Elon Musk announces Tesla ‘Powerwall 2 Plus’ secretly went into production in November

Elon Musk announced that Tesla started production of what he has now called “Powerwall 2 Plus” back in November of last year.

Leave it to Tesla to launch a new product and not tell anyone about it for six months.

The Powerwall 2 was introduced back in 2016, and it hasn’t been updated much since its release.

Last week, we reported on Tesla CEO Elon Musk discussing a significant power capacity increase for the home battery pack.

The CEO said that Tesla would unlock the capacity through a software update, but he didn’t elaborate on an actual production date cutoff for the new product.

Now during the conference call following Tesla’s Q1 2021 financial results, Musk confirmed that they started production of the new version “roughly in November of last year”:

“It’s actually ‘Powerwall 2 Plus’, if you will. The plus refers to a higher peak power capability. So basically, all Powerwalls made since roughly November of last year have a lot more peak power capability than the specification on the website. They have about twice the power capability roughly.”

Like the use of ‘”Plus” in the Model 3 Standard Range Plus, it looks like Tesla is using a similar naming scheme to note the change in capacity of the new Powerwall.

Tesla currently advertises the Powerwall 2’s power capacity at 7 kW peak and 5 kW continuous, and now they are talking about Powerwall 2 Plus having roughly twice that capacity.

During the call, Musk also elaborated on Tesla’s recent move to only sell Powerwalls with solar installations and vice versa:

“The difficulty of the installation will be much less. It will be much easier because the power from the solar roof, Solarglass Roof or the solar panels, will only ever go directly into the Powerwall. And the Powerwall will only ever go between the utility and the main power panel of the house, which means you never need to touch the main circuit breakers of the house.”

The CEO continued:

“Effectively, almost every house, therefore, looks the same electrically instead of being a unique work of art and requiring exceptional ability to rewire the main panel. So this is extremely important for scalability. It’s the only way to do it, really. And this also means that every solar and Powerwall installation at a house, or whatever the case may be, will be its own utility.”

This is getting Tesla one step closer to Musk’s vision of “Tesla Energy becoming a distributed global utility.”