Tesla are taking a new approach to getting their energy storage solution, the Powerwall 2 battery, into Australian households by partnering with builders directly. For existing home owners, you can always put up your hand and open your wallet to buy your own, but it makes a lot of sense to partner with Australian building companies to promote and sell solar and storage packages with new homes.
Internationally Tesla now own Solar City which make solar panels, which uniquely positions Tesla as a company that can offer an end-to-end solution for capturing and storing power, reducing the long-term power bills of customers.
Given the cost of Powerwall and a solar panels aren’t cheap at somewhere between $15-$20,000 for a complete system, its smart to integrate a Power Package as part of a new home build as it opens the door to having the price added to the price of a mortgage. As part of the electrical installation of the new house, this avoids the up-front cost (still only a fraction of the cost of a new home and land) and simply adds a few dollars per week to repayments.
As someone who’s just completed a new home build with Metricon, this timing came too late for me, if it had been in place, I absolutely would have taken them up on it. While there’s no discussion of discounts being offered, if a large volume of builder could guarantee a certain number of customers to Tesla, its a likely path forward where everyone, including the customer could win.
Once Tesla / Solar City start shipping their own solar panels into Australia, expect this to ramp up considerably. This makes the challenge for competitors much harder with other providers having to sell post-build systems outside mortgages, a much harder task.
With the right combination of solar panels and storage (remember you can scale up to 9 Powerwalls together), a new home could potentially be completely off the grid.
Right now the list of builders we know about are JG King and Metricon. If you’ve seen other, please let us know in the comments.
Tesla have also confirmed today on their Facebook page that the first Powerwall 2 installation in Australian homes has now taken place. We’ll have more on this soon.
