Tesla Stops Selling Powerwalls To Anyone with Solar

i got a call on saturday from my friend joe scott and he was asking about the tesla power wall he said that people were telling him you can no longer buy a tesla power wall without also buying tesla solar and my first reaction was like there's no way that's possible clearly it works this has to be some kind of mistake well it turns out i was wrong and tesla has stopped selling power walls to anyone that also doesn't buy tesla solar this is a big problem because there are millions of households out there like mine that have solar already and would love a tesla powerwall but now can't get one so what do you do and why might they have done this let's start with the technical discussion is there any reason why tesla would not want people that don't have tesla solar to have a power wall not really is the answer i myself on my house have lg solar panels and we have two power walls plus a span panel that replaced the sub panel that tesla put in and everything works fine my neighbor actually got a power wall from the referral program and he doesn't even have solar totally works fine i have a friend out in utah that has a couple power walls he also has tesla solar recently but he also has another kind of solar so he has like different kinds of solar and power walls it all totally works fine so from the limited sample set of data i have here it appears there is no technical reason why a tesla power wall wouldn't work with any other kind of solar out there so this can't be something that tesla from a technical standpoint is saying yes this makes sense or at least it's not obvious as to what that reason might be we should also just quickly talk about tesla's panels themselves tesla doesn't actually make solar panels they partner with panasonic and also i've heard of people using qcell and in talking to some installer friends of mine they've seen different issues with the quality of these panels now this can be problematic especially when it comes to warranties and things like that imagine on tesla they're guaranteeing them for a certain period of time but different manufacturers or makers of the panels can have different quality levels and different things like that this could be why you see different lawsuits out there such as walmart suing tesla for fires but on the other hand tesla is offering essentially the cheapest solar panel option out there the price per watt is really as cheap as it gets and this is probably what's led to a surge in installs so forcing you to buy solar if you want to power wall doesn't appear to be from poor sales on the solar side not to mention that tesla recently decided to raise the price of their solar roof even after their contracts were signed again this is leading those customers to sue them so there's a lot going on on the energy side here that doesn't seem to make sense from a technical side nor a business standpoint now i'm not a lawyer but i don't know the validity of those claims i haven't dug into them i know as little as anyone in the public else knows so the only other thing i can think of is that tesla might be wanting to build up a walled garden here and a walled garden if you're unfamiliar is essentially what apple does they have certain apps like imessage which only work on their devices and they integrate everything beautifully so it all just really kind of hums and airdrop from file to here and imessage from here to here and whatever until you have someone in your family that is a green bubble like this guy here's the deal though the walled garden is nice but it also comes at a cost because it really limits you in what you can do this is why i'll never own an iphone as long as they keep this up tesla is going down this similar path it appears where oh power walls are great we want power walls oh you have to have tesla solar okay and guess what you can probably get a wall charger for your electric car that you didn't know you wanted either so tesla appears to be following apple's footsteps of like holding one of their greatest products you know kind of inside the garden building up these walls around it so you have to be in there and then you can't leave that's kind of the the thing about apple that myself and many others don't like and it is clearly what tesla is doing here whether or not that's intentional again elon has talked against this a lot especially with things like the supercharger network being sort of emote and how he hates moats and all these other ideas but the point being like that's the only reason i can see why tesla would do this is to build up a walled garden but okay enough theorizing about all that let's get to you know hopefully the real reason why you're here which is to find out what you can do i mean so i you know i'm on my second house now my first house we got solar and tesla power walls thankfully we were able to do that on my new house we already have solar when we bought it so i can't get a power wall i do want battery backup i love battery backup i love the abilities it gives me from adjusting my time of use rates this is called peak shaving or rate arbitrage essentially buying loads selling high which is really helpful when you have an electric car that charges because you can go off grid when they would be charging you a really high rate and then get an extremely low rate at a certain off-peak time they call it super off peak here in san diego and then i can charge up my car for like texas crude oil cheap prices i mean we're talking nine cents a kilowatt hour it's dirt cheap especially for california so i love that having a home battery allows me to do these kind of things and now i'm sol and so i don't want you to be sol either i've done some research here and i just want to share it with you i don't know that i have a solid answer but i'll hopefully give you just the little bits of knowledge that i've gained here and then we can have a discussion in the comments and i can follow up later with what i do end up doing here at my new home okay first off i made a chart you know it's what i do it's how i look at the world and here you have some of the most popular home battery backups these are the alternatives and i did put the power wall on here so you can kind of see the reference so on the y-axis you have the capacity this is how much energy is actually the battery can store in a kilowatt-hour standpoint then on the bottom you have the price in us dollars i got all this info from energy sage and i'll talk more about them later but you can just kind of get a sense like the thing when i first put this together was you have these cheaper lower capacity ones the end phase and the lg and then the power walls kind of right in the middle and then on the top right you have the more expensive ones the sonnen or sonan i don't know how to say it and the generac so we're going to go through each one of these here and i'll put a link to this up on my website um if you want to go check this out just as a sense of like where these are at and then yeah when you hover over them you get kind of more details about the warranty the peak power of continuous power etc but here's kind of the lay of the land okay first off and these are in no specific order the saunan and this is one of the this is the highest capacity one at 20 kilowatt hours with a peak output of 12 kilowatts and a continuous power of eight so those are the best numbers that we have and the price here is starting at ten thousand dollars before install and this is kind of known as the the more luxury option uh if you have a look at it you can kind of get a sense of you know the the beauty of it and all those kind of things this is the sun and core is the big one here and then they have a couple other products here again you can kind of get a sense of kind of the luxury the beauty of it and all that stuff so this is a really good option i think here you know you can go from 10 to 20 kilowatt hours now see the reason i like this is the 20 kilowatt hours for something like this that's all you need right like one power wall doesn't really give you a ton uh to back up your house if you're doing your whole house 20 is good 20 should be able to support your whole house and it looks like you can even get up to 30 kilowatt hours so that is really awesome i also love the design of it and you know all that so the price is on the higher end here but i think for a single solution instead of having to say daisy chain these together this is pretty cool i really really do like this one i don't know if i'd put it in my living room like this images here i don't know what's up with that um but yeah more to come on there again i'm just going to give you the lay of the land and talk through these and then down the road once i decide on which one i'll obviously do more videos and explain what's going on with that next you have the kind of least sexy of them all in terms of the design the generac pwr cell again generac is typically associated with the natural gas backup solutions and so they bought this company i believe in 2019 and they created uh you know a rebranded version of that product here you can get a sense of what it looks like the generac pwr cell is one that has a capacity of 17.1 kilowatt hours so pretty good a peak of 10 kilowatts and a continuous power of 6.7 with the price around 10 000 so this is good because it has a really high peak power it's something that can really support a whole home backup and i believe you can daisy chain these together so this is like number two that we're looking at number three here is end phase and they are actually who i have for my solar inverter they're really popular in that space and they now have a storage solution here they have a couple options i think there's about a three i don't know what the smart switch is and then the 10. so the 10 is the one i would be interested in it's 10 kilowatt hours a peak output of 5.7 kilowatts with a continuous of 3.84 and price around 5 000 so for 10 kilowatt hours at 5 000 that's a pretty good deal it's something that i think would be really worth considering and if you can get a few of these together then yeah i mean you're talking you're talking a good solution for kind of off grid or backup scenarios also since it is literally the same company that makes the inverter i imagine that those are integrated really well so if you have an end phase system and if you have this battery i'm actually really curious how that experience has been for you next we have one that is kind of not marketed i i couldn't find their actual website for it but i believe this is super popular this is the lg chem resu risu resu 10h here we're looking at 9.3 kilowatt hours of usable capacity um a warranty of 10 years and a price of around 5 000 so again 5 grand for 10 kilowatt hours that's a really good deal i mean or almost you know 9.3 kilowatt hours so this is a really good this is like a great option if you can get a couple of these again daisy chain them together i think you're looking at um you're looking at a good solution here peak power of seven kilowatts and five kilowatt hours or five kilowatts of continuous power really good um and of course energy sage is a really great website to research all these things here and then here's one that is not really wasn't on my chart not on my list it's i don't even believe available yet let me zoom in a little bit for you this is the uh vanadium redox flow battery and if you're unfamiliar with the flow battery is or redox flow battery is it's pretty incredible and i'll point you to my friend matt farrell's video where he goes into depth about it and i think you'll be really impressed this is something that i believe it was actually yeah it was developed by nasa in the 70s and the patent or the whatever it finally became open source and here's a great graphic of it so the idea is that it's it's driven by these two liquids that exist you have a negatively charged electrolyte and then a positively charged electrolyte tank and so this is has a potential to be grid scale something that can actually like support cities because scaling it isn't the matter of producing more battery cells it's just making bigger you know tanks essentially so this is really really cool now they are reportedly doing a home battery you can kind of check it here volt storage smart i think it's called and again i don't think this is available yet but it is super cool and i'm super interested in it so the continuous power output of 1.5 kilowatts is super low capacity 6.2 kilowatt hours really low but again you can have like 100 of these or make it you know 10x that if you wanted to um some of the things that they say here are kind of ridiculous about it like not being able to catch fire because apparently that's a big problem with other batteries but i don't know this is just something that maybe it's wishful thinking here but maybe one day or if someone listening to this knows these folks and want to come do an install for me i would be super hyped to check this out because a rita the redox flow technology has a ton of promise when it comes to uh you know a cleaner grid and storage solutions like this so everything i learned here basically came from the website energysage.com i've been using energysage for years to learn about all of these things as well as energy sage is how i actually found my solar installer way back in 2017 and i am very proud to say that today they are our sponsor energy sage is a website that has great info again but it also is a way to get quotes for solar for your house without being bombarded by every installer out there and in the end they find that people save about 20 on their installs by using their marketplace so here's how i did it and here's how it works back in 2016 when i got my first tesla i noticed my bill went up i knew very little about solar at the time i mean i know you know this much more now but basically i knew nothing then other than this was a good idea to kind of save some energy make it cleaner and greener and all that and potentially save me some money well i went on an energy stage i uploaded my electricity bill i did a little google earth thing where i pinned my my roof lines they could see trees nearby the angle of the roof which direction the house is facing etc and then i got a bunch of quotes from different installers the installers never got my personal info i controlled like who got to see what and the messaging between it all was coordinated through energy sage and in the end i was able to find an installer and save a good amount of money by doing so because the quotes were all over the board yes at the time i got a quote from tesla but back then it was called solarcity and they were the most expensive i believe i mean they were definitely on the very high end in terms of price per watt plus the people i worked with at the time didn't really seem to know what they were talking about when i asked them these questions about like the warranties what types of inverters they really didn't know any of that so i learned a lot by using energy sage and i ended up saving some money and that is exactly what their goal is so with earth day here or coming up depending on when you're watching this i encourage you to go check out energysage if you're looking for solar it's a great place to learn stuff as well as i mentioned get these quotes and they find that people save about 20 on solar by doing so there's a lot to consider there there's a lot that i still am learning and so if you're were in the boat that i was in i really encourage you to go check it out and again i'm a huge fan of energy sage i've been telling people about it for years regardless of them sponsoring any videos you can go back and watch my previous videos and and vet that and i'm very happy to have them as a sponsor so final answer on the battery um it's hard to say uh right now i'm leaning towards the sonnen just because i mean i just learned about it as we were going here that you can have a 30 kilowatt hour capacity on one battery that would is beautifully designed and all that i think i really like that the money it wouldn't be probably the most financially best decision but you know when you're talking a couple hundred bucks a couple thousand bucks between the two like i would rather go with the one that is going to not have to have a bunch of boxes on the wall and not have a bunch of stuff that's just really really more elegantly designed and seamlessly integrated um so that's the one i'm leaning towards now uh i am curious though if you are someone that has any of these other options out there leave a comment let me know why you went with the one you did and how it's going help the community out by sharing that knowledge as well and then you know stay stick around because i'm going to be going on this journey at my new house like i said we already have solar my plan was to get power walls i can't do that anymore so this is kind of me sharing what i've learned so far and of course there's going to be a lot more to come so subscribe again if you haven't get on an email list over at benson.com join so that way you don't miss any of these videos sometimes youtube has different opinions about what you might be interested in so they'll share one versus not if you go get on the email list guaranteed you're going to get a notification and that's it for this one guys again leave me a comment down below let me know what you think and i will see you back here in the next one

Channel: Ben Sullins

Views: 368,690

Keywords: tesla powerwall, tesla powerwall 3, tesla powerwall 2, tesla powerwall installation, tesla powerwall vs generac pwrcell, tesla powerwall texas, tesla powerwall off grid, tesla powerwall cost, tesla powerwall app, tesla powerwall 2 installation, tesla powerwall teardown, tesla powerwall 3 review, tesla powerwall vs generator, tesla powerwall 2 off grid

Id: 3OprPI6b2WA

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 20 2021