pivots

A decade ago Elon Musk seemed capable of anything, and many of us believed that had another revolution in his hand with Solar Roofthe Tesla solar roof that revolutionized conventional installations to camouflage them with the roofs of our houses. Their goal was to install 1,000 of these solar roofs every week by the end of 2019. The reality: there are about 3,000 solar roofs in total, and the company has decided to pivot to survive. Now it is a much more conventional company that may achieve the success that its original version never came close to. Promises and realities. The deployment of the “solar roof” proposed by the Tesla subsidiary It has been an operational failure. In 2016, the promises of performance combined with sustainable design and architecture (tempered glass tiles that generated light) were very striking. Ten years later, the product represents a residual fraction of Tesla Energy’s income, and the company has decided to surrender to the evidence. They will do what others were already doing: manufacture traditional solar panels mounted on existing roofs. Complex installation. Tesla’s big mistake was not in the panels themselves, but in the physics of the construction itself. A conventional roof is installed in a couple of days, but the Solar Roof required weeks of work for an ultra-skilled workforce. Being made up of hundreds or thousands of small individual tiles, installers had to make multiple electrical connections in an environment exposed to environmental conditions. Costs skyrocketed. Thus, a single failure could render an entire section unusable, and to make everything perfect the installation costs were high: about $106,000 before incentives, when putting solar panels on a conventional roof costs about $50,000 less. Payback is achieved in about 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 for conventional panels. In a lawsuit from several clients was revealed that in some cases the price of the installation ranged from 72,000 to 146,000 dollars. Difficulties everywhere. These types of projects proved to have many obstacles. For example, the different geometries of the roofs or their shadows. There was also the fact that Tesla tried to control the entire installation process with its own personnel, but labor shortages were a bottleneck that delayed deliveries. A reasonable (but late) decision. In early 2026 Tesla launched its new solar panel, the TSP-420which makes use of a new optimization system based on 18 energy zones. Among other things, this panel solves a problem that affected the inverter architecture of Solar Roof panels. It is a much more reasonable strategy, especially since it is much more profitable and faster to install a standard panel on a roof than to do so with Solar Roof’s original proposal. It is curious that the power generation business has not worked out for him, but yes do it that of storage with their Powerwall. Musk once again promises the (perhaps) impossible. At the Davos conference, Elon Musk announced that Tesla had as its objective create 100 GW per year of solar panel manufacturing capacity in the United States. For this purpose, the purchase of solar panels and cells is proposed. worth 2.9 billion dollars to the Chinese company Suzhou Maxwell Technologies. Too many promises. The goal seems once again exaggerated. Global solar installations in the United States in 2023 reached 32 GW, and Musk aims to reach 100 GW by the end of 2028. He would have to triple the total installed capacity that there was three years ago, and do it at a frenetic pace without any problems. We have heard this story before. The challenge seems too colossal even for the tycoon, and reminds us of the promise that he himself made in 2016. It was then that he assured that his solar roof would end up costing less than conventional roofs with traditional solar panels. He also said that the SolarCity Solar Gigafactory would produce 10 GW per year. Neither of those two promises came true. In Xataka | Mexico has a brutal potential for solar energy: at the moment it has begun to exploit it with agrovoltaics