Dive Brief:
- Tesla CEO Elon Musk yesterday tweeted that his company, along with SolarCity, expects to unveil a "solar roof" on Oct. 28, a product described during the company's second quarter earnings call this summer.
- Musk's tweet said the solar roofs would be integrated with the Tesla's Powerwall 2.0 battery and a Tesla charger.
- Tesla, and the power industry as a whole, has been increasingly focused on the concept of linking rooftop storage with residential storage. In June, Tesla moved to purchase the largest installer in the country, SolarCity.
Dive Insight:
Elon Musk wants to move beyond solar panels and use the entire roof to generate power instead. In the company's August earnings call, he described the company's planned offering as "not a thing on a roof, it is the roof."
Tesla in June offered as much as $3 billion for SolarCity, positioning the company to leverage its battery business alongside rooftop energy production. From Musk's tweet, it appears the solar roofs could also be directly integrated with Tesla electric vehicle charging equipment as well.
Musk said the new product would be distinct from solar panels, rather than intruding into that market.
"The interesting thing about this is that it actually doesn't cannibalize the existing product of putting solar on roof," he told analysts and journalists. "If your roof is nearing end-of-life, you definitely don't want to put solar panels on it because you're going to have to replace the roof. So, there's a huge market segment that is currently inaccessible to SolarCity because people know they're going to have to replace their roofs."
Earlier this year Tesla announced it would be developing a new version of its Powerwall battery, expected to have a longer lifecycle and be produced at the company's Gigafactory in Nevada.
