At Tesla’s investor day on Wednesday, it announced plans to introduce unlimited overnight home charging to customers in Texas at $30 per month.
The new service will be offered to Texas customers as part of “Tesla Electric,” the company’s retail electricity plan, according to Business Insider.
“This is part of reducing the total cost of ownership of our vehicles and the reason why we can do this is because Texas has a ton of wind. And in Texas, the wind blows at night,” Tesla’s senior vice president of engineering, Drew Baglino, said at the meeting, according to Business Insider.
Texas generated the most wind power in the United States in 2022, according to a report from Climate Central.
Baglino says the $30 monthly subscription was rolled out to encourage Tesla customers to charge their vehicles in their homes at night using renewable energy, Business Insider reported.
Until now, charging rates for Electric Vehicles (EVs) at home were entirely dependent on electricity rates and the range of the EV.
Kelley Blue Book analyst John Voelcker found that from October 2022, the US household average was around 16 cents per kWh, meaning it would cost roughly $56 per month to charge at home on average.
Customers are only eligible for Tesla Electric if they have Tesla’s Powerwall-energy storage battery and live in an area in Texas that has retail options, according to the company’s website.
The subscription was announced at Tesla’s investor day on Wednesday at Giga Texas, in Austin. During the meeting, Baglino said that data from Tesla’s Electric Virtual Power Plant in South Australia, which had 5,000 customers last year, according to Business Insider.
It was found that customers who used default utility services paid roughly $142 per month, Baglino said. Customers who used Tesla Solar and Powerwall, which does not interact with the power grid, paid just $69 per month, Business Insider reported.