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I thought Straubel said that the Powerwall was meant not for offpeak storage but for emergency backup.

• toomuchtodo 10y ago
  That Powerwall was of a different chemistry, and has been discontinued. EDIT: This is a baller feature: "Always Connected: Monitor your solar energy use in real-time and receive alerts when Powerwall is preparing for cloudy or severe weather." They're performing weather forecasting, and then ensuring the Powerwall has charged up for a possible outage event. Brilliant.
  • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    I cannot imagine what preparation they could be making. Surely the default process is to charge the powerwall at all times if feasible. What extra operation could it do in the event of a bad weather forecast? Other than tell you about it.
    • yessql 10y ago
      Sometimes you discharge. You may decide to not discharge ahead of a storm. If it were just backup, it would be easy, but sometimes you want to consume your storage to save money, or sell back to grid, if you have time of use pricing, or get paid for grid service.
    • mikeash 10y ago
      At peak generating times, it may be valuable to sell your stored energy to the grid. If bad weather is coming, you might not want to do that.
    • extrapickles 10y ago
      To get better lifetime out of the cells, you don't fully charge them. I bet when bad weather is occurring soon, it charges to maximum storage capacity, not to max cycle level. This lets you have best of both worlds, with a minor tradeoff in unpredictable outages you have slightly reduced runtimes.