Comment by pridkett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pridkett | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It’s not as far off as you might think - even for individual homeowners. I’ve got a far from ideal house with a 8.4KWh solar array on my roof and 3x Tesla Powerwalls in my basement. Yesterday I produced 43KWh of electricity and exported 27KWh to the grid. The only reason I’ve needed grid connectivity in the last nine days has been to export power. In essence, I’m largely off grid from March through October.

Now, this wasn’t cheap (thankfully incentives made it more affordable and Eversource provides the most expensive electricity in the United States), after incentives it was about $22000. That’s a lot, but it’s not hard to imagine this becoming scalable in the near future for climates with better solar potential than Connecticut.

$22,000 would pay my electric bills for about 12 years, not even factoring in opportunity cost. What are the ongoing maintenance costs/total cost of ownership over 12 years of such a system?

As far as Powerwalls go, I'd definitely want something like that in an outbuilding and not in my house. Last thing I want to do is wake up at 3:00am with a raging battery fire in my basement.

If we're talking about nerds buying this stuff, $22k is comparable to what people spend on nice homelab setups. I would pay $22k just because it's cool and not because it saves money.

Yeah, but we're talking about 0.1% of the population. For mass adoption, prices have to be much, much lower.

There's some places where you can't put the Powerwalls indoors. In CT where I live it's just fine. I did add in a fire suppression system in my basement when I had them installed. This was not a requirement and was included in my overall cost figure provided. It's a big red thingy in between the rafters that goes "boom" when there's a fire. That's a technical term.

How much would you pay for electricity / month if you did not have any of that?

In the 12 months prior my electric bill averaged $140/mo at an average rate of $0.23/KWh (includes supply and delivery - split about 1:2).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com