the email says they've mailed the check and not much else other than the amount - for me it's about $72. this is a little less than double the amount that i calculated with the spreadsheet that @Redhill_qik posted. i guess i must have screwed up my data input, so it's a pleasant surprise.
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got email describing VPP payout today
- Thread starter astrorob
- Start date
charlesj
Active Member
I also received an email today. My check is in the mail, $222.05, for 108 kWh by my calculation, no spreadsheet involved. 
I also received an email today. My check is in the mail, $222.05, for 108 kWh by my calculation, no spreadsheet involved.
do you normally not export everything during peak? that's what makes it hard, figuring out what the baseline export works out to be for a given event.
charlesj
Active Member
I am not on time of use, so I don't look but most likely not much.
charlesj
Active Member
$538 for me. I had calculated $512 so also pleasantly surprised.
One big question is if we have to pay taxes on this. If so, then the value goes way down as I don't have to pay taxes on NEM exchanges. Also, since I have to use more grid energy outside of the event with exporting everything, I have to pay more NBCs. Yes, there's no way that $2 / kwh doesn't pencil out still but if I have to pay nearly half of that in taxes, then I'm not sure it's worth making an extra 50 cents / kwh to stress the powerwalls that much.
One big question is if we have to pay taxes on this. If so, then the value goes way down as I don't have to pay taxes on NEM exchanges. Also, since I have to use more grid energy outside of the event with exporting everything, I have to pay more NBCs. Yes, there's no way that $2 / kwh doesn't pencil out still but if I have to pay nearly half of that in taxes, then I'm not sure it's worth making an extra 50 cents / kwh to stress the powerwalls that much.
My email says $332.97 versus my spreadsheet calculation of $278.99 which is $53.99 or 26.99 kWh more. My total baseline amount was only 34.89kWh with 193.16kWh discharged, so this is a bit confusing. I'm happy that the amount is more than I expected though.
I will need to go back and check everything to see if I can find where I made a mistake to see if I can reconcile the numbers.
I plan on treating it additional income as I do with the annual true-up surplus check from my CCA. I am not a tax professional, but I think that it is likely that you could justify offsetting this against the expenses of running the solar+ESS (maintenance, deprecation, etc), but then maybe it would be treated like the home office deduction (for those that can claim it) and everything is prorated against the portion of the household that is your office.
PG&E isn't involved in this at all, other than paying Tesla to pay us. The baseline and discharge is all from the Tesla Powerwall reporting, so you can pull the log data for the VPP day and the baseline days before to calculate this. I built a spreadsheet and published it in the VPP thread (click here) and you can paste your data into it.
IIRC, I did find a very small error after posting, but it isn't enough for the variation that is being reported or that I have seen on mine.
I am not a tax professional, and I don't play one on TV, but I could see that this might be a tax issue that defies clarity for an extended period of time; what are the costs incurred in providing the ESS in the first place, what is the applicable depreciation and amortization, and what were the operator and operational costs for administering your system?...
E.g. If I keep my excavator around for doing earth moving, the depreciation is per year, not per hour of run time; my costs are per hour of run time, and per hour of service time, and my income is almost always per job, not per hour, though I may have estimated it by the number of hours that I think it will take.
I could see the IRS, state, and local groups going around on this one for awhile. Meanwhile taxpayers have to file...
All the best,
BG
So the payout appears to be a straight up total export to grid during the events. During the events, I exported a total of 256kwh of from the powerwalls but total exported to the grid was 269 kwh once you add solar and subtract house usage. So nothing like we thought it would be. Wondering if Tesla simply goofed and calculated incorrectly?
How did you come up with that? I made a modification to my spreadsheet and used the grid number from the Tesla data and it isn't close to what I am being compensated for.
Note: I don't trust the grid number from Tesla for my installation.
aesculus
Still Trying to Figure This All Out
Does anyone know how to easily get to the event dates in the Tesla app so I can download my event data into a spreadsheet?
Or alternatively anyone have any other means of figuring out the events I participated in? It would have been nice for Tesla to itemize the events and payment values.
Or alternatively anyone have any other means of figuring out the events I participated in? It would have been nice for Tesla to itemize the events and payment values.
Besides just taking the event times and adding up the total kwh exported the grid which is already available in the API? The trickier part is automating it so that I don't have to manually pull values based on the exact event times.
If the grid rate is negative(i.e. sending to grid) and greater than the current solar production, then we are in an event.
Daaaaangg that's a lot of cash that ya'll are taking from PG&E rate payers heh.
By the strict tax code, The IRS states, "All income earned through the taxpayer's business, as an independent contractor or from informal side jobs is self-employment income, which is fully taxable and must be reported on Form 1040. Independent contractors must report all income as taxable, even if it is less than $600."
Considering how much some of ya'll worked to post on TMC and learn about ESS, this VPP sounds like a side hustle to me heh.
If Tesla cuts you a 1099-MISC, my understanding is you have to include it in the taxable income regardless if it is $600 or not.
Technically if you never report it to the IRS and Tesla doesn't report it to the IRS then the IRS will never know. And since a certain political party wants to stop Biden's "IRS Shadow Army" of 87,000 new federal tax folks, it's unlikely the IRS would ever be able to hunt you down for taxes on the VPP gainz.
Remember, the only qualification I have to my name is that I have a disconnect for an avatar.
By the strict tax code, The IRS states, "All income earned through the taxpayer's business, as an independent contractor or from informal side jobs is self-employment income, which is fully taxable and must be reported on Form 1040. Independent contractors must report all income as taxable, even if it is less than $600."
Considering how much some of ya'll worked to post on TMC and learn about ESS, this VPP sounds like a side hustle to me heh.
If Tesla cuts you a 1099-MISC, my understanding is you have to include it in the taxable income regardless if it is $600 or not.
Technically if you never report it to the IRS and Tesla doesn't report it to the IRS then the IRS will never know. And since a certain political party wants to stop Biden's "IRS Shadow Army" of 87,000 new federal tax folks, it's unlikely the IRS would ever be able to hunt you down for taxes on the VPP gainz.
Remember, the only qualification I have to my name is that I have a disconnect for an avatar.
So did you do this for yourself and it worked out to the penny? If I do this for my data (I had already pulled all of this data during the VPP events last year) I am not even close.
I don't understand this, as the events were very specific days and times.
Yes, and if you want to goto your spreadsheet of API mined data and copy the grid kw (for each 5 minute interval) and sum those up, then that will work just fine. I'm just saying that I automated it to detect where in the data an event actually happens.
charlesj
Active Member
I cannot get this to work out with my data to get the check for $322.99. If I use your method with the Tesla grid data I get 154.83 kWh which is $309.66. If I use the PG&E data for the VPP times then I get 151.73 kWh which is $303.46.
You are computing 269 kWh which is $538 and your check was $538 which is a match. What were the sub-kWh and pennies?
Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Did @sorka's method work for anyone else?
I used only Tesla data. And just to make it simple, my results are the same if I copy ONLY the grid column values from Tesla's API during the events, sum them, then divide by 12,000. (i.e converting back to hours from 12 5 minute intervals, and then divide by 1000 to get kw).
