Tesla coming for Sense disclosed in new Patent

Who else do we know that has seen a giant compute problem and decided to point machine learning at it? Sure, Tesla, Full Self Driving. What other thing related to electric cars could Tesla be working on and put the black box programming to use for? Of course: Home Energy Management

When they started to install the Power Wall they started purchasing Neurio energy monitors en mass and Neurio ended up NOT coming after Sense as they originally spoke of the product doing. They gave up the learning individual devices as they were just too busy selling hardware. Sure they could show how much energy a home was using and the solar was producing, but otherwise, they were dumb compared to the Sense product.

That may have been a relief to the folks at Sense, but I am sure they would have preferred to have the high profile vendor come to them for product, perhaps even if it meant no longer having a high profile name themselves, but here we are. Today I have a house that vaguely knows what my devices are doing (thanks TP Link). I can scroll back in time and see what my (not-Tesla) solar did in the past or how my energy hogs compare over time. But I don’t think Sense would have ever discovered my Tesla if I didn’t use an HS110 to isolate it.

Now Tesla may be coming to play in this same sandbox, they already communicate with my car, they just-released Wall Chargers that they can communicate with over the net. Combine that with Neurio hardware on the breaker box and a hardware plug controller/monitor specified in the patent above and one will be able to see where all the power in one’s home is going, right on a phone.

Who does that sound like?

Sounds like a lot of speculation.

2 Likes

I own two Tesla EVs and have Tesla / SolarCity solar today, but no PowerWall. I would be happy if Tesla offered native energy usage and production logging and export that is on par with Sense. But today, pulling data from either is painful (Tesla App day-day w solar and via some subscription third party app/cloud, like TeslaFi, that requires me to give up my Tesla password). And fortunately, I don’t need to coordinate my Tesla supply (solar) and demand (EV charging), because there is absolutely no way for me to do that within the Tesla app and infrastructure with the products I have.

So I personally would love Tesla getting serious about the home energy management business, but they need to start with the little things within their existing products. Maybe if I bought PowerWall, things would be better, but I shouldn’t have to do that !

ps: I’m cranky because Tesla moved from flexible web app based access to solar output to much weaker app-based output in Aug, so my experience is that they don’t really get it.

pss: One of the Sense users was wistful on the forum about the Tesla Gen 3 HPWC using the new WiFi feature to log usage, but he’s kind of forgetting that the EVs have WiFi and already send the charging data to Tesla. Tesla just hasn’t seen fit to store and share with us. So I would urge that user not to buy based on speculation. And maybe Tesla can focus more on telling me how much I charged and when, instead of focusing on energy control and management of the universe;)

1 Like

@israndy The embodied energy in the grid itself and all the household panels out there (lots of copper!) is not something that gets tossed or recycled overnight. Energy saving from Sense-like integration with existing (old) infrastructure at the household level seems like something that will persist for a good long while until solar, EV, batteries and smart(grid/panel)homes and multi-family buildings with smart devices supersede that need. Landis+Gyr’s integration of Sense tech speaks to all that.

The likes of Span are competing against a huge inertia in that regard:

There is a “large scale” argument for and against Utility-scale solar projects vs household solar. A less-than-obvious factor in that equation is the interplay between affordable housing, urban density and energy provisioning. Consider all that in regard to any technology that favors (needs) the new construction of “single family homes” vs higher-density housing. For example, look at the complexities here!