Tesla has launched a Powerwall Lease program bundled with its Tesla Electric retail service plan, letting homeowners in areas of the deregulated Texas energy market buy an electricity plan and whole-home backup from a single provider, according to ESS News.
Customers get two Powerwall 3 batteries installed at home and pay a lease fee of $35 per month on top of a fixed electricity rate, with no installation costs, ESS News reported.
That headline figure is a discounted one. Tesla says the $35 reflects an $87 monthly bill credit applied against the standard $122 per month lease for a comparable Powerwall system.
The retail offer sits on top of a battery fleet the company has spent more than a decade assembling. Tesla's total virtual power plant (VPP) capacity is well over 2 GW, per ESS News. Across Australia, California, Puerto Rico, New England and Texas, its VPPs account for 2.38 GW of dispatchable capacity.
Puerto Rico shows what that aggregation does in a tight system. Powerwall customers there deliver 80 MW for four hours, and the VPP has been called on 25 times since June to support dangerously low reserve levels caused by insufficient reliable generation, according to Colby Hastings.
The single largest coordinated dispatch came in California. In summer 2025, Tesla sent more than 500 MW of peak capacity and 1 GWh of energy to the CAISO grid, ESS News reported.
The Texas structure ties the two sides together: residential storage financed through a monthly lease, with the bill credit doing the work that a separate grid-services payment would otherwise do. Homeowners keep backup power; Tesla gains addressable batteries in a market where it already sells electricity at retail.