Solar Solutions
A new update to the Tesla iOS app has an interesting new addition - the ability to charge your car using excess solar power!
The functionality isn’t live yet, but by looking at the code strings for the update, we can see that the ability is there, just unactivated - which is normal for new upcoming functions.
We have to figure out what it will do based on the code, but from first glance it looks like the function will allow users to do a couple of things.
First off, it will allow Tesla owners with a solar and powerwall setup to set their vehicle to charge from excess solar power. You’ll also be able to set locations for this to happen - like the sentry mode - and you can also tell it to only charge up a certain percentage of your battery.
This is a very flexible feature - but given the long silence from Tesla about the solar energy side of their business, it’s making us think there’s something more going on.
Remember back to the March 1st Tesla Investor Day presentation? Among the many subjects touched on was a brief discussion of Tesla’s energy business. The focus was definitely on the new Megapack XL - but the presenters touched on the upscaling of the entire energy collection and storage side of the company - with many gigawatt-scale projects in the works.
Commercial and public projects are one thing, but Tesla kept saying that they want to “retire fossil fuels” - and that takes individual customers as well as the gigantic solar and battery farms we saw popping up all throughout the last couple of years.
This new functionality in the Tesla App blends smoothly into the Virtual Power Plants, and the ramp up of power storage production Tesla has been working on. Just like with the VPPs, allowing users to control how much of their vehicles are charged with purely off-the-grid solar energy is huge.
It gives users more tools to cut out the middle-man - and fossil fuels - as much as possible. And it follows the company’s goal to use software as much as possible to help the transition from fossil fuels.
It would be interesting to see if this is all going to build towards a larger push by Tesla to increase their solar business, but it would be great to see some extra attention paid to that area as we see things like the Megapack and Virtual Power Plants getting a lot more attention.