Tesla to launch 'solar roof' with Powerwall battery end October
Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has announced the company's solar-roof technology will be released in San Francisco on 28 October. The highly anticipated solar technology will be integrated with Powerwall 2.0, Tesla's new domestic battery and charger. “It's not a thing on the roof; it is the roof, which is a quite difficult engineering challenge and not something that is available anywhere else”, said Musk. The ultimate aim of the roof is to not only power the user’s home, but their car as well.

Elon Musk says he hopes to unveil a new solar roof with an integrated battery and charger for Tesla automobiles next month.

The Tesla CEO tweeted Thursday that he expects to debut the new system, which will feature a second-generation Powerwall home battery, at an event on October 28 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The system appears to be the first product to come out of Fremont, California-based Tesla's partnership with SolarCity, a solar panel maker that Tesla announced in August it would buy for $2.6 billion.

Musk hinted at just such a product when he released his second "Master Plan" in late July, which sought to explain his reasoning for combining the two companies. One of his goals, he wrote, was to create "a smoothly integrated and beautiful solar-roof-with-battery product that just works, empowering the individual as their own utility, and then scale that throughout the world."

First unveiled by Musk in May 2015, the Powerwall is a lithium-ion battery module that stores backup electricity from solar panels, charging up during nonpeak energy usage periods, then providing energy back to the home during peak hours.

Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.