DJI opened IFA 2026 in Berlin on Friday by putting its Power 2000 power station on stage as a grid-tied home battery, bundled for the first time with DJI-branded solar panels and a microinverter, and closed the presentation with a black slide reading “Beyond Batteries. The next generation of power is coming.” The kit rolls out in Germany first. The grid-tied mode behind it works in a handful of European countries and nowhere in the United States.

The 2,048 Wh station itself is not new. DJI launched it in July 2025 at $1,299 as a portable pack for drone crews and blackout backup. What changed on Friday is the pitch. A wall-mounted diagram at DJI’s booth in Hall 20-129 runs a line from a PV module through a microinverter into a Schuko wall socket, then into the Power 2000, then out to a refrigerator and a TV, with the grid and a smart meter hanging off the top. DJI’s slide puts the payoff at €680 a year in electricity savings, on DJI’s own math, with a paragraph of disclaimers underneath.

DroneXL has covered DJI Power since the first Power 1000 leak in December 2023, and the framing has moved a long way from faster Mavic battery charging. The world’s largest drone maker spent this stage slot on a home appliance.

DJI Power Builds a Balcony Solar Kit Around the Power 2000

DJI’s first balcony solar system pairs its own solar panels and a grid-tied microinverter with the DJI Power 2000, sold in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. The panels feed the flat through a standard Schuko socket, and the station stores whatever the household is not using at the time.

The IFA announcement DJI published on August 27 listed a new balcony solar system alongside the Power 1000 Mini, Power 1000 V2, Power 2000 and Power Expansion Battery 2000 as the products visitors could handle at the booth from September 4 to 8. pv magazine Deutschland reported on August 28 that DJI would start the rollout in Germany as a Power 2000 bundle. DJI had published no price and no ship date for the kit as of Friday morning, and the stage presentation, posted as video by the DJI Power account on X, added neither.

The grid-tied storage function is the older half of the story. DJI added it to the Power 2000 by firmware in 2025, first for Germany, France and Spain, and its IFA 2025 release described the same loop: charge from panels by day, feed the surplus to the grid once the pack is full. What Berlin adds is DJI selling the panels and the inverter under its own name, so a renter can buy the whole plug-in system from one box. DroneXL covered the Power 2000’s launch in July 2025, when the balcony use case was a footnote.

The German market DJI is walking into has rules that make the pitch work. Since Solarpaket I took effect in May 2024, a plug-in solar system can feed up to 800 W into a household circuit through an ordinary wall socket, with a simplified online registration. The Power 2000’s 3,000 W continuous output and 22,528 Wh expansion ceiling with add-on batteries sit far above what a balcony rig needs, which is the sales argument: the same box that runs a film set can sit in a Berlin flat soaking up midday solar.

DJI Claims €680 a Year in Savings, on Its Own Arithmetic

DJI’s headline slide shows 2,160 kWh of annual solar generation, a 90 percent self-consumption rate and €680 in estimated annual electricity bill savings for a household running its balcony kit with a Power 2000, and every one of those figures is footnoted as a DJI Power internal calculation.

The footnotes deserve as much attention as the numbers. In DJI’s own words, solar generation varies with location, weather, installation and shading, and the savings figure excludes the purchase price of the equipment, installation, maintenance, taxes, fees and incentives. The €680 is a best-case model of the electricity bill alone, before you subtract what the kit cost.

The 90 percent self-consumption figure is the one worth understanding, because it is the whole reason to put a battery behind a balcony system. A bare plug-in setup exports most of its midday output to the grid for nothing, since nobody is home to use it. A battery holds that output for the evening. Whether a household gets to 90 percent depends on how much it consumes and when, which is exactly what DJI’s footnote says.

DJI has not published the panel wattage or the electricity tariff behind the 2,160 kWh and €680 figures. Without those inputs the savings claim cannot be checked.

DJI Power Also Built a Cable for Drone Ground Stations

One slide was aimed at drone operators. It introduced a DJI Power SDC to PoE Power Cable. The cable lets a DJI power station feed the DJI O4 Ground Station directly over Power over Ethernet, so a remote relay site can run with no grid connection at all.

The slide paired the cable with what it called DJI Power’s next-generation power station, the same unannounced product the closing teaser pointed at. The O4 Ground Station launched on June 16 as a PoE-powered relay and gateway for Dock 3 and Matrice 400 fleets, and its published specs put typical gateway-mode draw at 17.1 W, a 7 W low-power mode, and 65 W maximum with cold-weather heating on. Its built-in backup battery lasts about 45 minutes in gateway mode.

Those numbers are why a power station makes sense in front of it. Divide the Power 2000’s 2,048 Wh by the 17.1 W typical draw and you get roughly 120 hours, about five days, before conversion losses and heating eat into it. Add a solar panel and a ground station on a ridgeline stops needing a trench to the nearest outlet. It is the first DJI Power accessory built for ground infrastructure rather than for topping up aircraft batteries.

DJI Says Its Battery Business Rests on 15 Years of Drone Batteries

DJI presented the Power line as an extension of its drone battery engineering and put three numbers behind it: more than 15 years of battery expertise, more than 700 battery patents and applications, and more than 10 million users worldwide. The footnotes attribute all three to DJI internal records.

The 10 million figure is the one to read carefully. The footnote says DJI has served more than 10 million users across its product portfolio, which means drones and cameras, not power stations. It is a statement about DJI’s installed base. DJI has never published Power unit sales, and Friday did not change that.

The engineering lineage is real enough. The Power 2000’s 10 ms UPS switchover and the 1-ton static load rating on the case date from the July 2025 launch, and DJI Power’s Tongxi Lu told T3 in May that the division shares its battery management and fast-charging engineering with the drone side. She also said most Power buyers still come from DJI’s drone and camera base, and that reaching people who have never owned a DJI product is the division’s biggest problem. A balcony kit sold to renters in Germany is the clearest answer to that problem DJI has shown so far.

Americans Can Buy the Battery, Not the Home Energy Part

The Power 2000 stays legal to buy in the United States because its FCC authorization predates the December 22, 2025 Covered List action, but grid-tied mode is not enabled on US units, DJI has announced no US balcony kit, and Friday’s teased hardware needs a grant DJI cannot get.

The station on a US retailer’s shelf is the same hardware as the one on stage in Berlin, minus the firmware feature that makes the whole IFA pitch work. DJI’s grid-tied function shipped for Germany, France and Spain first and has spread to other European markets since. A grid-interactive inverter sold in the US would also need UL 1741 listing and utility interconnection approval, a separate process from anything the FCC does.

The newer Power products show where the wall sits. DJI launched the Power 1000 Mini globally in April, and DJI spokesperson Daisy Kong told The Verge at the time that US authorization was pending, as DroneXL reported on April 20. That piece told readers to watch the status for 90 days. The window closed in late July, and DJI has announced no US launch for the Power 1000 Mini since. Whatever the next generation of power turns out to be, if it has an app it has a radio, and it faces the same gate.

The US plug-in solar market DJI is skipping is starting to exist. Utah became the first state to legalize plug-in solar systems in March 2025, Virginia signed its own law in April 2026, and several more states have followed this year. A Chinese company selling a balcony battery into American apartments would land in the middle of the same security fight that already covers its drones and its robot vacuums. DJI knows that, which is the likeliest reason Berlin got the announcement and America got nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

DJI is spending its IFA stage on home batteries because the drone business has a ceiling and this one, so far, does not. Aircraft answer to airspace rules and, in the United States, to a Covered List blocking every new model. A balcony battery answers to none of that.

Look at what the company has shipped outside of aircraft in the last 18 months. The Avinox M2S and M2 drive units pushed its e-bike motor business to 1,500 W and 150 Nm. The ROMO robot vacuum became a real product line, with a second generation debuting in Berlin this week. The Osmo 360 II launched on August 13 at 8K60. And now a company that sells drones is selling solar panels to tenants in Berlin. Every one of those products is DJI’s battery or motor engineering wrapped in a new case.

The pitch on Friday’s stage is the one I find most convincing of the lot. DJI’s drone battery experience is real, and a home battery is a product where the boring engineering is the entire product. The balcony market in Germany is large, regulated in DJI’s favor since 2024, and already contested by Anker Solix and EcoFlow, the same names DJI went up against when it entered portable power stations in 2024. This is the shortest line DJI could draw from what it already knows how to build to a market that is growing.

Yes, the €680 slide is a best-case number wrapped in disclaimers, and DJI has not shown a price. Every company in this category does the same. The question for a buyer is whether the hardware is good, and DJI’s power stations have been.

The problem is the same one that has followed every DJI announcement since December: none of this reaches American buyers, and the gap is widening from drones into things that are not drones at all. I do not think the Covered List was written with balcony batteries in mind. My read is that it does not need to be. As long as DJI cannot get a new FCC grant, every product with a Wi-Fi chip is blocked by default, and a home energy system that talks to a smart meter is more radio, not less. Americans will watch DJI’s power business grow up in Europe the way they watched the Osmo Pocket 4P and the Mic Mini 2S.

The teaser gives us something to watch. DJI said the next generation of power is coming. Whether that station ever gets a US listing is the test. If it does, DJI found a path through the authorization gate for products without a drone attached. If it lands in Germany and stays there, what this article describes is the pattern for everything DJI builds from now on.

Sources: DJI (IFA 2026 announcement, Power 2000 press release), DJI Power on X, DJI Enterprise (O4 Ground Station specifications), pv magazine Deutschland, T3

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.