system into one single unit that was about the size of a basketball and that's exactly what they did Tesla innovated to create new designs for how the refrigerant flowed through the pump these are the Tesla super manifold and octo valve replacing several meters of bent tube and hose with solid metal components since a heat pump is just an air conditioner that works backwards all you have to do is create cold air and run the heat pump in reverse and that's what the octavalve enables so now instead of having a heater and an air conditioner you just have one multitasking unit The Next Step was to manufacture that design at scale the first iteration of the heat pump was assembly by hand on a manual production line that wasn't good enough so Tesla set about designing their own fully automated manufacturing system for their heat pump they actually did this using a 3D simulation they designed tested and specced out their new production line entirely in the virtual world and then turned it into reality the result was a 99 reduction in labor hours associated with heat pump production the fully automated line has a 99.995 rate of success at high quality and it allows Tesla to produce one of their super manifolds every seven seconds and all of that design engineering is coming soon to a new house scale heat pump product from Tesla probably Elon still hasn't said that Tesla 100 for sure will make a home hvaccess system but during his master plan part 3 announcement he yet again for like the 10th time now hinted that Tesla should make a home HVAC in the future and considering the weight and the economic benefit that Elon highlighted in his new master plan it seems more than likely that this is something Tesla will do Elon has said that the current heat pump design that is being used in every Tesla vehicle can be scaled up to heat a house or even a business and if Tesla can deliver that same level of efficiency and Manufacturing scale at those larger sizes then that could be a product that revolutionizes the way that we heat and cool our homes do you think that the world is ready to switch to heat pumps and can Tesla be the company that leads the way let us know your thoughts in the comments below don't forget to give this video a thumbs up today if you liked it that is so important for getting our content out to more people if you enjoy the content then you'd probably also enjoy our Weekly Newsletter so sign up the link down 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Channel: The Tesla Space

Views: 297,512

Keywords: tesla, tesla hvac, tesla hvac system, tesla hvac home system, tesla home, elon musk, tesla heat pump, heat pump

Id: OJHfPshBZUI

Length: 12min 11sec (731 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 10 2023