There was another discovery on my adventure with Tesla Energy that might be of interest to people who live in states like NJ where you get TRECs - Transition Renewable Energy Credits. TRECs are paid in NJ to incentivize solar production at a rate of $91.20 for every 1000 kWh of solar production for the first 15 years.
Here was my original quote from Tesla for a 16.32 kW system with 2 power walls:
View attachment 659842
Now, the strange thing I noticed was that ($9893 / $49800) * 100 =
21.1% which is significantly lower than the Federal Tax Credit rate of
26%.
I eventually found out why I was not getting the full federal tax credit. Instead of allowing you to collect your TREC payments from the state, Tesla pockets all those TREC credits and in exchange gives you an upfront discount in the system purchase price. I'm not sure if Tesla allows customers to keep their TRECs and forgo the discount if customers ask for that. There's certainly no option to do so on the Tesla ordering website.
This is bad for the customer for 2 reasons:
1) It decreases the
initial cost of the system and therefore decreases the federal tax credit by $3,055
2) It increases the
total cost of the system because Tesla only pays about 50% of the fair (present) value of the future TREC payments ($11,750 vs $21,500)
A lot of customers probably just look at the "Price After Incentives" number and think - "wow Tesla is so cheap compared to my other solar quotes". However for the system configuration above the real cost is around $13,000 more than the Tesla quoted price of $28,157.
In my case I found that Tesla quote
total lifetime cost was still cheaper (but not significantly so) compared with competitor quotes. And since I could find a competitor that offered a larger system and better tailored service I went with them instead of Tesla.