- I just got my Tesla
Powerwalls installed, and I'm sort of in love with them. It's just such a cool feeling to know that you no longer
need the energy grid for, you know, your daily life. However, when I started
to look into the data, it came clear to me that not everyone should buy one of these. So I wanted to dig into just
kind of my experience so far, what I've learned, and
maybe help guide you on whether or not a Tesla
Powerwall makes sense for your home. Let's dive in. (upbeat music) The latest version of the Tesla Powerwall, also called the Tesla Powerwall 2, has just under 14
kilowatt hours of energy, 13.5 is what they list, and this is part of the Tesla ecosystem, where if you get solar, and
you have the home batteries, and then you have the cars, you have a lot of
freedom and independence, based on just the stuff you're generating and storing at your own home. Most houses use around 28 kilowatt hours of energy per day, so with two of these, at 27 kilowatt hours, more or less, you're pretty good to
be a full day off grid, and then of course within those 27 hours, if the sun comes out even a little bit, your solar panel should
charge them back up, giving you this kind of off-grid, energy independent feeling. Now typically these run around
$7,000 with installation. Every install is different, so when you go through this process, you have to fill out a form, take pictures of lots of things, and send it to them, and then they come back with a quote. I earned these two Powerwalls from the Tesla Referral
Program back in 2017. Thank you to everyone that used my code, because these are super cool, and as I mentioned, I am
really, really stoked on them. Now the ones I got were the white ones. These are the standard ones you buy. You may have seen some other folks that received the red ones that were actually physically signed by JB, and Elon, and Franz. That's super cool, but it actually kind of worked out better, because I think the
white ones look better, and as you'll see when we
talk about installation, we had to put them outside, and it would just be kind of a shame to have these really fancy ones, with the hand signature, sitting out, getting rained on every day. Speaking of installation, it actually was kind of a challenge. The original idea I had was
to put them in the garage, but the garage, where
they would be located, was over 100 feet from where
the electrical panel is. My house, built in the 1950s, put the electrical panel
kind of on the opposite end, and so it was gonna be too far, because there's a communication wire that has to run, and it
runs at a very low voltage, so over 100 feet it just
doesn't really work as well. Now they can change that apparently, but then they'd have to kind
of reconfigure the system and all that, and it just
didn't make a whole lot of sense to put them in the garage. Plus, if they are in your garage, they have to have these
barriers in front of them, so you don't hit them, or they have to be mounted high enough that they would be above
the standard hood height of a vehicle, which is pretty high. My garage is pretty short,
so it just didn't make sense, so that plan was out. The next challenge was to figure out where to put them outside. We would just mount them on the house, however they can't be next to a bedroom, and so we had to find a place where we didn't have a bedroom, and we could put it, and so it ended up being just right between the studio that I use to work, that I use to make these videos from, and our master bathroom. It's kind of right next to the AC unit, and it's close to where
the electrical panel is, so it all made sense. One of the interesting things is that we had to basically
make a concrete pad for them to sit on, because it's not, there's
no concrete there, and I was able to find one for about $50 from a local building supply company. So this is a tip, if you are in this boat, trying to do this, their initial thought was, you need to actually pour concrete, you know, go make molds
and make a concrete pad, but a local building company
here in San Diego just had one that I could buy for $50,
so I went and did that. Worked out great. So in addition to the Powerwalls, they both had to have their
own AC disconnect switches. Then, you had to have a gateway and a whole new panel setup, with basically every circuit from the old electrical panel rewired into this new one, and
basically now the grid itself is upstream from the rest of your house, meaning the grid can go away, and you can still function. In fact, that's how the
primary function works. Typically if my solar system
isn't generating enough power, I am pulling from the battery. So it's really cool, and
it does give you the sense of independence and freedom, because in theory you could go off grid. However, that doesn't really
make a whole lot of sense. One thing Tesla just added was the ability to look
at very detailed data about how you're using your energy. And what glorious data it is. So in the app you can see that I have my Powerwall
here, it's currently charging. There's two of them listed there, and you can click into the power flow, which is easily my favorite
diagram of all time, showing exactly what's
happening with your energy. Here we're looking at over four kilowatts of solar energy being generated right now. 3.6 of that, or 3.5
going back to the grid, so I'm building up a credit
with the electric company here, and .5 of it powering the stuff that's currently used in my house, and occasionally it's powering up, or it's charging the Powerwall. I can dive into the history of this, and see very detailed
stats of what's happening with all these different sources, and how the energy is flowing
from one place to the other. And until recently, you
could only look at today and yesterday in the app. Now, you can actually click, and look at a week, or even a month. I don't have that much data, but you can kind of go back, look at the lifetime of it, etc., etc. So they're giving you just
really cool visualizations, and ways to understand this data, and I love that,
obviously, that's my thing. But prior to this, you
had to go into the APIs, and kind of reverse engineer it, so thankfully they did this, and one of the cool things is, if you don't like these visualizations, I particularly don't find bar charts are good over time series, which is the data we're looking at here, you can download the data, and obviously I did that. Either way, I think it's really cool that they're giving you this data, and it's really awesome just to see this. I actually made an old iPad
into sort of an art stand, with that power flow thing, so anytime we have people over, I can kind of explain what's going on. It's just a really
beautiful visualization, so cheers to the Tesla
team for making that. The bar charts and the other stuff, I think can be better, but hey, it's a step in the right direction, and you're freeing the data about this, which is amazing. One of the challenges I've found so far with the Powerwall is charging my car. So, typically I charge at work. I have a charger here, and
that kind of fills up mine, but Jenny charges our Model 3 at home. Now she doesn't drive a lot, so she doesn't charge that often. You know, maybe once or
twice a week at most, but when she does, if you think about it, the Model 3 Long Range has somewhere around 78 kilowatt hours of energy stored, and if she needs to fill that thing up from close to zero, this
27 kilowatt hours stored in the Powerwalls are just a snack. That's not even, not
even approaching enough. On a regular basis, if you went to work, and came back and charged every night, you would probably be fine, but essentially what's gonna happen is we're just gonna just
hammer that battery, and then have to go to grid power. Now thankfully, because we're
using even less grid power than before, we've built up enough credits to where it all kind of washes out. Going back to the app though, there are a few ways to
setup your Powerwall, and I think it would make sense just to kind of talk about these, and give you my thoughts on them. I'm not sure I've had
enough experience yet to be the expert at this, or really figure out what's best, but when you go into the
Customize option here, you can see there are different ways to kind of use the energy
stored in your Powerwall. The first one is Backup-only, where you never really use the Powerwall, except in the case of a backup, so in the case of a storm,
or something like that. The other one is this Self-powered one, where generally all your
energy's gonna be coming out of there, when, instead
of pulling from the grid. I like this, because that
means I'm just reducing the actual load on the grid, and I'm becoming more self-sufficient. Now, in there you can, and I've set it here to 20%, you can reserve a certain percent of the battery for power outages. For here in San Diego, it doesn't make a lot of sense, because we really don't have
power outages regularly, but if you do, you may want to set that up to 30, 40%, whatever
really makes sense, or just go on the backup only. So, I choose the self-powered mode, because I feel like it's
just really good being, you know, kind of off
grid as much as possible. Now there's also this time-based control. So if I click on this advanced one here, what you'll see is, it actually will learn the peak and off-peak schedule, and so here in San Diego, as well as many other parts of the world, or other parts of the country now, are going to this time of use rating, where you pay more for the peak rates, versus the off-peak, and
this is pretty common. And you can actually kind of design that, and set it up to match whatever your local company charges you. That way, let's say here in San Diego, it's between 4:00 and 9:00pm
are the super high peak, I think it's like 53
cents a kilowatt hour, which is nuts. You can say, "Hey, use the
battery during that time, "but 12:00 to 5:00am, when
energy is much cheaper, "don't worry about it. "Go ahead and pull from the grid, "just kind of let the battery be." This actually could save
or help with that problem with charging the car, where if the car is designed to charge between 12:00 and 5:00am,
and you use this mode, then it may, you know, not
use the battery at all, and go straight to the grid, which seems like a better deal. So, I'll have to play with this over time, and see exactly what makes sense, but right now I'm just kind of in love with this idea of being self-powered, and being off-grid as much as I can be, living in a relatively
suburban kind of area. And then of course you
have this Storm Watch, which I kind of mentioned, but they actually have a system here that monitors the weather patterns, and looks for when
there's a storm coming up, and it will kind of prep
the battery for that, so you don't have to
really worry about it. You just leave that on. If there is a storm coming that looks like it may cause power, it'll adjust the energy
flow to optimize for that, so that way if you guys do have an issue, it'll be fine. So, really cool. Really advanced, you know, and like I said, I just love this concept of being off-grid, or kind of
as independent as I can be. So speaking of going off-grid, it definitely is possible
with solar panels, and batteries, but the
cost of being connected to the grid, and having
it as a reliable backup, is pretty low, it's $10 a month, and for me that's
something that's worth it. You know, it's cheaper than Netflix, and a lot of other things
you'd probably spend money on, and it gives me reliable backup power. But another thing you could do, is if you don't have solar right now, you can take advantage of
the federal 30% tax credit, the federal ITC it's
called, and bundle this in. So, you would actually
get 30% off the cost of your Powerwall, making the economics much more palatable, much better, much more in your favor, versus just buying them outright, where honestly the economics
don't make a lot of sense for most people. Let's look at my actual
utility bill from last year, and just kind of see
how this would shake out without the Powerwalls, but with solar. Now most months I actually did not produce more than 100% of the
power that I consumed, so I was still using the grid, even though I had a
relatively large solar system on my house. But, you know, due to the
power company giving me a $500 credit for having solar, I ended up not owing anything
for all of last year, other than that $10 a
month connection fee, which was kind of a separate thing that you just have to pay for. And the reason this works is because of Net Energy Metering. Now NEM is a sort of controversial topic. There were some recent changes to it, but in the end, the way
it works is you sell back, or you, you know, give back energy that is in excess of
whatever you're consuming at that moment. So what you do is you kind of use the grid as a battery here, and you
give them that excess storage, and then, when the sun goes down, and your solar panels
are no longer working, you essentially buy it back. You use those credits. So if you're generating more
energy than you're consuming, you have a negative balance. In general, this is a super common thing that makes the economics of the Powerwalls really not
worth it for most people. Now you may be wondering, hey, do I have Net Energy Metering? Well I'll put a link to a website there, that'll let you know, but 38 states, plus a
lot of the territories and provinces of the
United States offer this, so chances are you do. So, in that case, when you have solar, and Net Energy Metering, it doesn't really make hardly any sense to actually put your money into this, except for one case I'll
talk about in a second. But, let's assume you
don't have solar right now, you could actually benefit from this, and a recent Stanford study showed that across the warranty period, the 10 year warranty that
you get on the Powerwalls, if your average per kilowatt hour price is above 13.9 cents, you would at least break even, if not come out, you know, well ahead. Now that comes out to about 12
states in the United States. Some of the places with the
most expensive electricity are the ones you can imagine, Hawaii of course being
number one as always, so in those places, if
you don't have solar, this could make a lot of sense, by doing what I like
to call rate arbitrage, another term you may see out
there is called peak shaving, where essentially when you have the lowest time of use rating,
the cheapest electricity, you fill these up, and
then during the highest, the peak time, you live off of them, and that was in the app where I showed you that customize, where
it'll actually figure that out for you. You just kind of go in and tell it when is the expensive, the peak rates, versus the off-peak rates. But that other case
where it does make sense, is if you live somewhere that
have regular power outages. So, in the United States, this is kind of the sub-Atlantic area, the south that is on the coastal side, where hurricanes regularly come, and, you know, knock out power, or cause other kind of problems like that, these things could be
really beneficial for you. You know, it could
literally be the difference between life and death in some cases. There are a lot of cases, and a lot of people in the world that live in areas with kind of insecure, or unstable electricity grids, and so if you live in one of those places, this could be something that, whether or not the economics
make a whole lot of sense, having energy when the grid is down, and that being a regular thing, is totally gonna be worth it for you. So it's not one of those things where you're just looking to save money. You're looking to just
have a better quality of life with this, and
this definitely offers you that opportunity. And lastly, I really can't stress enough how awesome it feels to look and see that I am really not using any electricity from the grid at all. I mean it's just incredible seeing this, and knowing that I have control over how I'm consuming energy, and what's happening to it. It really is a great feeling, and so, you know, we're human, and you know this is why
behavioral economics exist, because we're not machines, this isn't just a math equation here, and so, you know, that
is definitely valuable, and so if that's something
that is valuable to you, and you can do things like pair it with a solar purchase, or get, you know, one of the discounts from the
S-CHIP program in California, or a similar one where you live, then this can totally make sense, right? It financially may not be 100%, but knowing that you
have energy independence, and security, could be enough for you, depending on your financial situation. So I'm curious what you
guys have to say about this. Do you have a Powerwall,
or are you considering one? Do you have solar? Let me know if there's anything I missed in these calculations,
because that's essentially what we're trying to do here, is explore sustainable
technologies like this, and see how they're transforming
the world around us, through the lens of data, of course. So thank you for watching. Don't forget, when you free the
data, your mind will follow. I'll see you guys back
here in the next one. (upbeat music) Hey thanks for watching the video. I hope you got something out of it. Now if you wanna dive a little bit deeper, become a part of the
Teslanomics community, consider joining us on Patreon. So, what we have setup
are different things and ways to engage,
such as a Discord group, which is like this chatroom, that is just the folks
that support the channel through Patreon. I'm on there almost daily, engaging in conversation about how Tesla, and others like them, are
changing the world around us for the better. So, if you'd like to learn more, go ahead and go to
patreon.com/teslanomics, and I hope to see you there soon.
