Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

Octopus Tesla Energy Plan

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Moderator comment - thread renamed from "Introducing Tesla Energy Plan"

Just had an email from Tesla angling for us to sign up to a Tesla Energy Plan by the end of the year - free energy for a year being the bait.

Has anyone else had this mailing? I see it's basically based on an Octopus offering with Tesla hardware.

I'm interested but have no idea where to start in terms of how to evaluate whether or not it's viable for us.

PS Just read up a bit more - it looks like you need to have solar already installed, which we don't. We could afford solar but just find the whole market far too confusing. I'd be happy to be educated!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
We could afford solar but just find the whole market far too confusing

Do you have enough roof facing ideally South?; West is almost as good or possibly better (peaks later, when you are likely to be coming home), East a bit less-so, and North ... ermmm ...

If you have the inclination (Sorry!), the roof space, no awkward installation issues, and you would not have to borrow the money (i.e. your return on Capital might well be same as your current investment) then it should be worthwhile - before you even consider any Green / Eco stuff that is either your bag ... or not

That's all separate from whether you do PowerWall or not. The economics of PowerWall are very unlikely to stack up - unless you have unreliable supply currently (seems unlikely), need/want battery during power cuts, have very high Peak usage that could be time-shifted to Off Peak and so on. If you export a lot of PV and have FITs payment [presumably not applicable unless you have had PV for some time] for it then chucking those into PowerWall might make financial sense, but it might make better financial sense to just "turn the immersion on" to use up excess PV during the day,.
 
@WannabeOwner When the original boom in solar interest happened almost ten years ago there seemed to be some disagreement as to whether our South East facing roof was big enough. The roof ridge is narrower than the width of the house because the gable is a half a pyramid.

But we also have a secondary roof on our extension. That said, no companies visited us to measure up; they relied on Google satellite photos and only one company rejected us, I suspect because they were only targeting larger houses in particular.

Our house is about 100 years old and still has its original roof on so I'm assuming it would need renovation before any PV installation. Whatever happened to Tesla's solar roof tiles?

I'm an Octopus GO customer already (referral code available! :D ) but the email came from Tesla.
 
The roof ridge is narrower than the width of the house because the gable is a half a pyramid.

Can all get a bit messy trying to fit rectangular panels on a triangular roof ... as I am sure you can imagine. Tesla Tiles would solve all that of course ... but ... Elon Time applies.

Our house is about 100 years old and still has its original roof on so I'm assuming it would need renovation before any PV installation.

Maybe, but if it is sound I would expect it to be OK. 100 year old roof probably has far more substantial timbers than a modern roof.

On a bit of new-build-extension here we just put wriggly-tin on the roof, and solar panels on top of that. They are (deliberately) pure-black panels so look smart, and the building/roof was sized to exactly fit with no "edge" gap ... wriggly-tin was relatively cheap, as roof coverings go :)

And Tesla solar panels.

I read that as "Solar Panels" ... is it definitely Tesla Solar Panels? (Didn't think they existed in UK ... yet ??)
 
PS Just read up a bit more - it looks like you need to have solar already installed, which we don't. We could afford solar but just find the whole market far too confusing. I'd be happy to be educated!

Doesn't it also say you need a PowerWall?

Looks like a small scale experiment to try out the idea of using local off grid electricty storage to help the supplier predict demand better, therefore manage costs of electricity generation.

You also have to optout of the current FIT export tariff, which assumes 50% export which you will not hit in winter.

Interesting idea, but solar + PowerWall + E7 rates + ongoing FIT payments will work out cheaper I suspect.
 
Interesting idea, but solar + PowerWall + E7 rates + ongoing FIT payments will work out cheaper I suspect.

Good point .. .and can substitute Octopus Go instead of E7 in your formula :)

"This is achieved through the lowest flat electricity tariffs" ... I would prefer, assuming PowerWall installed, to be using a 30-minute banded Tariff, like Octopus Agile, if I could set the PowerWall to only "buy" from grid when price was £0.00 ... or less :)
 
So you need PV and a power wall. I reckon we could get 8 panels on our roof - possibly 9. Is that going to be enough? The kids no longer live at home and I work from home. Not including car charging our annual electricity consumption is about 5000kWh (quite high tbh). Car charging probably adds 4000kWh.
 
Thats a bloody good tarrif by looks of it. Need to do some sums...

I'm wondering what the Tesla wall connector brings to the party? Its a very strict requirement that sounds like it may be more than just branding. Wonder if there is something technical going on with it like it being connected to the Powerwall via the load balancing comms?
 
I'm wondering what the Tesla wall connector brings to the party? Its a very strict requirement that sounds like it may be more than just branding. Wonder if there is something technical going on with it like it being connected to the Powerwall via the load balancing comms?

It’ll act as a competitor to the Ohme cable, which works with the Agile tariff.

Octopus will turn off the charger or limit the charge rate during peak times and unleash full rate during times when the wholesale cost is lower/off peak.
 
Thats a bloody good tarrif by looks of it. Need to do some sums...

I thinks its only really good if you massive amount of excess solar PV.

8p per kWh is what am paying for E7 rates with bulb, so not any more expensive. I suspect with our PW now charging off E7 our grid electricity use going forwards will be nearly 100% E7 rates.

Our 4KW panel only generated 3000kWh roughly last year to our total electricity use of about 8000kWh - most of that is the X covering 14k miles at 2.5 miles per kWh. Am not sure how much of the 3000kWh our Powerwall can capture going fowards, but in effect we would not get paid much for exporting since our own consumption is much higher.

Infact moving to this tariff would cause our 50% assumed FIT export tariff to go, when infact with a PW and small solar PV our true export rate would be far below 50%.

If we had a 10KW PV array the maths might be different.