Seeking to expand its business beyond electric vehicles, Tesla Motors will sell stationary batteries for residential, commercial, and utility use under a new brand, Tesla Energy.

Tesla is launching the home battery business partly because it’s already making vehicle batteries—and as a result it can benefit from the economies of scale that come from making both. Another reason is that the market for storage is expected to grow in concert with the use of solar power. Tesla needs both electric vehicles and solar power to boom if it hopes to fulfill the projected output from a vast $5 billion battery “gigafactory” it’s building in Nevada.

“The obvious problem with solar power is that the sun does not shine at night,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the unveiling of the new batteries at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, yesterday. “We need to store the energy that is generated during the day so you can use it at night.”

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