- In addition to being a car company,
Tesla's also an energy company which I'm sure you knew
with the solar roof, the solar panels, and Powerwall,
but they have done a new thing here
and it's something I recently discovered
that makes them look much more like a utility
than just a manufacturer of these products.
The cool part is you can help further their mission,
buy a Powerwall, and end up getting paid to do so.
I don't mean in 10 years it'll save you some money.
I mean they will send you a check
for helping them further this mission along.
Now, there's a lot of details to cover in how this all works
so stick with me, hit that like button, and let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
The grid isn't just one thing.
In fact, even when we say the grid, it sounds like, yeah,
it's that thing out back over there,
but through this process, the past few weeks
I've been researching this video, I learned a whole lot
and it'll really help if we just go
through a high-level overview of how this works
to then understand how you can benefit yourself.
Okay, so at the high level,
the grid has essentially two parts.
There is the part that generates energy,
whether it be a solar farm, a nuclear power plant,
or a coal plant or whatever the case may be.
Then there is the part that gets that energy to you
in your home that you use to charge your phone
which you're now watching this on,
and those two things combine to essentially create
what we know as the grid.
In regulated states, the folks that generate the energy,
the energy suppliers we'll call them,
are also the people that deliver that energy,
the grid operators, as we'll call them.
In deregulated states, of which there are many
in the United States in varying degrees,
you don't have to be the same company which means if you
and me with our lotto winnings wanted to take that money
and go start a solar farm and start selling it
to individual customers or even
to other utilities, we are free to do so.
So there is distinction.
It's not applicable everywhere, but that is kind
of the high-level overview of just how that bit works.
There's also a lot of hardware involved such as substations,
high-voltage transmission lines that actually carry
the energy from generating station,
to then the distribution lines which are the power lines
you're typically seeing in your neighborhood
which are then connected to your house.
Now obviously, there are 1,000,000 more details
and things that I glossed over there,
but just trying to think about it at a high level,
you have energy generators and energy distributors.
Now is when we take that red pill
and go a little bit further to see
how far the rabbit hole really goes.
Tesla currently offers three consumer products
on the energy side.
They offer the solar panels,
the solar roof, and a Powerwall.
Now, these are things that you and me can take advantage of
and they're actually really great.
I've done videos on all of them.
I'm sure you've seen some of them, and combined,
these products help us become like a mini power plant.
We can generate our own energy, store that energy,
and then use that energy.
At my house, I'm participating in this as well.
I have a 5.3 PV, or photovoltaic, solar panel system,
and then two Tesla Powerwalls giving me 27 kilowatt-hours
of off-grid or backup storage which really just tugs
on my American heartstrings of independence and freedom,
the things that just, I don't know, it's something innate
in our culture here, and for folks not from here,
obviously you have your opinions on that.
That's fine, but there's just something really incredible
about knowing there can be a power outage,
there can be a global pandemic,
whatever is going on out there in the world,
I don't care when it comes to my energy.
I can be lighting my home, heating it, cooling it,
all of those things without worrying about what the grid
or anyone else has to say about it.
Now as I mentioned, I have 27 kilowatt-hours
of offline storage in my Powerwalls and that
for my one home will provide about a day's worth of backup
if there was no other energy at all.
Again, I have solar so I would be getting that energy.
Even on a cloudy day, I'll get some or you could think
of it like these two white boxes next to my master bathroom
can provide about 15 or 20 of my neighbors
with an hour of off-grid power in the event of an outage.
So yeah, it's really cool that literally
for not an exorbitant amount of money, in fact,
it's pretty economical and it saves you money
in the long run, I can be a power generator
in a very limited amount of space.
My home's only 1,000 square feet.
I don't have some giant ranch here that I'm able
to do this with, and that's what's really powerful
about these technologies.
What happens is you end up with a sort of decentralized grid
where instead of having major infrastructure
in one location providing energy to everyone,
you essentially have little power generating stations all
over and that is where this whole vision
of Tesla becoming more of a utility starts to take form.
This is what they call virtual power plants, and remember,
the grid must get their energy from somewhere,
whether that's from their own generation stations
or from any other little mini
or even bigger power generating stations
that might be out there.
So this is where the master stroke
for Tesla really starts to become a reality.
With this virtual power plant concept,
what they're doing is networking together all
of the homeowners with Powerwalls, creating essentially
a decentralized energy generation station.
It's actually many, many stations, but combined together,
and then selling that energy back
to the grid operator or the utility.
Like where I live it's SDG&E.
California has a lot of other big ones.
Wherever you live, you probably have one
or two in your area.
So they are becoming an energy supplier to the grid operator
and it turns out that battery storage is much more reliable
and even cheaper than some of the other sources
where the grid operators are getting their energy today.
Now, Tesla hasn't rolled this out nation-wide yet,
but it is in a few different places, and I spoke recently
with a guy named Mike up in Massachusetts
who said that last year he participated in eight events.
This is when the grid needed more energy
than they could provide and they went to him.
They actually pulled energy from his Tesla Powerwall
and in the end, after a year,
for basically doing nothing different,
just having it be configured and a part of this program,
he got over $700 in cash.
I mean, it was a check, but it was real money.
It wasn't like a credit on his bill or something else,
and that to me is just so cool
that you can literally help Tesla advance their mission
by supporting them, by buying one of these products,
do good for yourself by providing energy, backup,
and even other ways of doing rate arbitrage
or what's called peak shaving and saving money,
and then earn money back just by letting it be used
in this kind of virtual power plant which again even helps
the grid get cleaner and more resilient and everything.
It is a really brilliant kind of situation
that I was just thrilled to see.
This is a part of what Tesla calls ConnectedSolutions.
Now as I mentioned, it's not available everywhere.
There are a few different locations such as National Grid
in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and then Eversource
in Massachusetts as well and Connecticut.
So Northeast states, there's a few of them participating
in this, and I hope they roll it out further
because this is just the coolest thing I think,
and here's how it actually works kind of in detail for Mike.
He lives in Massachusetts and he is a part
of the National Grid, that's the utility name,
the National Grid's demand solution program.
With this program, he let them pull
from that Powerwall eight times.
In the app, in the Tesla app, he can actually see
a different icon for where this energy goes
and it's different than, say, what I have in California
where we don't have this kind of program and for him,
he essentially said he noticed zero difference.
He didn't have a problem with the outage,
he didn't have a problem charging his car,
he didn't have any other changes to his behavior,
and earlier this year in 2020, for the 2019 year,
he got a check for over $700.
Awesome, yes, that's what we all should be hoping for,
and the reason that National Grid and a few
of the other ones out there are doing this is
because it turns out it's just a cheaper and better solution
than firing up a natural gas peaker plant
which takes time, is expensive to maintain,
and is just expensive to even generate the energy.
So think about what's going on in Hornsdale
in Australia there with the Tesla battery there
that has saved those customers 1,000,000s and 1,000,000s
of dollars by having to use the battery instead
of firing up those gas peaker plants.
It's a really cool scenario where it's just better
in every way, and in fact, if you're wondering
where your energy is coming from right now,
they have these things called ISOs,
and so here's the one in California.
It shows that as of today when I'm recording this,
61% of the energy is coming from renewables,
and of that, 71% is solar.
So you can actually kind of go dig in and see
where all the energy is coming from now
if you guys are curious, but imagine that over time
as these virtual power plants kind of come online
and more people have them,
then this chart would change a little bit.
This mix might change, and in the end,
it will save people money.
Hopefully everyone, not just those that are able
to participate in the program.
Now, I also said that this makes the grid stronger,
and I mean that very literally
because a decentralized solution versus a centralized one
is just gonna be more resilient to any issues,
and so depending who you talk to, depending where you live,
storms, down trees, fires, all kinds of problems can lead
to huge power outages.
I know where I live in San Diego,
several years ago we had an outage.
Something happened in Yuma which is a couple 100 miles away
that took out power for all of the San Diego region
which is over 3,000,000 people, and so think about it,
if every little station here is providing energy,
we're not reliant on this big, centralized infrastructure.
This is also how it works in tech
where I spent 20 years in the field of data.
We essentially learned early on that in order
to index the Internet and search through it,
you couldn't just have one massive computer.
You had to have 10s of 1,000s,
or nowadays it's more like 10s of 1,000,000s
of computers running that service.
So if part of the region goes down
or even a few computers go down,
everything is still humming along.
So that is essentially where we're going here
and that makes the grid just so much more stronger
than having this massive central infrastructure.
Now, there are other utilities doing things similar to this
that don't lead to you actually getting a paycheck,
but do provide either better, cheaper services
or things like the Powerwall for as little as $15 month.
One of those is Green Mountain Power in Vermont,
and I recently spoke with their chief innovation officer,
Josh Castonguay, about this and here's what he had to say
about their program and what they're doing.
- Basically, the way it works today is you can get
two Powerwalls which will cover your home
and for most customers easily cover for in the event
of an outage, at least a day, typically longer.
We've had customers go for multiple days
and run their Powerwall, and we are able
to use those batteries as like little peaker plants,
basically as little power generation stations
that during really peak energy demand times,
the really hottest days or the coldest nights,
we can pull from those batteries and help manage the grid,
help lower how much energy we need from other sources
around New England, and by doing that,
we're able to save all of our customers quite a bit of money
and in turn we take some of that savings
and we make the battery system cheaper for the customer.
So the program we have running,
we deployed over 2,000 systems with customers
and it was $30 a month to put two batteries in your home
and power up your home.
If you pair it with solar on your roof, for example,
the solar will actually replenish the battery
and it can last even longer during an outage.
Now, that's only part of what Green Mountain Power
or GMP is doing.
If you want to see the full version of that,
go ahead and subscribe below and I'll probably post it
later on or kind of for members only.
Now, this is a real exciting time, and I love the idea
that you can help advance our transition
to sustainable energy all while actually earning money.
I really do hope that other utilities out there,
large utilities really start to adopt this
because they do see a savings out of it,
so they're not just doing it out
of the kindness of their heart.
This is something that will actually help
on their bottom line and those arguments for my experience
in business tend to win, and if you are curious
about getting a Powerwall, check out this playlist I created
over here about everything I've covered on it.
Like I said, I have two at my house along with solar panels
and I've been able to do some interesting things
in terms of peak shaving, saving money by using it
at different times of day, and lots more.
So have a look, let me know what you think
in the comments down below, and as always, don't forget,
when you free the data, your mind will follow.
I'll see you guys back here in the next one.