Yet Another Tesla Powerwall Price Hike: Aussies Now Pay $1,500 More Than In US.

If you’re an Australian hoping to buy a Tesla Powerwall battery system, I have bad news.  It’s so bad that before I reveal it, you may want to sit down and prepare to offer words of comfort to your wallet.  The Australian Tesla site has just increased the price of Powerwalls by $800. 

To be clear, this isn’t me repeating news about Tesla’s previous $800 price hike I wrote about less than three months ago because I have memory problems.  This is completely unrelated to my impending senility.  It’s an entirely new price increase.  The cost of a Tesla Powerwall and supporting hardware — including GST — is now $13,300:

At this rate, I’ll be telling you about the next $800 Powerwall increase sometime in May.

Australians Screwed Over By Tesla

There was a recent price hike in the US, but I was hoping we wouldn’t have one here because the Australian dollar has risen over 8% since the start of October, which is around when Tesla introduced their last increase.  Just keeping the price constant while the Australian dollar rose to the 77 US cents it’s worth today increased the amount of money Tesla received for each Nevada-made Powerwall by over $900 Australian. Still, apparently, that wasn’t enough for Tesla, and they felt the need to bung an extra $800 onto the price. 

In the past, I’ve pointed out Tesla was pretty good when it came to offering products in Australia for around the same price they did in the US, but this is no longer the case.  Going by today’s exchange rate, we are now charged $1,586 more than Yanks.  Charging a little more is forgivable or even understandable, but this is just screwing us over.

I don’t know why Americans feel the need to charge Australians extra.  So many old people have died in the US from COVID-19 you’d think they’d be flush with inheritance money, wouldn’t you?  Or maybe they’re being hit with massive ICU bills, American style?

Home Batteries Are Supposed To Fall In Price

The Powerwall 2 made its debut back in February 2017.  That’s over four years ago.  It’s been around so long I’m about the only one left who bothers to include the “2” on the end.

According to the hype it was supposed to usher in an age of cheap home and business battery storage.  In 2016, serious forecasters at Morgan Stanley made a middle-of-the-road prediction that 1 in 10 Australian households would have a battery system by 2020.  They also made an optimistic forecast that was 1 one in 5.  But this battery storage-filled future still hasn’t materialized and instead it’s something like 1 in 30 at the moment. 

While not everyone huffed the battery hype as hard as Morgan Stanley, a lot of people — myself included — were hoping the launch of the Powerwall 2 would usher in an age of affordable home battery storage.  Instead, we received the exact opposite  — Powerwall price hikes:

As you can see from the chart above, there has been exactly one Powerwall 2 price decrease and four increases.  I find the single price decrease reassuring because it means at least they understand prices can go down. 

The Powerwall 2 price has risen by almost 50% since its introduction.  The $9,000 price for February 2017 is approximate as Tesla gave prices differently back then.  But if we assume it’s a hard figure, then there has been:

• A 48% increase since 2017.
• A 43% real increase after inflation is taken into account.

This is not what was supposed to happen to home battery prices.  For some reason, the Powerwall price keeps rising even when battery cells’ cost is decreasing dramatically.  In 2018 the Powerwall price was increased $2,650 only three months after Elon Musk said Tesla would get battery cell prices down to $100 US per kilowatt-hour by the end of that year.  There was a $550 decrease in the middle of 2019, but that didn’t last.  In his September 2020 Battery Day announcement, Elon said Tesla would cut the cost of batteries in half by 2025 and in the four months since then the Powerwall price has been hiked twice for a $1,600 total increase.   

When the Powerwall 2 was introduced, I thought its price was pitched low to scare off competition, and it would be a long time before we saw a price cut.  I didn’t expect a 43% real price increase. 

Why The Price Hikes?

So why does the price of the Powerwall keep going up when the price of battery cells keep going down? 

A friend suggested Elon needs money to pay for new rockets because the ones he used to have only worked well until they come in contact with the ground:

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But Tesla and SpaceX are separate companies that shouldn’t have fingers in each other’s financial pies, so that’s probably not the reason. 

On the other hand, we know Elon is desperate to get to Mars, so maybe he’s trying to raise money for that.

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One contentious hypothesis as to why he increased the price of the Powerwall by $800 twice inside of four months is because when he reverts to his true Martian form, he has eight tentacles.  Or possibly 800.  This line of thought is very speculative. 

Then there are those who will say he’s simply after money because he caught the bitcoin bug and recently bought $2 billion of them.  I don’t know if he has been buying at around the current peak or if he created it.  He does say he’ll accept bitcoin for Tesla cars.  I hope he’ll put a carbon surcharge on those transactions because they’re terrible for the environment. 

It’s also possible Tesla has raised the price of the Powerwall because they can while still selling all the units they produce.  Making safe and reliable home battery systems has clearly proven to be a lot harder than expected, otherwise Tesla would have a lot more competition given their current price point. 

Increasing the price to take advantage of consumers’ willingness to pay is a perfectly normal business move. Still, it is very different from a strategy of keeping prices low to keep out competition.  Rather than supply battery storage for the masses, Tesla may have decided it will instead only provide its bottled lightning to those willing to pay a premium for the Tesla brand. 

Fortunately, there is still time for Tesla to lower its Powerwall prices and get back to supplying energy storage to the masses, rather than just those with masses of money. 

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/another-powerwall-price-rise/