So what good are all the PowerWalls Tesla is shipping to Puerto Rico if comms are still out on most of the Island?

We can only hope elon makes a provision against hackers

OTOH If I had a giant fucking battery glued to my wall I'd want to make damn sure its firmware was up to date. The I isn't the problem here.

So why is the internet required for that? Why not just turn them off without the wifi then? How about an audible/visual alert?

Well, *you* monitor the shit out of them. With a screen, or a LAN reporter if you have to. Here we have c) a vendor monitoring your device.

The very bit you quote explicitly says it does NOT require it… only for updates and the app - can’t very well do TCP/IP over magic, can it.

People in remote locations and disaster areas can always resort to firmware updates via IPoAC en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_ove…

They unlike others probably want to update all the time

the ONLY reason is of course to data mine.

Tesla battery management software is on continuous delivery schedule; it's how they get such good performance in the cars