Goldin Solar gives a look at Tesla’s newest energy management offering

Florida’s Goldin Solar has completed one of the the earliest deployment’s of Tesla’s newest offering, the Tesla Backup Gateway 2, known to pv magazine, with the product being installed at Goldin Solar CEO Daren Goldin’s home over the weekend of May 30-31.

The new Tesla Backup Gateway is an energy management system that communicates directly with any installed Powerwall batteries, allowing customers to manage their energy usage and backup capacity, as well as monitor self-consumption and time-based control, all from the Tesla app. It can support the connection of up to 10 Powerwall batteries, comes with a 10-year warranty and its wall-mount design comes in at 23″ tall, 15″ wide and 5″ deep.

“It arrived last week, we installed it at the house over the weekend and, yeah, it’s a beautiful product,” Goldin told pv magazine.

In comparison to the original Backup Gateway, the new version is smaller and lighter, with no visible antenna, similar in appearance to a Powerwall. The design has also removed the need for an additional sub-panel to connect all of the Powerwalls, the inverter, and loads together. The new Gateway can also be configured to backup specific loads within a home while excluding others, meaning that power can automatically be cut from extraneous loads during outages. The overall amount of data monitoring available has also been upped.

“We’re excited about the aesthetics,” Goldin said. “We’re excited about being able to give our customers a product that looks just like the Powerwall. It makes [the installation] that much more of a clean and seamless experience for our customers. We believe it’s going to make for an easier installation for us, because now we can terminate everything we need into one device – we don’t need an extra subpanel for the generation breakers.”

Outside of aesthetics, Goldin sees the biggest upgrade of the Backup Gateway 2 being the improved power consumption and monitoring accuracy. The monitoring accuracy is on par with utility-grade monitoring, sometimes referred to as ‘revenue-grade,’ due to the monitoring being so accurate that one can be invoiced for it. This new monitoring accuracy is lauded as being 0.2% from actuality. According to some reports, Tesla is tinkering with using this improved accuracy in future virtual power plant programs, like the company’s ongoing pilot in Australia.

According to Goldin, all new Goldin Solar contracts for Powerwall from here on out will include the new Backup Gateway, and the company has also put together a video highlighting the installation.