I see Midnite has a new product to combine two Tesla Powerwall lithium batteries.
Tesla just sent me an email and will take $500 to reserve one of their Powerwalls - they say they have twice the capacity of first model.
But you have to pay at least $1000 for their installer to hook them up. Forget that !
" One 14 kWh Powerwall battery $5,500
Installation and supporting hardware starts at $1,000
Total estimate $6,500
Requires $500 deposit for each Powerwall
Total cost excludes sales tax, permitting and fees.
Installations begin January 2017. "
Larry
Interesting. There seem to be various lock-ins with the powerwall product. First, there is an inverter that is bundled with the battery pack, and consumer has no choice about it. Second, as you noted yourself, they insist on their own installers performing the installation. This is going to be a flop with the RE market, which value open products that can be installed without lock-ins.
The first go round I signed up for their Powerwall and never got contacted by anyone . Not even an email.
So now they still have my email address and salute me for being a supporter with this offer !
Maybe some day they will actually sell their batteries on the market, until then it is just fiction to me.
Larry
they are dangling the baited hook in front of you to see if you will BITE! I think they GOTCHA! ::) ;)
now for the Spam... :o
They only sent me one email - no spam. But their offer isn't what I am looking for. Last year or whenever that was the first Powerwall was announced I thought it sounded like a good deal but of course it never materialized. So yeah maybe they were just fishing !
Larry
Perhaps look at it from Tesla's business model perspective.
The best way to drive down battery (cell level) cost is to always run the factory at full capacity. On the other side, it is nearly impossible to have perfectly balanced demand for cars and battery production 100% of the time, especially during factory ramp ups.
The power wall and other energy storage projects provides a way to help balance out the situation. If auto production stops for even 10 minutes, it is a big deal. If someone gets their solar system battery 1 week early or 1 week late, it can be dealt with using logistics and installation time shifting.
Especially now that the solar city company is part of Tesla, they can use energy storage as a competitive advantage to pull customers to them, train their own network of installers to need minimal support, rather than support 100s of installers asking questions.
SunPower has a similar business model, they are well known to make very good panels, but do not sell them to anyone else.
I will be very surprised if Tesla doesn't continue to keep their storage solution as an in-house captive capability.