SolarCity’s CEO, Lyndon Rive, said this week that the company should “definitely increase forecasts” for next year because of the upcoming new products that the company will unveil in a joint event with Tesla at the end of the month.

We already reported on how the integration of all three products to be unveiled on October 28, ‘solar roof’, Tesla Powerwall 2.0′, and Tesla charger, will be key to the overall offering of the new combined companies.

Though we learned today that the companies will not be merged by the time they unveil the new products since the proposed merger is only going to a shareholders vote on November 17. It’s likely that Tesla will phase out the ‘SolarCity’ brand after the merger since the company applied for trademarks to sell solar products under its own ‘Tesla’ brand, as we previously reported.

When Tesla CEO Elon Musk first mentioned the new ‘solar roof’, he said that the product will allow Tesla/SolarCity to differentiate their offering in the solar market. Talking to Business Insider this week, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive doubled down on the idea:

“I believe that, next year, what is going to separate solar companies from one another is going to be their product. If the consumer can’t necessarily tell the difference between solar company A and B’s service because they claim to both have the best service, then you have to have product differentiation.”

There are about 5 million new roofs installed every year in the US and if your roof is about to need to be replaced, you don’t want to invest in solar panels to install on it since you are about to take it down, but if the solar panels are integrated into the roof and you need to redo it anyway, there’s no reason not to go with a power-generating roof.

That’s why Rive wants to increase sales forecast for next year following the unveiling at the end of the month:

“We should definitely increase forecasts for 2017. I think there will be high demand for solar combined with storage. Our solar roofing offering opens up a whole new market we haven’t addressed before.”

He sees “hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of solar systems combined with storage” being installed. SolarCity developed a software called GridLogic to manage all those installations and offer distributed energy resources as a service to electric utilities.

If Tesla and SolarCity are able to deploy enough solar systems with storage, those services to manage demand for utilities could become a very important new market and lower the cost of systems for homeowners.

But you need to get the products in the homes first and that’s the new offer Tesla and SolarCity will unveil on the 28th. Rive hyped the event in his interview with Business Insider:

“Next year is going to be the big year for solar and storage because we’re launching the product in October. We have a better product now than we’ve ever have before that’s really cost effective that we think will have large adoption,”

Last week we reported some exclusive information about the solar roof and the Powerpack 2.0, which are expected to be important parts of the event.

If you want to install a solar array at your home, business (or your gas station), you can see if it makes sense for your property and if you can be saving money on your energy bill here.

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