I am in the Bay Area (PG&E) and have an order for a 9.6 kW solar + 2 PW in-progress. However, I recently discovered that I am in PG&E's special outage block #50. This means that I am "generally exempt from rotating outages" because "essential services such as hospitals and police and fire departments share a circuit with this block." I am not exempt from Public Safety Power Shutoffs though. One of my big reasons for getting Powerwalls was to handle rolling outages but it doesn't look like that will be an issue. It will help with the TOU plan I am on but are two (or any?) Powerwalls worth it? Should I instead get one or none?
We actually have very little power outages here in San Diego and I am still happy to have some energy storage. Like other's have mentioned, if someone is looking at this purely for rotating blackouts, or a ROI, I think it's probably not good for those cases. It's for the cases when folks have no power from some other reason and you're stuck. Even the last few weeks, there weren't that many rotaing outages, but folks still lost power due to equipment failures I think.
A few of the major outages we've had here had been 'other' issues like power company operator error and stuff like that, but if there was a major event from a storm, earthquake, foreign conflict, hackers, disgruntled employees, etc...the batteries may blunt some of that.
My thinking is what else are you going to use with the $$ and can you afford it without major stress? I know very wealth multi-millionaire folks with lots of zeros in their accounts, but no AC, no storage and will have more $$ than they can use before they die without solar/power walls.
Seems like if weather events are the norm now, seems like low cost insurance to have it rather than not. Also, adding stuff later usually doesn't turn out well and new installers don't want to touch someone elses install so either you get them at once or don't bother.
I think like many others here, I was/am still very happy to have batteries and haven't even got to really use it yet. Cost isn't as much with the tax credits IMO and I see as just not getting a Model X maybe vs. a Model Y.