25 ms·

Tesla largely responsible for slide in U.S. home solar sales

96 points by callwaiting 9y ago

njharman 9y ago
According to article SolarCity was also largely responsible for the boom in home solar sales and in building the market and lifting up other solar companies.
mtgx 9y ago
> But under Tesla’s ownership, the company has largely stopped its aggressive marketing campaigns and ambitious expansion. From what I heard, that was more like "aggressive salesmen." Perhaps Musk wanted a different more Tesla-like approach to sales, then the sleazy salesman persuading you to make the purchase at all costs. Even if that strategy results in more revenue in the short term, maybe Musk thought he doesn't want Tesla to be known for that type of purchase experience.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  Off topic. Did you intentionally use the word then after the comma in the second sentence in the second paragraph "then the sleazy salesman"? I see this a lot here on HN where I assume the word should be than. Is this some regional dialect quirk?
  - azernik 9y ago
    In most American accents, the two words are homophones, so misspelling one as the other in writing is quite common.
    - speedplane 9y ago
      Common, but not correct. That said, it's a random comment on hackernews, not quite the OED.
      - Gracana 9y ago
        Yes, it is usually the case that misspellings are incorrect. :P
      - azernik 9y ago
        I did say misspelling :-P
    - ballooney 9y ago
      'different then' is one of the clues in online written communication that the writer speaks American English (with some confusion), 'different than' is 'correct' american english (though seems odd to me as an english english [or just simply: english] speaker), 'different to' is, I believe, more common in english english but not american english, and 'different from' is probably the most correct and universal formulation, and I use the word 'correct' with all the usual caveats when applied to language.
      - ridgeguy 9y ago
        "Different than" and "different from" both appear to be accepted in American English, with "different from" having an edge for more formal writing. [1] [2] [1] http://www.dictionary.com/e/different-from-or-different-than/ http://www.dictionary.com/e/different-from-or-different-than... [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/different-from-than-or-to https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/different-from-than-...
    - taneq 9y ago
      Oh, is that why we see the than/then typo so often? I never understood how you could mix the two up.
      - behringer 9y ago
        Yes they're pronounced exactly the same in the Midwest.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - ballenf 9y ago
      I know a lot of Americans from all over the place and have never met one who pronounces those two words the same. At least not in the same way "pen" and "pin" are homophones in parts of the country. Nor how they're / their / there is for everyone.
      - jcranmer 9y ago
        "than" is usually unstressed, which means it's going to be largely reduced to a schwa. "then" would also be reduced to a schwa if it were unstressed, but it doesn't seem to be as frequently unstressed. When trying to transcribe the spoken thought to written text, the unstressed schwa is a lot closer to the 'e' in then than the 'a' in than, which probably explains the predilection for choosing "then" when "than" is meant. (I know I have a major tendency to write "then" when "than" is meant).
        ghaff 9y ago
        I would never have said they were homonyms. That said, they're probably closer for people speaking with a bit of a Southern drawl than they would be with standard American pronunciation.
      - gervase 9y ago
        I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, and it's a homophone for me; you can add me as a data point to your pool.
  - 35bge57dtjku 9y ago
    No, people are just lazy. It's not like people don't mix up the two in other regions.
- amluto 9y ago
  Instead they've gone for the very nice Tesla experience. You put down a deposit and no one contacts you for a month. You ask for specs (architectural and performance) and get squat. You call them and the sometimes return your phone call. You ask whether they can give a rough install date and you get squat. It's a roof for Pete's sake. I'm a bit surprised anyone puts up with this crap. A shoddy underspecified solar install above a roof is one thing. An actual roof, that's supposed to be waterproof and such, is rather different.
  - lafar6502 9y ago
    Ha ha good luck if you plan to build a new house- maybe there are regions where you can live few years without a roof
enjo 9y ago
Utilities across the country are changing how they handle net metering (buying back at the wholesale instead of retail rate). It greatly changes the payback on these solar installations... I’m guessing that has more to do with any slowdown than Tesla’s management. Not to mention that the low hanging fruit may already be largely picked.
- latj 9y ago
  Yes. This is exactly what is going on. In the same time period described the power dinosaurs (Google autocorrected companies to "dinosaurs" but it kinda fits in more than one way so I'm keeping it) have implemented polices to slow down adoption of PV claiming they can't build the infrastructure fast enough to hold the growth but all the while just hoping to figure out a way to remain relevant while not embracing any kind of change.
- narrator 9y ago
  Wait till the masses discover cryptomining as an alternative to measly net metering rates.
  - travmatt 9y ago
    If that shifts the mining away from large datacenters run by coal, would that be a net benefit for society/environment?
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Mining is not done by coal, or by residential places right now. Mining is done in Datacenters placed next to hydro power plants in China, using their almost free excess electricity.
      - UncleEntity 9y ago
        Not according to the recent spate of articles claiming bitcoin is causing all the global warming.
  - 9y ago
mrfusion 9y ago
How hard would it be to buy some land and build a solar farm? As an investment.
- njharman 9y ago
  Doing that would be easy, doing that at a profit is hard. There's a reason windfarms are being built instead of solarpanelfarms.
  - mcbutterbunz 9y ago
    I'm not that knowledgeable in this subject, but is it because wind farms provide dual land use? The footprint required to erect and maintain turbine is much smaller and allows existing farmland to continue operation.
    - batrat 9y ago
      Also can harvest energy 24/7
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      There's plenty of scrub land available.
  - philipkglass 9y ago
    In some countries it's much harder to build a profitable solar farm than a profitable wind farm. Both are viable in much of the United States. In 2016, the US installed 8203 MW of wind power: https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance It installed ~14000 MW of solar PV, including about 10000 MW of utility scale projects: https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data Given the higher capacity factor of utility-scale wind over solar, wind still has the lead in effective electricity supply added in 2016. But both are being built. Through Q3 in 2017 in the US, solar is actually way ahead of wind in terms of capacity increases. Q4 usually dominates the year for both wind and solar, so it remains to be seen if that's true with full-year data. Large scale solar construction in the US could slow down significantly in the near future depending on how harshly the solar module import tariffs/quotas derived from the Suniva ITC case are set.
chrisgd 9y ago
SolarCity was acquired because it was running out of money. There where a lot of questions whether Tesla over paid for the asset because of Elon musk's ownership in both companies. Not having any more money to spend on aggressive expansion might be the biggest reason for the decline
- zer00eyz 9y ago
  "Tesla declined to comment for this story, but has previously said that while sales are down, margins are up. The company expects its fourth-quarter solar installation numbers to be higher than those of the third quarter." Lets assume what your saying is true, as is the above statement (and the article hints that there was concern about the debt model solar city was using). The decline in sales and the increase in profits look like there is an attempt to right the ship, rather than persist with a model that doesn't function well.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Profits are increasing because they stopped expensive marketing and promotion to attract customers. Solar city was actually losing money with new customers. So just by Tesla stopping new customers they increase their income.
agumonkey 9y ago
Any physicist around here ? to challenge musk/solarcity claims about the 100km² solar farm being equivalent to the world energy output. Energy transport aside of course, just as a napkin calculation thing.
- hwillis 9y ago
  The 100 km^2 aka solarcity's "blue square" is US electrical output, not world and not total energy. There's a 36x difference between the two. US insolation is around 5.5 kWh/m^2/day. For a non-tracking array in Arizona it's about 6.5-7 [1]. Total energy collection would be almost 10^20 joules with 100% efficiency. US electricity consumption is about 1.4 * 10^19 J [2] so it would only require solar panels with 15.5% efficiency. Average is around 17%. [1]: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
  - agumonkey 9y ago
    Thanks, I probably misread US electric as something more. Sorry. If it's national, the 36x isn't that big of a factor. There are other locations with high solar input (africa, australia, middle east).
- ridgeguy 9y ago
  I'm a little foggy this morning, but here goes: If 100km^2 is read as an area (not a square 100 km on a side), that's 1e8 m^2. Assuming an average of 500W/m^2 daytime insolation over 8 hours and an average conversion efficiency of 20%, that's about 1e9Watts (1 GW) average output over 8 hours, or 8GW-hr/day of energy. Assuming 365 days/year, I get about 2.9e4GW-hr/year, or about 29 TW-hr/year. Wikipedia [1] gives the total energy used by civilization in 2013 as about 157 PW-hr, or 157,000 TW-hr. The same source estimates electricity generation alone was estimated at about 19,500 TW-hr in 2013. So 100km^2 of solar panels looks like it could produce about 0.15% of humanity's 2013 electrical energy production or about 0.0186% of humanity's total 2013 energy generation. If the initial solar array dimensions should have been read as 100km x 100km, then its output would be 2 orders of magnitude larger. This would bring its output to 15% and 1.86% of 2013 electrical and total energy generation, respectively. YMMV - these are only napkin calcs, not reviewed for error or fatal simplification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
myrandomcomment 9y ago
Waiting for the solar roof tiles. Put money down to hold a place in line. Still waiting....
ilaksh 9y ago
The incredibly obvious thing that somehow most people are not connecting here is the solar shingles or roofing tiles. They can't continue to push the old-fashioned panels with the same enthusiasm at the same time as launching the solar shingles. Combine that with the fact that they are the only producer of those particular tiles that they are selling and have a bottleneck, and I think that explains it. There are other non-celebrity companies that make solar shingles, see at the bottom of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_shingle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_shingle
blunte 9y ago
This article completely fails to mention several other potential factors: - some states have reduced or removed subsidies to home owners for new solar installations - solar installations are expensive and take years to pay themselves back (and ultimately become a net gain); but homeowners are staying in one home for shorter periods than in the past, making long-term planning less attractive - some utilities have pressured local governments to block or make difficult new solar installations because of (real or perceived) problems with pushing a lot of power back into the grid from the endpoints (homes) - political misinformation campaigns have convinced some simple folk that solar is bad (or is un-patriotic since some regions, such as Texas, are so deeply connected to oil and gas) How much of a role these other factors have played is up for debate, but I think it's rather disingenuous of Reuters to not even mention some of these.
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  Solar will go big when interest in home ownership goes away due to innovations like Uber which is reducing long term car ownership or multiple car ownership. Once home ownership goes away and we can subscribe to smart, intelligent homes powered by solar and other renewable energy sources, it will begin the golden age of Solar. Unfortunately, we are still 20 years away from this vision.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > home ownership goes away Home ownership is the only practical way in which the general public can access leveraged asset price inflation. There has to be big transformation in the economy before home ownership is seen as a cost centre rather than the most profitable investment most people will ever make.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      And is also the only way that many people can have stability in where they they live and what they pay. Obviously different people make different tradeoffs but, for many (especially families), it's desirable to have a high degree of control over where you live.
dmh2000 9y ago
'aggressive marketing tactics'. in other words, high pressure salesmen making dubious claims
coliveira 9y ago
Thankfully, the future of solar technology doesn't depend on the USA anymore. China is the biggest producer of solar panels, and will continue to employ solar technology for its internal development. These factors will make the US adoption irrelevant for the development of solar technology.
WheelsAtLarge 9y ago
Linkbait, they don't mention that Solar city was drowning in debt. There was no way it could continue its aggressive marketing. It's one of the reasons it's no longer an independent company. The reduction is not a reflection of Tesla but a reflection of the overall market. People just are willing to spend the thousands of dollars or perpetual lease to power their homes. Like it or not, the switch to solar or similar is for the large utilities to do it. But they won't do it unless they are forced to do it. California has started but its now time for the rest of the country to pass some laws.
greglindahl 9y ago
The main reason is that Tesla -- and only Tesla -- is switching business models from having investors put solar panels on house roofs and selling the power to the homeowner, to the homeowner buying panels. This transition has been going on for the past 4 quarters. The article discusses it here: > SolarCity’s rapid growth was fueled in part by a no-money-down offering that enabled residential customers to pay a monthly fee to go solar. The business generated huge sales volumes but led to investor concern about debt. and it's easy to see, from the published financials, that this is a large effect.

96 points by callwaiting 9y ago

According to article SolarCity was also largely responsible for the boom in home solar sales and in building the market and lifting up other solar companies.

mtgx 9y ago

> But under Tesla’s ownership, the company has largely stopped its aggressive marketing campaigns and ambitious expansion. From what I heard, that was more like "aggressive salesmen." Perhaps Musk wanted a different more Tesla-like approach to sales, then the sleazy salesman persuading you to make the purchase at all costs. Even if that strategy results in more revenue in the short term, maybe Musk thought he doesn't want Tesla to be known for that type of purchase experience.

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
Off topic. Did you intentionally use the word then after the comma in the second sentence in the second paragraph "then the sleazy salesman"? I see this a lot here on HN where I assume the word should be than. Is this some regional dialect quirk?
- azernik 9y ago
  In most American accents, the two words are homophones, so misspelling one as the other in writing is quite common.
  - speedplane 9y ago
    Common, but not correct. That said, it's a random comment on hackernews, not quite the OED.
    - Gracana 9y ago
      Yes, it is usually the case that misspellings are incorrect. :P
    - azernik 9y ago
      I did say misspelling :-P
  - ballooney 9y ago
    'different then' is one of the clues in online written communication that the writer speaks American English (with some confusion), 'different than' is 'correct' american english (though seems odd to me as an english english [or just simply: english] speaker), 'different to' is, I believe, more common in english english but not american english, and 'different from' is probably the most correct and universal formulation, and I use the word 'correct' with all the usual caveats when applied to language.
    - ridgeguy 9y ago
      "Different than" and "different from" both appear to be accepted in American English, with "different from" having an edge for more formal writing. [1] [2] [1] http://www.dictionary.com/e/different-from-or-different-than/ http://www.dictionary.com/e/different-from-or-different-than... [2] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/different-from-than-or-to https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/usage/different-from-than-...
  - taneq 9y ago
    Oh, is that why we see the than/then typo so often? I never understood how you could mix the two up.
    - behringer 9y ago
      Yes they're pronounced exactly the same in the Midwest.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
  - ballenf 9y ago
    I know a lot of Americans from all over the place and have never met one who pronounces those two words the same. At least not in the same way "pen" and "pin" are homophones in parts of the country. Nor how they're / their / there is for everyone.
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      "than" is usually unstressed, which means it's going to be largely reduced to a schwa. "then" would also be reduced to a schwa if it were unstressed, but it doesn't seem to be as frequently unstressed. When trying to transcribe the spoken thought to written text, the unstressed schwa is a lot closer to the 'e' in then than the 'a' in than, which probably explains the predilection for choosing "then" when "than" is meant. (I know I have a major tendency to write "then" when "than" is meant).
      - ghaff 9y ago
        I would never have said they were homonyms. That said, they're probably closer for people speaking with a bit of a Southern drawl than they would be with standard American pronunciation.
    - gervase 9y ago
      I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, and it's a homophone for me; you can add me as a data point to your pool.
- 35bge57dtjku 9y ago
  No, people are just lazy. It's not like people don't mix up the two in other regions.
amluto 9y ago
Instead they've gone for the very nice Tesla experience. You put down a deposit and no one contacts you for a month. You ask for specs (architectural and performance) and get squat. You call them and the sometimes return your phone call. You ask whether they can give a rough install date and you get squat. It's a roof for Pete's sake. I'm a bit surprised anyone puts up with this crap. A shoddy underspecified solar install above a roof is one thing. An actual roof, that's supposed to be waterproof and such, is rather different.
- lafar6502 9y ago
  Ha ha good luck if you plan to build a new house- maybe there are regions where you can live few years without a roof

enjo 9y ago

Utilities across the country are changing how they handle net metering (buying back at the wholesale instead of retail rate). It greatly changes the payback on these solar installations... I’m guessing that has more to do with any slowdown than Tesla’s management. Not to mention that the low hanging fruit may already be largely picked.

latj 9y ago
Yes. This is exactly what is going on. In the same time period described the power dinosaurs (Google autocorrected companies to "dinosaurs" but it kinda fits in more than one way so I'm keeping it) have implemented polices to slow down adoption of PV claiming they can't build the infrastructure fast enough to hold the growth but all the while just hoping to figure out a way to remain relevant while not embracing any kind of change.
narrator 9y ago
Wait till the masses discover cryptomining as an alternative to measly net metering rates.
- travmatt 9y ago
  If that shifts the mining away from large datacenters run by coal, would that be a net benefit for society/environment?
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Mining is not done by coal, or by residential places right now. Mining is done in Datacenters placed next to hydro power plants in China, using their almost free excess electricity.
    - UncleEntity 9y ago
      Not according to the recent spate of articles claiming bitcoin is causing all the global warming.
- 9y ago

mrfusion 9y ago

How hard would it be to buy some land and build a solar farm? As an investment.

njharman 9y ago
Doing that would be easy, doing that at a profit is hard. There's a reason windfarms are being built instead of solarpanelfarms.
- mcbutterbunz 9y ago
  I'm not that knowledgeable in this subject, but is it because wind farms provide dual land use? The footprint required to erect and maintain turbine is much smaller and allows existing farmland to continue operation.
  - batrat 9y ago
    Also can harvest energy 24/7
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    There's plenty of scrub land available.
- philipkglass 9y ago
  In some countries it's much harder to build a profitable solar farm than a profitable wind farm. Both are viable in much of the United States. In 2016, the US installed 8203 MW of wind power: https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance https://www.awea.org/wind-energy-facts-at-a-glance It installed ~14000 MW of solar PV, including about 10000 MW of utility scale projects: https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-data Given the higher capacity factor of utility-scale wind over solar, wind still has the lead in effective electricity supply added in 2016. But both are being built. Through Q3 in 2017 in the US, solar is actually way ahead of wind in terms of capacity increases. Q4 usually dominates the year for both wind and solar, so it remains to be seen if that's true with full-year data. Large scale solar construction in the US could slow down significantly in the near future depending on how harshly the solar module import tariffs/quotas derived from the Suniva ITC case are set.

chrisgd 9y ago

SolarCity was acquired because it was running out of money. There where a lot of questions whether Tesla over paid for the asset because of Elon musk's ownership in both companies. Not having any more money to spend on aggressive expansion might be the biggest reason for the decline

zer00eyz 9y ago
"Tesla declined to comment for this story, but has previously said that while sales are down, margins are up. The company expects its fourth-quarter solar installation numbers to be higher than those of the third quarter." Lets assume what your saying is true, as is the above statement (and the article hints that there was concern about the debt model solar city was using). The decline in sales and the increase in profits look like there is an attempt to right the ship, rather than persist with a model that doesn't function well.
- prepend 9y ago
  Profits are increasing because they stopped expensive marketing and promotion to attract customers. Solar city was actually losing money with new customers. So just by Tesla stopping new customers they increase their income.

agumonkey 9y ago

Any physicist around here ? to challenge musk/solarcity claims about the 100km² solar farm being equivalent to the world energy output. Energy transport aside of course, just as a napkin calculation thing.

hwillis 9y ago
The 100 km^2 aka solarcity's "blue square" is US electrical output, not world and not total energy. There's a 36x difference between the two. US insolation is around 5.5 kWh/m^2/day. For a non-tracking array in Arizona it's about 6.5-7 [1]. Total energy collection would be almost 10^20 joules with 100% efficiency. US electricity consumption is about 1.4 * 10^19 J [2] so it would only require solar panels with 15.5% efficiency. Average is around 17%. [1]: https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html https://www.nrel.gov/gis/solar.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Thanks, I probably misread US electric as something more. Sorry. If it's national, the 36x isn't that big of a factor. There are other locations with high solar input (africa, australia, middle east).
ridgeguy 9y ago
I'm a little foggy this morning, but here goes: If 100km^2 is read as an area (not a square 100 km on a side), that's 1e8 m^2. Assuming an average of 500W/m^2 daytime insolation over 8 hours and an average conversion efficiency of 20%, that's about 1e9Watts (1 GW) average output over 8 hours, or 8GW-hr/day of energy. Assuming 365 days/year, I get about 2.9e4GW-hr/year, or about 29 TW-hr/year. Wikipedia [1] gives the total energy used by civilization in 2013 as about 157 PW-hr, or 157,000 TW-hr. The same source estimates electricity generation alone was estimated at about 19,500 TW-hr in 2013. So 100km^2 of solar panels looks like it could produce about 0.15% of humanity's 2013 electrical energy production or about 0.0186% of humanity's total 2013 energy generation. If the initial solar array dimensions should have been read as 100km x 100km, then its output would be 2 orders of magnitude larger. This would bring its output to 15% and 1.86% of 2013 electrical and total energy generation, respectively. YMMV - these are only napkin calcs, not reviewed for error or fatal simplification. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption

myrandomcomment 9y ago

Waiting for the solar roof tiles. Put money down to hold a place in line. Still waiting....

ilaksh 9y ago

The incredibly obvious thing that somehow most people are not connecting here is the solar shingles or roofing tiles. They can't continue to push the old-fashioned panels with the same enthusiasm at the same time as launching the solar shingles. Combine that with the fact that they are the only producer of those particular tiles that they are selling and have a bottleneck, and I think that explains it. There are other non-celebrity companies that make solar shingles, see at the bottom of this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_shingle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_shingle

blunte 9y ago

This article completely fails to mention several other potential factors: - some states have reduced or removed subsidies to home owners for new solar installations - solar installations are expensive and take years to pay themselves back (and ultimately become a net gain); but homeowners are staying in one home for shorter periods than in the past, making long-term planning less attractive - some utilities have pressured local governments to block or make difficult new solar installations because of (real or perceived) problems with pushing a lot of power back into the grid from the endpoints (homes) - political misinformation campaigns have convinced some simple folk that solar is bad (or is un-patriotic since some regions, such as Texas, are so deeply connected to oil and gas) How much of a role these other factors have played is up for debate, but I think it's rather disingenuous of Reuters to not even mention some of these.

perseusprime11 9y ago
Solar will go big when interest in home ownership goes away due to innovations like Uber which is reducing long term car ownership or multiple car ownership. Once home ownership goes away and we can subscribe to smart, intelligent homes powered by solar and other renewable energy sources, it will begin the golden age of Solar. Unfortunately, we are still 20 years away from this vision.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > home ownership goes away Home ownership is the only practical way in which the general public can access leveraged asset price inflation. There has to be big transformation in the economy before home ownership is seen as a cost centre rather than the most profitable investment most people will ever make.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And is also the only way that many people can have stability in where they they live and what they pay. Obviously different people make different tradeoffs but, for many (especially families), it's desirable to have a high degree of control over where you live.

dmh2000 9y ago

'aggressive marketing tactics'. in other words, high pressure salesmen making dubious claims

coliveira 9y ago

Thankfully, the future of solar technology doesn't depend on the USA anymore. China is the biggest producer of solar panels, and will continue to employ solar technology for its internal development. These factors will make the US adoption irrelevant for the development of solar technology.

WheelsAtLarge 9y ago

Linkbait, they don't mention that Solar city was drowning in debt. There was no way it could continue its aggressive marketing. It's one of the reasons it's no longer an independent company. The reduction is not a reflection of Tesla but a reflection of the overall market. People just are willing to spend the thousands of dollars or perpetual lease to power their homes. Like it or not, the switch to solar or similar is for the large utilities to do it. But they won't do it unless they are forced to do it. California has started but its now time for the rest of the country to pass some laws.

greglindahl 9y ago

The main reason is that Tesla -- and only Tesla -- is switching business models from having investors put solar panels on house roofs and selling the power to the homeowner, to the homeowner buying panels. This transition has been going on for the past 4 quarters. The article discusses it here: > SolarCity’s rapid growth was fueled in part by a no-money-down offering that enabled residential customers to pay a monthly fee to go solar. The business generated huge sales volumes but led to investor concern about debt. and it's easy to see, from the published financials, that this is a large effect.