$5500 incentive for home battery system?

My Nissan Leaf Forum

Help Support My Nissan Leaf Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

mwalsh

Well-known member
Leaf Supporting Member
Joined
Apr 22, 2010
Messages
9,781
Location
Garden Grove, CA
Got a mailer the other day from caenergy.org/Swell Energy offering "up to" $5500 against installing a home battery system. Apparently they know this household is both solar and EV. Did anyone else get the mailer? Has anyone else signed up?

It looks like Swell uses the Tesla Powerwall, so I'm automatically disinclined on that basis alone. Also I'd only have real interest right now if the rebate covered most (if not all) of the cost, being as the timing is simply awful for me from a financial standpoint.
 
I don't know about the Tesla Powerwall 2s, but the Enphase AC Batteries (Part No. B280-1200-LL-I-US00-RF0) are currently being sold for the ridiculous price of around US$2000.00 each. I thought the retail price was around US$1000.00, which is hard to justify unless you have a strong incentive (such as exists in Hawaii and South Australia).

Unfortunately, Enphase has a chicken-and-egg problem right now: they need to get their volumes up to get the prices down on these units and the volume is not likely to ever get high at the current prices. Simply put, it's going to take a while for these to get off the ground on the mainland of the U.S. Unfortunately, time is something that Enphase does not have in abundance. On top of that, Enphase has real competition in this space coming from Tesla.
 
If you have an older 48V PV system, adding a more advanced battery is easy. I've got 10kWh on my system ($1400) and I'm cycling 6kW daily. On SCE it's getting me an additional $400 energy credit annually..

The batteries are cheap.. but the inverters are a tad pricey. My old Xantrex SW4048 is getting a little long in the tooth at 16 years and I'm not sure what I'm going to replace it with if it kicks the bucket..
 
Received some mailers from local installers as well about the battery rebates, but also only pushing PowerWalls. I'd really only consider the Enphase battery at this point, but I haven't looked to see if the CA rebate makes it cheap enough to make any sense yet. I certainly don't *need* it.
 
Back
Top