Tesla Powerwall in Newfoundland

In late April, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, introduced the world to the Tesla Powerwall.

The Powerwall is a home battery that can store sustainably collected energy. While it can be charged using various renewable sources, it seems to primarily be marketed towards customers who have solar panel installations on their property.

This move from Musk was a bit of a no-brainer. His car division, Tesla Motors, has been working to build a more cost effective battery for several years and one of his other funded ventures, Solar City, sells and leases residential solar panel installations.

Offering the Powerwall helps to bolster sales for both groups.

And while the Powerwall will be available for sale in Canada via NRStor Inc and Opus One Solutions Energy Corp, upon initial investigation it doesn’t seem like it’s potential use in Newfoundland and Labrador will be all great.

It should be noted that I’m not a physicist nor have I worked in the electricity business, but I’ve spent some time researching and it appears there are some major drawbacks to using the Powerwall in Newfoundland.

Poor area for solar energy

The purpose of the Powerwall is to store energy. It’s essentially a big battery that needs to be charged.

Obviously charging the Powerwall with electricity generated by the power company kind of defeats the purpose of the device most times (but not always), there has to be alternate means of collecting energy available to make the most of the device.

For most Powerwall customers, this will be way of solar energy collected via solar panels installed on their property.

As you may have noticed, there aren’t too many solar installations in the province. And if you’ve been in Newfoundland for more than a couple of days, you probably know why that is.

The biggest reason for the lack of solar panel installations in Newfoundland is that we get so little sun. Especially along the populous east coast of the province, the number of sun hours Newfoundland receives is much, much lower than an area where solar power is taking off like Arizona.

Sun is weaker too

In addition to receiving fewer hours of sun, Newfoundland and Labrador sits at a higher latitude where the sun hitting the province is “weaker.” This results in a lower efficiency of energy being captured.

It should be noted that some people are making solar energy work in the province. A man in Dawe’s Pond is running completely off the grid via solar and wind energy gathered on his property and stored in a homemade battery setup. But he’s definitely an outlier.

While this article isn’t about why solar energy collection isn’t feasible for Newfoundland, it’s easy to see there’s a much greater justification for spending the capital on solar energy collection in sunnier southern locales.

Power isn’t charged at different rates at different hours

Newfoundland Power charges the same rate for electricity at all hours of the day. This isn’t always the case when dealing with electric companies.

A number of these companies are starting to charge more for electricity used during peak hours (typically these are evenings and weekends) than during off-peak hours (typically these are weekday daylight hours).

As a result of this imbalance in billing times, a Powerwall customer could essentially charge the device during daytime hours when electricity is cheaper then run their household off the Powerwall during the evenings to avoid the costlier rate.

The customer still may have to supplement the electricity from the Powerwall with electricity from the electric company, but it would require less of it thereby providing a savings to the customer.

But until the time comes that Newfoundland Power changes their billing model to include these peak/off-peak rates, the Powerwall would essentially serve as nothing more than a costly generator for power outages.

A generator at more than 10X the Price

The one major benefit of a Powerwall would be the fact that it does act as a solution for power outages.

After the power outages of 2014 (#darknl anyone?), generator sales in the province seemed to skyrocket. People didn’t want to be caught in the position of being powerless again should we go through another multiple day outage.

The Powerwall does offer protection against such a threat.

The problem with purchasing the device for the intention of using it as a generator for power outages is the cost.

Tesla has priced the Powerwall at $3,500. This is presumably in US funds and covers just the unit. Figuring conservatively, let’s estimate the install cost at another $3,500. All together we’ll guess the total cost at $8,000 CDN.

The math doesn’t make sense. All but the greenest of green Newfoundlanders (with lots of disposable income) would resort to buying an $8,000 Powerwall as opposed to a $500 gas powered generator at Canadian Tire when all they would need the devices for was a couple of times per year.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m a fan of what Tesla are doing and I think they’ve released a great product. Based on the number of pre-orders they’ve received it appears that it’s going to be a great success as well.

The issue is that Newfoundland and Labrador just isn’t well suited for the Powerwall…yet.

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If you have a better understanding of the implications of the Powerwall or the solar energy collection business in Newfoundland and could provide some counter points, please let us know in the comments below.