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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Well, yeah, probably. You'll also make a lot of people unhappy

$2/kWh is very expensive. I guess by paying the powerwall users you can limit how much you spend with them. Not sure with how much local granularity can you turn them on, but it definitely helps

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How can they pay powerwall users $2 if they're not actually charging $2?

Presumably most of the time they are charging end users more than they are paying energy providers.

By amortizing that across off-peak pricing?

By not having to build more power plants or not putting the battery equivalent of all the power walls.

Also, I imagine this is to get the power wall users 'hooked'. Then over next few years that $2 will turn into 20 cents.

This isn’t actually unique to powerwall users - this is a program for energy providers to supply emergency power. There’s a minimum amount of power needed to be eligible and a powerwall is too small. Tesla realized that they have the unique ability to manage a fleet of small batteries to act as a single large one to qualify.

Will the price go down in the future? Maybe. Is this a gimmick to get people hooked? Probably not, assuming Tesla isn’t paying end users more than they make to join in.

And hope that won't realize they're destroying their battery without enough compensation?

You're buying the bare minimum to stabilize the grid and you're buying it "delivered" already

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