I don't think that's the true at all. There's a vast and visible footprint we can see with batteries (pretty sure every major solar company in the U.S. that has a battery storage option does at least some Tesla) that has no equivalent with solar rooftops. The former are ubiquitous while the latter are so far as I can tell almost entirely non existent.
And if that's too light on data I'll put it this way, I'm reasonably confident I can find 10 solar companies that install Tesla batteries for every one that does Solar City roofs.
Exactly, and theres plenty of third party companies buying and installing these for customers and their economic activity testifies to the significant scale of the Tesla battery business.
Because Tesla abandoned the SolarCity model? Like, SolarCity was a bunch of sales people going door-to-door to sell questionable leases on solar systems and hawking off the junk bonds resulting.
I’m curious what the cumulative operating cost / financial repayment plan is relative to the capital installation cost. Funny enough if it is advantageous to you vs solar city that is one more argument in favor of them running a poor business model.
The general model has some intrinsic advantages. If you want to build out solar generation you normally have to buy land (expensive), but this way the customer is giving you space on their roof "for free". Then the price per kWh the customer pays to the power company includes a transmission cost, but the power is being consumed on site so you don't have to pay that.
The result is that solar generally has a generation cost of ~$0.04/kWh (which includes the cost of the land) but meanwhile you have customers happy to be paying $0.11/kWh. The trade off is the one-time cost of installing it on individual roofs is more labor intensive than doing a large-scale installation in a field somewhere, but that just means it's competitive rather than having a massive advantage.
> Exactly. So then why draw conclusions about how SolarCity was a bad deal for shareholders (see parent comments)?
You can absolutely draw adverse inferences from Tesla's refusal to report certain straightforward, useful numbers. For example, their refusal to publish any real safety statistics, to the point where Elon Musk himself has to invoke rubbish numbers like the 'community tracker'.
If, after all the lawsuits and accusations of failure, and the reporting about the near-zero deliveries and idled factories, the Tesla Energy division is giving you no numbers on the solar roof, and is lumping them together with a totally different product like batteries, there is one thing and only one thing that that means: the numbers are awful.
