Powerwall in Home Assistant 2026.11: Teslemetry Adds Local Battery Dispatch

Picture a sunny Sunday in spring: wholesale prices dip below zero for a couple of hours and your utility is effectively paying people to use power. Your Powerwall, though, sits at 100% because it filled up from the panels at noon, or it follows the app's schedule and ignores the opportunity. Until now, Home Assistant could only nudge it indirectly, by switching the operation mode or moving the backup reserve through the Tesla cloud and hoping the battery's own logic did the rest.

That changes with the next Home Assistant release. Two pull requests merged into the Teslemetry integration in the last week give Home Assistant a direct line to the Powerwall gateway on your own network. It can ask for an exact charge or discharge power for an exact duration, and it gets seven new status sensors that the Tesla cloud never exposed. This article explains what lands, what it really allows, how it compares with the three other ways to bring a Powerwall into Home Assistant, and who should bother.

Key takeaways

• Teslemetry gains two actions, teslemetry.dispatch_battery_power and teslemetry.resume_battery_operation, which are sent to the Powerwall over the local network (PR #188303, merged October 25, 2026).
• Power is set in watts (positive discharges, negative charges) and duration in seconds, from 1 to 86,400. When the timer ends, the Powerwall goes back to normal operation by itself.
• The battery still enforces its backup reserve and grid limits, and older gateway firmware rejects the command with an explicit error.
• Seven "Local" binary sensors such as Grid OK and Contactor closed are polled from the gateway every 10 seconds (PR #186730).
• Both features should ship in Home Assistant 2026.11. The beta is due around October 28 and the stable release on Wednesday, November 4.

What exactly is new in Teslemetry for 2026.11

Local pairing itself is not new. Since 2026.10, the Teslemetry integration can add an energy site with a Powerwall 2 or Powerwall 3 as a "local energy site". That already made commands faster and let Home Assistant read live values directly from the gateway, with automatic fallback to the cloud. What 2026.11 adds is control that only the local path can offer. Here is the list, taken from the merged pull requests and the documentation for the next release.

Change	Type	Requires local pairing	Status on October 26
Dispatch battery power (set W for N seconds)	Action	Yes	Merged Oct 25, docs merged Oct 26
Resume battery operation (end a dispatch early)	Action	Yes	Merged Oct 25
Grid OK, Microgrid OK, Contactor closed, Site running, Site manager running	Binary sensors, polled every 10 s	Yes	Merged Oct 21
ESCAN / PW3CAN firmware updating	Binary sensors	Yes	Merged Oct 21
Charge on solar switch + lower limit (per vehicle)	Labs preview	No	Merged Oct 24
Wall Connector "Energy delivered" daily sensor	Sensor	No	Merged Oct 24
Powerwall 3 solar string voltage/current (strings A to F)	Sensors	Yes	Pull request still open

The low-level work happens in aiopowerwall, the open-source Python library that talks to the gateway. Version 0.7.0 added the dispatch commands, and 0.8.0, merged into Home Assistant today, adds support for older Gateway 1 hardware.

How battery dispatch works

The dispatch action takes three fields: the energy site (a device), a power in watts and a duration in seconds. A positive value discharges the battery into the house and, if your settings allow it, the grid. A negative value charges it. The documented example charges at 5 kW for half an hour:

action: teslemetry.dispatch_battery_power
data:
  device_id: YOUR_ENERGY_SITE_DEVICE_ID
  power: -5000
  duration: 1800

A few rules from the code and docs matter more than the syntax:

• It is a lease, not a mode change. When the duration ends, the Powerwall returns to its configured mode on its own. If Home Assistant crashes in the middle, the battery does not stay stuck in forced discharge.
• Last call wins. A new call replaces both the power and the duration of the previous one, so a script can refresh a dispatch every few minutes instead of setting one long block.
• Limits stay with Tesla. The gateway keeps applying the backup reserve and grid limits, so the power you actually get can be lower than requested. If you ask for something it refuses outright, the integration returns "rejected the requested power, change the power value".
• Firmware matters. On firmware without dispatch support, the action fails with a clear "firmware does not support this command" message. Nothing is silently ignored.
• Local only. Unlike other energy entities, these actions have no cloud fallback. If the gateway is unreachable, the call fails.

The schema accepts up to ±100,000 W, but that figure is a software ceiling, not a hardware one. Tesla's Powerwall 3 datasheet lists 11.5 kW of maximum continuous discharge but only 5 kW of maximum continuous charge per unit. The documentation's -5,000 W example is therefore the realistic charging ceiling for a single Powerwall 3. Tesla lists the Powerwall 2 at 5 kW continuous.

Four ways to put a Powerwall in Home Assistant

Teslemetry is not the only route, and its new features come with a subscription. Here is how the four options compare, based on each integration's current documentation.

	Tesla Powerwall (core)	Tesla Fleet	Teslemetry	Tessie
Connection	Local only	Tesla cloud	Cloud + optional local pairing	Cloud
Cost	Free	Free, but you register your own developer app and host a public key	Energy site Access plan $30/year per site, 7-day trial	Tessie subscription
Powerwall 3	Supported with limitations (no off-grid switch, no backup reserve sensor, no Powerwall status sensors)	Yes	Yes, local pairing for PW2 and PW3	Yes (PW2, PW3, Powerwall+)
Set backup reserve and operation mode	No (reserve shown as a read-only sensor on PW2)	Yes	Yes	Yes
Timed charge/discharge at set power	No	No	Yes (2026.11, local)	No
Contactor, microgrid and site-running sensors	No (grid status only)	No	Yes (2026.11, local)	No

The core Powerwall integration is still the best free choice if you only want monitoring and energy-dashboard data, especially on a Powerwall 2. Tesla Fleet is free for energy sites but takes an evening of developer-portal setup. Tessie makes the most sense if you already pay for it for a car. Teslemetry's pricing page states that energy site API calls don't consume command credits, so heavy automation of the battery doesn't cost extra on top of the plan.

Setting up local control

The pairing process is already in the current stable docs and takes a few minutes:

1. Update to the latest Teslemetry integration, then open it and choose Add local energy site. Only sites with a Powerwall are offered.
2. Approve the local access key on the hardware by turning the primary Powerwall's On/Off switch off and back on.
3. Confirm the IP address Home Assistant discovered and enter the last five characters of the Powerwall's Wi-Fi password. They are on the QR label behind the front cover of a Powerwall 3, or behind the Backup Gateway door on a Powerwall 2.

Give the gateway a fixed IP in your router, since the dispatch action has no cloud fallback. Also note that removing the integration does not revoke the access key from the Powerwall. Other apps using the same key keep working.

Three automations that now make sense

Charge when power is free or negative

If your tariff integration exposes the current price as a sensor (as some dynamic tariffs in the US and Europe do), a numeric-state trigger below zero can call a -5,000 W dispatch for 30 minutes and repeat while the price stays negative. That is exactly the use case the documentation gives. On a fixed or simple peak/off-peak tariff, the gain is much smaller, and the Powerwall's own time-based control already covers it.

Discharge during a demand-response event

Utilities with peak-time rebates often announce events ahead of time. A calendar trigger can discharge at a fixed power for the length of the event, then call resume_battery_operation. Check first that you are not also enrolled in a Tesla Virtual Power Plant for the same hours: we covered how those programs work in our Tesla home energy and VPP guide.

React to the grid within seconds

The local Grid OK sensor refreshes every 10 seconds, faster than cloud polling. During an outage it can shed non-essential loads such as the EV charger, pool pump or water heater, send a notification and pause price automations. The firmware updating sensors are useful as a condition, so no script fires dispatch commands while the gateway is updating.

Who is it for? Our take

For most Powerwall owners on a fixed tariff, nothing here is urgent. Tesla's own Time-Based Control already handles self-consumption and backup well, and the monitoring-only core integration is free. Local dispatch becomes valuable in three cases: if you have a real-time or negative-price tariff, if you join demand-response programs Tesla doesn't manage, or if you run a solar setup where Home Assistant already orchestrates EV, heat pump and water heater and the battery was the last device it could only nudge.

The local-first design is the right one. Commands go over the LAN, every dispatch expires, and Tesla's reserve and grid limits still apply. That is the kind of approach we favor in our Home Assistant 2026 guide. The trade-off is dependency on a small paid service and on a gateway protocol that Tesla does not publicly document, so a firmware update could break it. Keep the Tesla app as the source of truth for reserve settings, and treat dispatch as an optimizer layered on top.

Finally, it is worth watching Tesla's direction. We looked at the weight of the energy business in our Q3 2026 earnings analysis. Yet the most advanced local tooling for its home batteries is coming from the community, not from Tesla, which still publishes no documented local API.

FAQ

When can I use battery dispatch?

The code is merged into the development branch, so it is expected in the Home Assistant 2026.11 beta (around October 28) and the stable release on November 4, 2026. Home Assistant ships stable versions on the first Wednesday of each month, per its release FAQ.

Do I need a Teslemetry subscription?

Yes. The integration requires a Teslemetry account. The pricing page lists energy site Access at $30 per year per site, with a 7-day trial. Energy site calls do not consume command credits.

Can dispatch drain my backup reserve?

No. According to the documentation, the Powerwall keeps applying its own backup reserve and grid limits, so it stops discharging at the reserve even if the dispatch is still running.

Does it work with a Powerwall 1 or Powerwall+?

Local pairing is documented for Powerwall 2 and Powerwall 3 reachable on your network. aiopowerwall 0.8.0 adds Gateway 1 support at the library level, but dispatch still depends on gateway firmware, so test it with Settings > Tools > Actions before building automations.

Is this the same as joining a Virtual Power Plant?

No. A VPP is a utility or Tesla program that controls your battery during grid events, usually for payment. Dispatch is a tool for your own automations. If you are enrolled in both, the VPP schedule and your scripts can conflict, so avoid overlapping hours.