Tesla is about to become an Australian electricity retailer – as first reported by Danny at ZeCar.
Its local entity, Tesla Energy Ventures Australia, has a plan called Tesla Electric Dynamic that is currently in testing, and I spent the evening pulling it apart.
I typed my address into Tesla’s plan finder and read every document it links to.
The way the export credits work makes it genuinely innovative. But there’s one question none of the paperwork answers.
What happens to your exports when the wholesale price goes negative, and Tesla can’t switch your solar off? I own a Powerwall 2, so that question is personal.
What Tesla is offering
Imports are fixed time-of-use rates. Exports earn a share of the live wholesale price. Here’s the plan I was offered in the SA Power Networks area:
| Charge | Rate (inc. GST) |
|---|---|
| Peak, 5pm to 9pm | 65.33c/kWh |
| Off-peak, 9pm to 10am and 4pm to 5pm | 39.03c/kWh |
| Solar sponge, 10am to 4pm | 17.61c/kWh |
| Supply charge | 112.61c/day |
| Export credit | 90% of the real-time wholesale price |
| Grid services credit | “Dynamic” |
You need a Powerwall 2 or Powerwall 3, the Tesla app, a Tesla Wallet with direct debit, and a smart meter.
Your Powerwall has to stay online at least 95% of the time, and you can’t sign it up to anyone else’s virtual power plant (VPP).
You also can’t just sign up yet. The fact sheet says it’s “By invitation only” and offers a $100 credit “for participation in the Pilot program”. The PDF sits in a folder named closed_beta.
What I like
Your downside is capped, and your upside isn’t
What you pay for imports is fixed by time of day. What you earn for exports floats with the market – and Tesla claims they’ll pay you 90% of the 5-Minute Settlement prices published by Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO).
So you are protected from crazy expensive imports, but still have the opportunity to milk high-priced exports. Nice.
The exit door is open
There’s no exit fee. If Tesla changes the non-price terms, you get 20 business days’ notice and can walk without penalty. Credits of $50 or more get paid into your bank account within 10 business days of asking.
Tesla does the driving
Tesla’s software decides when to charge and discharge. Tesla is very good at software.
What I don’t like
Tesla keeps the midday windfall
In the last three months of 2025, the SA spot price between 10am and 4pm averaged minus $33/MWh, according to AEMO.
At those times, the market pays participants to use electricity.
On this plan, you still pay 17.61c/kWh for anything you import in that window, including energy Tesla pulls from the grid to top up your Powerwall.
Grid charging only pays at high evening prices
Say Tesla charges your battery from the grid at 17.61c and sells it back in the evening. Roughly 10% is lost in the round trip, and Tesla keeps 10% of the export price. The spot price has to beat about 22c per kWh before that trade puts money in your pocket.
The grid services credit is a black box
The plan page lists a “Grid Services Credit” and calls it “Dynamic”. None of the three contract documents gives a rate, a formula, or the share Tesla passes on.
What they do say is that your Powerwall may go into standby while it provides frequency control services.
The warranty clause
This line in the Specific Plan Terms raised my eyebrow:
“You may affect Your manufacturer’s warranty if You don’t promptly install updates or if you manually override any control of Your Powerwall by Tesla.”
The next sentence says your Australian Consumer Law rights aren’t affected. Still, a retail electricity contract that warns you about your hardware warranty for taking back control of your own battery is new territory. I’d like to hear what the ACCC thinks of it.
The big unknown: negative prices and the Powerwall 2
90% of a negative number is still a negative number. Unless something in the contract puts a floor at zero, you’d pay to export whenever the price goes below zero. I read the General Market Terms, the Specific Plan Terms and the fact sheet. None of them mentions a floor.
Tesla’s answer only works on a Powerwall 3
The Specific Plan Terms give Tesla the right to:
“Curtail Your solar production if required. This is typically required during periods of negative wholesale electricity prices. This applies to Powerwall 3 only, and is not available for Powerwall 2.”
That makes sense. A Powerwall 3 has its own built-in solar inverter, so Tesla can turn your panels’ output down or off.
A Powerwall 2 sits beside a separate solar inverter, and Tesla’s software can’t tell that inverter to stop exporting. One way tech-savvy Powerwall 2 owners can protect themselves? Set the solar inverter to a zero-export timer between 10 am and 4 pm every day.
What about network charges?
Tesla’s documents don’t mention export network charges at all. On my local network provider, the network (SAPN) pays retailers 13.22c/kWh for exports between 5pm and 9pm, November to March.
If your battery pushes 8 kWh into the grid each summer evening. That’s about $1 a night in network rewards, or roughly $150 over the season. Your export credit is 90% of the wholesale price. Nothing in the paperwork says you get any of that network reward.
Questions for Tesla
If Tesla had a PR department, I’d send them these questions by email before publishing – but as Tesla famously doesn’t (officially) talk to the media – here’s what I’d like to know:
- Is the export credit floored at zero, or do customers pay to export when the price is negative?
- How is the Grid Services Credit calculated, and what share of the revenue do customers get? Do customers see any similar evening export rewards from SAPN or other DNSPs?
- When does the plan open to everyone, and will it ever be available without a Powerwall?
I’ll update this column if Tesla answers. Don’t hold your breath.
Disclosure
I founded SolarQuotes and sold it to Origin Energy. Origin is an electricity retailer that will compete with Tesla Electric. I also own a Powerwall 2.
About Finn Peacock
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I’m also fascinated by their plan, hopefully the details get fleshed out.
One thing about the plan which bewildered me is its lack of support for overnight grid EV charging. You’d think that would be a priority for Tesla, given its EV business.
If they are going out for limited the trials at this stage, you could understand why they are concerned with the 3 hours of free power.
if successful and they go fully commercial, one would assume they would end up with enough customers that they have to offer 3 hours of free power in some variant at some point in the future.
It also sounds like there are a few issues that hopefully will get sorted in their trials, but yeah, i really like their overall pricing strategy.
Hopefully if it takes off other companies may offer similar pricing strategies, so those of us that choose not to support Mr Musk get the option of something similar.
Mr Musk does not own Tesla. Last I heard he had a 13% ownership only.
Many companies are foreign owned. For example Alinta Energy ( you know – the one that had the Aussie cricket team singing and dancing ) is 100% owned
by a Singapore company. We are just mugs.
I didn’t say he did – but he is their CEO and is the public face of Tesla and a person i do not wish to support in any way.
This Tesla plan sounds complicated to me, and not very favourable to consumers.
Finn, maybe you can put it in your electricity plans spreadsheet and we can check it’s real value.
It is a VPP after all, so you give Tesla the control of you battery which personally I don’t like.
Also how is savvy to: “One way tech-savvy Powerwall 2 owners can protect themselves? Set the solar inverter to a zero-export timer between 10 am and 4 pm every day”?
The timer is dumb and if you do it, you cut your exports every day even in the days when the exports are NOT negative, and you can make some money.
Also, it’s the Musk effect. As long as there are other plans on the market I don’t want to help Musk get richer.
And lastly, I own an EV, and 2 Powerwals, and my best electricity plan is one with close to zero cents electricity between midnight and 6am, for those short cloudy winter days when I cannot fully charge from the sun.
Did you see the Four Corners report on the control that foreign companies have over the car you are driving ? Not just EVs but the show used the BYD Shark Hybrid as an example. The expert on the show took over the controls of the Shark as the reporter was driving. Lights, wipers, speed, cameras and every thing in between.
Quite an eye opener.
I saw Four Corners report and is absolute rubbish.
Why they single out Chinese cars?
Aren’t all modern cars the same?
Are laptops, phones, tablets different?
What is using ASIO instead of computes connected to internet?… pen and paper?
And about privacy… is China’s fault that Australian government is lazy, complacent and outdated?
To me this is paranoia or made to sell prime time TV, or both!
I own an EV but not a Chinese EV.
It’s just another option in the market, giving consumers choice.
Apart from the free charging plans, it’s pretty attractive (hence it’s attractive as a small business plan).
I question how long some of the free plans or plans with high ‘fixed’ feed in tarrifs can last.
NSW regularly staying positive now with big batteries filling. Even when it’s negative, it’s usually only a few cents negative. Which is actually still a positive price once you take into account network conveyancing charges.
Plans longterm ultimately have to reflect the market, short term it’s just marketing & customer acquisition costs.
I’m lucky and have an old Ampol plan that AGL haven’t changed too much since they took over. I certainly won’t be jumping over to Tesla, even if I had one of their batteries.
No PW2 or 3 here, but I punched in my address and got the same basic tariffs (here in SA metro too).
Doesn’t look like a good deal to me, or at least consistent / anticipated, too much micro managing might be needed.
Nothing for EV owners to charge cheap ?
That should have been in there somewhere.
Our battery goes in tomorrow (Sig 27kwh, 3P 15kw), plenty of easier, safer plans to be more relaxed in what your bill might be each quarter (or month with most of these other retailer plans) . . . iO Energy, Ovo, a few others to check out, but will be looking harder at other larger retailers too and see what’s on offer.
I really want 6 hours cheap EV (and battery) charging day or night, and a good FIT for evening 3 hours or so.
Those plans are out there, but also diminishing annually in benefit like FITs have in SA dropped to a quite useless return, and plans seem to be getting a little more complex with seasonal aspects.
Ah, the modern electricity market gets more complex every year.
Octopus in Texas have offered wholesale prices for the FiT for a while (with fixed consumption), and to me it makes much more sense than an Amber style plan. Companies can much more easily manage & hedge dunkelflaute price risk than consumers..
Also, I can see why they don’t want to offer free energy in the middle of the day. Saying that the price was negative in the last 3 months of 2025 ignores the fact that on some days it’s not. Look at June 22 this year, where a wind lull led to a peak RRP of $1,550 / MWh ($1.55 per kWh). Or Australia Day, where the peak RRP almost hit $4k / MWh.
If nothing else I learned a new word today — dunkelflaute. It seems in this instance it was the Germans, not the Greeks, who had a word for it.
The most essential question, in my mind, is whether Tesla will contract to only ever throttle exports, *never* affect solar production. Anything else is a monumental non-starter – otherwise why have private solar in the first place?
Mind you, they’d also have to dispense with the 17.6c midday import charge, replacing it with “Tesla will top up the battery with free midday grid energy, while available, at no cost to you.” Anything else is an egregious rip-off.
But I’d never spend heavily on a capacious battery, then hand over control to competing interests. The stored energy is there for self-consumption, thank you very much.
Disclosure: Off-grid here, so my major export is the BEV, with a tariff-on-wheels of $1/kWh, increasing as the Hormuz Special Military Operation surgically inflates fossil fuel prices.
Any plan has to beat that tariff to compete. And BEVs are a delight to drive. I’ve even downloaded a charger app, in case I need to use it one day.
Power your car with a star.
Touche!!
Whether it’s good will, as always, depend on: your location, DNSP, home energy usage, battery size and solar size. In QLD 100% of the market FIT is barely worth having so 90% of it even less so.
The comments on inability to curtail with PW2 will apply equally to AC coupled PW3’s. But there’s plenty of ways to do curtailment of most modern solar inverters and if they are done locally usually work better than cloud control.
I was a little surprised their webpage coughed up my NMI. I wonder if that’s a breach. I think I’d rather this wasn’t discoverable from my address.
I tested it on a North Adelaide cathedral rather than someone’s house. The page rejected the address as non-residential. Behind the page, though, Tesla’s server still sent my browser the site’s NMI, its network, and whether it has a controlled-load circuit. The plan page then includes the NMI in its URL, so it can end up in browser histories and analytics logs.
On its own, an NMI won’t unlock a stranger’s meter data from SA Power Networks, which also wants the meter number and the name on the bill.
But Ausgrid’s online form asks for the NMI, the account holder’s surname and the postcode. In NSW, Tesla’s tool hands out the one piece that’s hard to get. If you have someone’s meter data you can infer a lot about them – including when they are not home…
They really should adopt the SQ standard of “Beeswax nullis” on these matters. Although that possibly should be nulla.
https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/landisgyr-smart-meter.jpg
Rates are not very attractive for feed in. I’m with Red Energy and rate is $0.27 per kWh (flat rate) with a daily supply charge of $0.87 (inc GST). You’d have to be confident on receiving significant export credits to make those Tesla charges be worthwhile.
Probably better off using Amber?
I’m not part of the tesla ecosystem but what I do like is the peak rate is only between 5pm and 9 pm.
There are plenty of plans in South Australia where the peak tariff is from 6am to 10 am and from 4 pm until midnight. With these plans it is impossible to shift your load to save money
We might be about to get some genuine competition