The cautious points you've outlined are reasonable and prudent when situation with TE is analyzed from the general point of view, but they are really not plausible when looked at from the detailed, semi-professional angle.
Before elaborating few details on my background. I am not specializing in the area of the BES (yet) but have more than 2 decades of work experience designing and building fossil power plants (hopefully I will be still tolerated on this Forum after this revelation
), so my views are informed by significant experience in the industry, as well as by the fact that I was tasked with developing expertise in the BES, as the company I am working for is interested in this type of work. So I do a fair amount of research, have some access to data that is not publically available and prepared several presentations on the subject for the edification of our company's professional staff.
First, on pricing. The $470/kWh is undercutting competition by 20%-30%, the originally mentioned $250/kWh is undercutting competition by 2.5 to 2.2 times (!). The above information is not based on various surveys floating around, but rather on actual project quotations. Unless Elon is capable to flood the market with TE products (and we know that he is not because of production constraints which are likely to last for decades), I do not see $250 as being realistic price - this is just a useful lower limit boundary, but I am fairly confident that actual pricing will be much closer to $470/kWh than $250/kWh. The $250/kWh --> $470/kWh move most definitely is not driven by the "need to charge a higher price", it was a strategic move.
So Tesla pricing is not driven by the set margin, but rather by the pricing of the offerings from the competitors, with even Tesla "list" pricing being lower than competitors by a significant margin. On top of the solid pricing advantage, TE product has several significant technical advantages over the competition, which is completely overlooked on this Forum, so I should really summarize them in a separate thread dedicated to the Stationary Storage.
Regarding the R&D, you have to rember that Tesla treats R&D as a tech company, not a typical automobile company. Tesla R&D expenses are paid as they happen, they are not amortized over the life cycle of the product as is typical in auto industry. So whatever
was spent on TE R&D was already paid for, it is water under the bridge.
As for your disappointment with the unpleasant sight of sausage being made (iterations of TE products, etc.), it is so typical of Tesla which is moving much faster than any legacy company in the automotive or energy storage field. We are most definitely very familiar with this on the automotive side (multiple issues with MS and MX, first adopters as beta - testers, etc.), but as we are so familiar with automobile products, we generally able to se it in the greater context, which is much more difficult to do with the TE products, hence is the nagging suspicion that something fishy is going on...
To the point you made about BES being a commodity, the addressable market is so huge (this includes both auto and BES markets) and combined world's manufacturing capability so tiny as compared to TAM, that we are perhaps decades away from the point in time when there will be typical commodity driven competition on price.
And finally, to your point about grid being able to handle renewables just fine, it is just not so now, and increasingly will not be so because massive increasing amounts of renewable non-dispatchable capacity is being added to the grid every year. Situation is becoming ominous with regulators mandating adding BES capacity to the grid to improve reliability and uninterruptibility.
My apologies for going off-topic ( sort of) but I feel that the above context is very important particularly now, when Tesla is clearly making an effort to communicate TE value to the Market.
