Tesla Powerwall charges to a ridiculous price of A$20,000

More than a quarter of Australian homes have solar panels on the roof, but battery storage represents a tiny percentage of this potential customer base.

There could be many reasons why that’s the case, but there’s only one that matters, cost.

In Feburary 2020, we added solar panels to our home and significantly reduced out power bills. Since then, we’ve now grown from 1 to 2 EVs in the garage, and battery storage was next on the to-do list.

Given we’re very much in the Tesla camp, we were hoping to add a Powerwall 2 to the garage but have just received 2 quotes, that places the price at an insane A$20,000 installed.

Just a few years ago, Powerwall 2 cost A$12,500 but that has now swelled to a price tag that no longer makes sense. The warranty on the Tesla Powerwall is for 10 years and if you join Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant, they’ll extend that to 15 years. Even still, at a couple of dollars in power costs per day, it takes an awfully long time to get any kind of return on this investment.

In some markets, you may be buying battery storage for different reasons, like reliability and each homeowner will attach a different value to that, but for us, that isn’t really part of the equation.

Of course, we could consider a different brand, a smaller capacity, but none offers the simplicity, performance, and features of Powerwall.

Our only other option is to wait it out until we see an LFP-based Powerwall 3, but there’s absolutely no timeline for that product to exist in the world, or be available in Australia.

This is incredibly disappointing and while Tesla’s Gigafactories are ramping production of vehicles like the Model Y significantly, it seems their energy division has a long way to go before ramping supply to meet demand.

Also not helping the total costs in the quote are new Australian regulations that require batteries in your garage to be protected from vehicles. Obviously placing it in front of a vehicle would be a bad idea and the protection of a bollard could be justified, but this appears to be a blanket rule, so even placing the battery to the side of the garage where there is basically zero chance of it being run into, still requires protection. Let’s get some common sense about this and re-think the risk here.

Below is the itemized account of what’s included and while not all the cost is the Powerwall alone, if this is what it costs homeowners to install, that’s the cost that forms the basis for your decision to buy or not.