Solar + Tesla battery storage offered in new-build Queensland homes

One Step Off The Grid

Another of Australia’s major housing developers, the Melbourne-Based group Metricon, will offer rooftop solar and storage as an optional extra in a range of its new-build homes in Queensland, via a new partnership with local installer and Tesla battery reseller CSR Bradford.

CSR Bradford – whose NSW-based company started in insulation more than 80 years ago, and has since expanded into energy efficiency and solar and storage through Bradford Solar – is an accredited Tesla Powerwall reseller, and has been watching the growth of the battery storage market closely over the past few years.

The deal with Metricon, announced this week, takes the company one step closer to its vision of solar and battery storage being included as a standard feature in all newly built houses in Australia – something the company’s managing director, Anthony Tannous has predicted will be the norm in just a few years’ time.

According to the Metricon website, Queensland customers who upgrade to the builder’s “luxury living” offer will get CSR Bradford’s a 5-6kW Solar ChargePack, which includes solar panels, a SolarEdge inverter and Tesla’s 14kWh Powerall 2 lihtiu-ion battery pack.

As Tesla has itself claimed, the Metricon 5kW offer promise to give the average house of four up to 90 per cent electricity self sufficiency on an average day, while the 6kW solar offer is said to give the average Australian family “little or no reliance on the grid.”

In financial terms, households choosing the Luxury Living” upgrade – which costs $1,999 for a single story home and $4,999 for a double story home – is expected to save the Metricon households $2,100 a year on energy costs.

CSR Bradford has similar packages being offered in Victoria, through Arden Homes, and in New South Wales with Mojo Homes.

“I have a vision that every house built in a few years time will have a battery installed, it just makes so much sense,” Tannous told One Step Off The Grid in an interview last month.

“We’ve been working with most of the major builders across Australia and a lot of them are starting to include storage as standard… while others offer it as an upgrade,” he said.

“And that will just gain more momentum.”

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy’s sister site, One Step Off The Grid, which focuses on customer experience and ambitions with distributed generation. To sign up to One Step’s free weekly newsletter, please click here.

Comments

9 responses to “Solar + Tesla battery storage offered in new-build Queensland homes”

  1. trackdaze Avatar
    trackdaze

    Am i reading that right? One year payback?

    1. solarguy Avatar
      solarguy

      Don’t be fooled about the luxury upgrade price of $1,999 as the rest is in the price of the house, it’s just a marketing hood wink to make Metricon look as if their got a great deal, in an effort to beat their competition.
      The remaining $17,600 is hidden in the updated house prices, oldest trick in the book.

  2. humanitarian solar Avatar
    humanitarian solar

    They may no longer be able to offer Tesla Powerwall 2 because it has a 5kW inverter which it uses to AC couple the battery to the grid. There’s another PV inverter needed to get the PV from DC to AC into the grid. So both inverters added together will exceed the 5kW inverter limit. Local networks would have to agree to let this kind of AC coupled system onto the network at their discretion. Otherwise, it’s use a 5kW hybrid inverter and put the PV directly into a battery. This effectively keeps the PV which could be installed at any kW rating, on a leash, so no more than 5kW is ever exported into the grid, no matter how big the local PV strings are.

    1. solarguy Avatar
      solarguy

      The built in inverter in PW2 is there to charge the battery AC to DC and back again when discharging into a grid connect inverter, their built in inverter can’t be connected directly to the grid.

      1. humanitarian solar Avatar
        humanitarian solar

        Fin Peacock has done some work looking at this because he put a deposit on a PW2. He has written an article in his blog about it. I’m not clear about how AC coupling works. At the very least, it appears special exceptions need to be made to allow PW2 to be connected to grids.
        https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/powerwall-2-as4777/

        1. solarguy Avatar
          solarguy

          Yes that right Finn’s page has that info, I was going to tell you about it, anyway have a look at the block diagram how it’s wired and the fact that it shows a grid inverter.

          1. humanitarian solar Avatar
            humanitarian solar

            The AC coupling diagram has a “solar inverter” and a “battery inverter” both feeding the AC loads and potentially exporting excess to the grid. So say a solar inverter is 5kW and the battery inverter is 5kW also, is it ever possible that both inverters combined could export an excess over and above the load, of beyond 5kW? If the answer is yes, I would say networks are within their rights under the new rules to say no to 2x AC coupled inverters. At least a hybrid inverter is straightforward in that we know it can only invert it’s kW output onto the grid. When there’s more than one inverter, with talk of smart grids and virtual power plants, we don’t really know how much power will be exported at any given time. Well I don’t.

          2. solarguy Avatar
            solarguy

            I think somebody needs to ask Tesla about this problem, but good luck getting that. At the moment I can’t devote any time to it.

          3. humanitarian solar Avatar
            humanitarian solar

            I tried talking to neroden. He/she has a prolific coverage of Tesla related websites, owns an S, is a Tesla investor. Tend to be silent with negatives of products and there supporting the product when it’s doing well. Can’t get an open honest discussion about these challenges.

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