All eyes these days may be on Elon Musk’s space venture—which has just put people in orbit—but here on Earth you can now get your monthly electric bill courtesy of a different Musk enterprise.
Tesla and its partner Octopus Energy Germany recently rolled out retail utility services in two large German states. It’s being marketed as the “Tesla Energy Plan,” and is available to any individual household in this region of 24 million people that has a solar panel system, a grid connection—and a Tesla powerwall, the Palo Alto firm’s gigafactory-made 13.5 kWh battery wall unit.
The German initiative comes on the heels of a similar rollout through Octopus Energy last November in the United Kingdom.
It’s too soon to say if these are the nascent strands of a “giant distributed utility,” an expression Musk has long talked up, the meaning of which is not yet clear. Analysts and power insiders sketch scenes including interconnected local renewable grids that draw on short-duration battery storage (including the small batteries in electric vehicles in a garage, models for which Tesla just happens to make) combined with multi-day storage for power generated by wind and solar. For bigger national grids it gets more complicated. Even so, Tesla also now has gear on the market that institutional battery storage developers can use to run load-balancing trade operations: the consumer won’t see those, but it’s part of ongoing changes as renewables become more important in the power game. Being able to get a Tesla-backed power bill in the mailbox, though—that’s grabbing attention. And more broadly speaking, the notion of what is and isn’t a utility is in flux.
Leave a Reply