Exploring Tesla Powerwall and home batteries - worth it?

This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, from websites and online stores to marketing and analytics tools. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform to create a beautiful online presence and manage your business. I just bought a Tesla Powerwall, well, more similar to the one I have. A Tesla wall that is ready to be installed is on my garage floor, but since

home

batteries

like this are so expensive, why would anyone want one? It goes beyond a simple discussion of return on investment; In fact, there are some really interesting programs launching right now. could help drive adoption, so let's get into it.

I'm Matt Farrell, welcome to the undecided. My Tesla Powerwall doesn't work much on my garage floor right now, but once it's installed, I plan to post future videos to dive deeper into my experiences with and how it's integrated into my non-Tesla solar panel setup, as well Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out, but given how expensive these battery systems can cost, I thought it was

worth

diving into why you would want one, how they can make sense financially. and some of the intangibles that go beyond return on investment, we're actually seeing more and more people jump into residential battery systems like this, it's not too surprising why, considering recent events like the wildfires of California that left millions of people without power or Tropical Storm Isaias that left almost 3 million

home

s without power here in the northeastern US.

Traditionally, when there is a power outage, solar panels must be disabled to protect utility workers who may be sent to fix something like a downed power line. You don't want your excess solar production to keep the grid's power lines electrified. When you add a battery to a home, it has the ability to isolate itself from the grid, so your home consumes stored and self-generated electricity, basically your solar panels. they remain on. and are controlled by the battery control system. Here is a good example of a homeowner here in Massachusetts who has a Sonam battery combined with solar power.

When the tropical storm hit our area, it uprooted a tree and caused a 36-hour power outage. The blue line is the amount of energy. they were using the yellow line is their solar output, the red line is when the battery was discharging power to the house and the purple line shows the battery charge status until the end, the top is 100 charged and the bottom, zero percent. You can see exactly when the battery started up and powered the house for the first 14 hours and then over the next day it recharged and powered the house with solar energy for the next 26 hours.

An interesting note is the sawtooth pattern seen in the purple color. line, as well as solar power that appears to be being turned off and on, the battery control system automatically turns off the solar panel system when the battery is almost full and too much power is generated for the house to use the system alternating between power from the battery and solar recharging to manage that charge is really great. Resilience is a big advantage of a home battery storage system like this. It can be a little tricky to calculate the return on investment this way, but keep in mind that this homeowner still had the lights on at night and didn't lose food from a refrigerator that lost power during the height of the New England summer.

It's also

worth

mentioning that many people install permanent gasoline or natural gas backup generators for situations like this and those can cost an average of thirty seven hundred dollars to install, but power during a blackout isn't the only reason why. You want a battery system. If you have solar installed on your home, you could benefit from having energy storage to capture your overproduction during the day for use at night, with or without solar, you can switch your grid energy usage to avoid costly utility rates. time of use, paying for power from the grid when it is cheap and drawing it from the battery when it is expensive.

I'll go into more detail on this in a moment, but you may be able to make a little money directly from your utility by allowing them to use your battery as part of a larger virtual power plant system, and speaking of making money, If you're looking to build an online store or portfolio for your business website, you should check out Today's sponsor, Squarespace, this one is pretty personal to me because I've been using Squarespace for years and I use it for the undecided website. I have over 25 years of experience building websites, so I know it's a full-time job to build and maintain a website.

Squarespace takes care of everything and allows you to focus on the rest of the work that's important to your business. I love the content management system for publishing my articles and videos. You can customize and adjust the appearance to get something. that fits your personality and your company's brand and you don't have to worry about software updates, web servers or anything like that. The all-in-one platform is my favorite part if you want to create a beautiful web presence without any hassle. Visit squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com matt farrell to save 10 on your first website or domain purchase thanks to squarespace and all of you for supporting the channel and when trying to choose a battery, it can be difficult to navigate all the different battery types, brands, installation costs, and incentive programs.

The most prominent option that exists and is what I have on my garage floor: the Tesla Powerwall, is an NMC battery pack which means that it uses a chemistry of cobalt, manganese and lithium oxide, it tends to have a specific energy or higher energy density compared to other chemistries so it can store more per kilogram, however it has a slightly lower power rating than other chemistries so there is a bit of a trade-off. -off power well has a usable capacity of 13.5 kilowatt hours and a continuous power supply of 5 kilowatts or up to 7 kilowatts peak when you first turn on an electrical device, sometimes there is a brief spike in power consumption and that extra spike in the battery will cover, you can think of a battery's power supply as water flowing through a hose, the diameter of the hose limits the amount of water that can come out at once, the power supply Power has the same kind of limiting effect, so in my setup with a single wall power, my backup is able to handle about five kilowatts or 5000 watts of power consumption at a time, meaning I couldn't run it. an electric heater and air conditioner at the same time, considering they use over 5000 watts, my hose just isn't wide enough, I need to add a second electric wall to make sure I can cover that situation now.

Kilowatt hours are the number of watts you are using over time. If I ran a thousand watt oven from my electric wall, I could make it work. It lasts approximately 13.5 hours because the battery is rated at 13.5 kilowatt hours. The other important thing to consider when choosing a battery is the depth of discharge, the round trip efficiency and the guarantee that comes with the depth of discharge is how much it can drain. The battery before the manufacturer recommends recharging it in the case of the electric wall, has a depth of discharge of 100, which means that in theory you could drain it completely, but it is generally not a good idea for the health of the battery. long term battery, round trip efficiency is the amount of energy that can be used as a percentage of the amount of energy it took to store it.

It has an efficiency of 90, which is excellent, and as a guarantee, Tesla offers a guarantee of 10 years or 70 percent of the original capacity, an alternative to the NMC. The battery chemistry is LFP or Lithium Iron Phosphate and examples of that format are the Sonen Eco and Final Phase and Charge LFP

batteries

which have a slightly lower specific energy but higher power output. The Sony Eco comes in configurations ranging from 5 to 20 kilowatt hours of capacity and between 3 and 8 kilowatts of continuous output power, has a discharge depth rating of 100 and a round trip efficiency of 86 and, as far as As for the warranty, the Desonant has a 10 year, 10,000 cycle or 70 capacity warranty, there are even more batteries like the Generac Power. cell phone, lg cam resi, panasonic evervolt and electric power pod.

I will provide a link in the description of my website that has more details on the different batteries and their statistics. It's not a complete list, but it covers some of the most important options out there. out there, but there is still a big question looming: the cost, no matter which way you go, all of these options are expensive right now, the electric wall costs between nine thousand six hundred and fifteen thousand dollars to purchase and install, and the probe starts around ten thousand. dollars and can be expanded in increments of 2.5 kilowatt hours, which would increase the price accordingly.

Now, like I said, it is expensive, but remember that a backup generator can cost you thousands of dollars and is only used during a power outage when home batteries can provide 24/7 value. This is also where incentive programs can really come into play to make not only economic sense but also to help the community at large in California. There is this self-generation incentive program or sgip, which has a budget of a billion dollars to fund the program through 2024. Single-family homes are eligible to receive 850 per kilowatt hour as a rebate. Now this should cover about 85 percent of the cost of the average energy storage system, and if you live in a multi-family home or qualify for additional help, the program will. cover a thousand dollars per kilowatt hour or about a hundred percent of the cost now in Massachusetts where I live there is a Massachusetts solar or smart renewable target program that pays participants based on how much energy they produce.

The program has a battery storage adder that depends on the size of the solar panel system and the battery it is paired with, but can add between two cents and seven cents per kilowatt hour of electricity and while there is no payment like California's, there is a massive savings heating loan program you can use to pay for your battery system, allowing you to get a seven-year loan of up to twenty-five thousand dollars at zero percent interest. and utilities in the New England area, which are eversource and the national grid, have created their own incentive program called connected solutions. is a really interesting program that creates a virtual power plant by using thousands of home battery installations as one huge battery to handle peak loads on the grid.

I have requested that my electric wall be included in the system, which will pay $225 per kilowatt of your battery's average contribution during summer events and $50 per kilowatt during winter events. Tesla takes a $20 cut for power wall administration and dispatch, but Sonan manages its service for free for its customers. Public services limit the number of events to 60 in the summer. and five in winter, with each event lasting approximately two to three hours for a typical battery that is capable of making a continuous contribution of five kilowatts that could earn you about $1,375 a year while enrolled in the program for a single

powerwall

that would almost cover the cost of the

powerwall

itself for five years and going back to the Massachusetts homeowner with that sun and battery, he is enrolled in this system and in this graph you can see what it looks like when the system connects the battery, the utility company made sure its battery was fully charged and then started to run out at the beginning of the peak event, which was at 4 p.m.

This drained the battery at the end of the event, which was around 7 p.m. m., and the grid filled the battery to approximately 20 charges until the next day. When your solar panel system filled you the rest of the way, the most interesting part about this program is that it was created by the utility companies in an effort to save money and the payments come from the benefits that the program offers. Pilot programs like this have shown great promise: Green Mountain Power launched a similar program in Vermont that paid for itself considerably in 2018. The battery grid reduced consumption during New England's peak hour and saved about six hundred thousand dollars in electricity rates. capacity in 2019 after adding more. batteries to the system for approximately 10 megawattsof capacity, saved about 900,000 with a single hour of operation at the late July peak, so you can begin to see why utilities are willing and able to pay customers to contribute to systems like this, in fact, the national grid. in rhode island offers 400 per kilowatt during summer events and connected solutions program maybe i should move to rhode island well construction under that basic concept is a broader standard called clean peak that is starting to be implemented in some governments massachusetts It is the first state in the United States to enact the clean peak standard and it looks like Arizona could be next.

Simply put, it is a mandate that requires a certain percentage of a state's energy to come from renewable sources during peak demand. The nuance is that there is a clean peak peak simply by adding solar panels will not be enough because they will not provide direct power during the peak events that usually occur early in the evening when people start turning on the lights and preparing dinner to meet With those mandates, states will need methods to store that renewable energy for use. During peak, which is where battery storage comes into the picture, programs like connected solutions are laying the groundwork for utilities to start building up those energy reserves as part of the mix.

A study has shown that after the initial costs of installing the clean peak seen in Massachusetts to save taxpayers more than $400 million over the next decade, not to mention the huge savings in co2 emissions, in Germany there is a Solar storage incentive for systems under 30 kilowatts which can cover 30 of the cost of the battery system and in the UK you will find the Smart Export Guarantee which will allow you to earn money by exporting your stored electricity to the grid. How much you'll get and whether you can get it depends on the supplier, but we're likely to see between 4 and 6 pence per kilowatt hour, two factors are going to play a big role in home battery adoption and will continue to drive down battery prices. and smart government and utility policies and programs as more pilot programs, such as connected solutions, begin to show their value. that home energy storage can bring to the community, we will begin to see greater adoption.

It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few years, so what's your take? Hit the comments and let me know what you think about home batteries. I like this one and if you are interested in watching a follow up video on my

tesla

powerwall be sure to hit the like button and I would like to say a big thank you to Matthew Tuttleman who helped me with the research and scripting the video he is an expert in energy storage systems and has a lot of professional experience with virtual power plants so his ideas were incredibly helpful and as always a special thanks to all my sponsors, all your support is really helping to make this possible, yes they like me. this video, make sure you check out one of the ones I've linked here and make sure to subscribe if you think I've earned it and as always, thank you so much for watching.

See you at the next one.