Nick Pfitzner and his family from Kellyville Ridge have recently become the first Australians to have a Tesla Powerwall installed in their home. As an avid Tesla and renewable energy fan, Nick calls the Tesla Powerwall “a thing of beauty”, and “was ecstatic to find [he] was going to be the first person in Australia to have one installed residentially” — while jokingly calling himself “king of the nerds for one day”.

Wait, a wall of power? What is it?

The Tesla Powerwall is essentially a large battery for your home, that charges using electricity generated from solar panels. It maximizes the usefulness of solar panels and there’s even an option to allow you to go “off the grid” — meaning that your house produces as much energy as it consumes, but is still connected to the utility grid for periods of high demand.

It’s just over a metre tall, is wall-mounted, and delivers a decent 7 kWh (kilowatt hour), and also acts as a backup generator in the situation of a power outage. It also stores energy throughout the day, so that you can use it at night — bridging the gap between the peak storage and peak consumption periods.

What you can expect

Seeing as this marks the first residential household in Australia to have the Powerwall installed, Australians around the country can hope for a faster (and hopefully cheaper) process and product in the near future. The inception has been both costly and slow in Australia, as it currently takes around six to eight weeks for the product to be installed, and packages start from $13,000 (including government rebate).

But it’d be great to see this technology become a general appliance or house standard, as it takes pressure off of the utility grid, and doubles as a backup generator in emergency cases, and ultimately, can eventually shift the social norm towards a more sustainable and renewable energy — which we can all agree is a fantastic move.

As all great things are, there’s no doubt that the Powerwall will become a thing of the present in no time.