Tesla’s Home Battery Will Only be Rented to Consumers

Following on from our previous story regarding the two new batteries due to be introduced by Tesla, a new report has come in that these batteries will only be on loan rather than bought outright. The batteries in question are a battery for home and a “very large scale utility battery” for ‘very large scale tasks’.; which will more likely be applied to hospital emergency power or similar.

All this comes from a report from The Guardian, suggesting that the home battery will be loaned on a similar principle to what SolarCity is experimenting with their solar panels; SolarCity is a company with extremely close ties to Tesla and is expected that they will work closely on this project in the future.

The proposed scheme will be laid out by SolarCity; the customers pay an initial fee of $1,500, this covers the installation and providing of a Tesla Battery. From here, this will be followed by monthly installments of $15 for 10 years. On the grand scheme, the battery costs a huge $13,000, which makes it a very favourable investment for the consumer which only has to pay $3,300 for the 10 years of ‘ownership’. The batteries will be reclaimed after the 10 years of use and we are unsure if another battery will then be leased at the new pricing or if the customers will get a returning offer.

The battery will be powerful enough to sustain power to the home’s lighting, refrigerator, internet and many other electrical appliances during a power cut. They can store energy either from on-grid mains supply, or through renewable sources; possibly solar panels may be offered from SolarCity to keep them topped up on sunny days.

Approximately 300 customers have already installed Tesla batteries in their homes; “It’s clean, it’s quiet and it looks good in the garage … if you are a gadget person living a digital life – you have iPhones and computers and you always want to be connected – the storage battery is a dream come true.”

All this and more will be revealed to the world on April 30th at Tesla’s Hawthrone Design Studio by Elon Musk himself.

Thank you to The Verge for providing us with this information