Tesla has issued a product recall on its Powerwall 2 residential battery storage solution across Australia due to a “battery cell defect” from a third-party supplier.
US residential solar installer Sunrun’s virtual power plant (VPP) in California has more than quadrupled in size from 2024 to support the state’s grid as summer weather begins.
Three virtual power plant (VPP) programmes have been announced in California and Colorado. Two of them will use Tesla’s Powerwall battery. Another is attempting to change customer habits to save energy and money.
Tesla has reported more than 200% year-on-year increases in both solar and energy storage deployments for the second quarter of this year, during which time the company also produced and delivered more than 200,000 vehicles.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company is already achieving “good margins” on the residential Powerwall product, but that “some additional work is needed” for its utility-scale Megapack to do so.
In the first part of this interview with Swell Energy CEO Suleman Khan we heard about how Swell Energy has been working to ‘productise’ the virtual power plant proposition: making it attractive to utilities and to their end-customers and then wrapping that into a long-term agreement. This time out, we speak to Suleman about some of the finer details of the VPP proposition and where he thinks the market is heading.