Spot-on SMAIset! We're in California and the expense + waste + physical-layout & extra boxes required are a
major turn-off. I've waffled back and forth for months
wanting to place an order for 8kw + 3PW, as we really want full house backup (200amp main panel). However the thought of 3PW + gateway + inverter + mandated cut-off switches everywhere ==> ~10 boxes on the side of the house spanning 15 feet of wall is a rube-goldberg deal breaker. Also, as packaged, the 3PW are needed for full-house backup (amps), but would have a capacity
far higher than what we could produce + consume daily.
Here's what I'm hoping and guessing Tesla might be up to:
- Larger amp-capacity Powerwalls, lowering the number of powerwalls for typical homes to one or two (one ideal!). I suspect the inverter is the bottleneck here and not the battery cells. In fact, eliminating the inverter (per PW) should reduce cost significantly.
- Larger kWh-capacity Powerwalls, i.e. going from 13kWh to ~25kWh. Like many, we basically want to cover overnight usage and have some basic grid-outage-backup ability. We're ok to lower our consumption during rare outages (seriously, over 10 years we had an 8h outage and a few 2-3h outages). High usage is typically during the day when the sun is shining, and most don't use much overnight etc... 25kW would give us ~2/3 of a full day's use, and plenty to go overnight.
- Just like the tweet said: solar-dc -> powerwall with charge/flow-through controller -> inverter w/integrated gateway.
- I suspect this setup will also allow power to flow back into the grid, just that they will want to emphasize how cool this all is and maximize that margin. Also, many areas are lowering NEM rates, so there is a growing benefit to local storage.
Now in theory we're down to two beautiful Tesla branded boxes on the side of the house, with far less mounting and far less conduit/cabling/termination. We've also reduced the number of physical shells, controllers/monitoring, and most importantly inverters from 4x to 1x.
This all would (a) motivate us to immediately place an order, (b) raise Tesla Solar's margin from ~0 to > 20%, (c) yes as others mentioned, lower demand for those wanting the cheapest option, (d) hopefully allow the business to raise the quality of support, given the margin, further encouraging fence-sitters like us.