Tesla has achieved its best solar deployment in the US residential solar market since back in 2017 after acquiring SolarCity, but its solar roof deployment is still at a crawl. Contact online >>
Tesla has achieved its best solar deployment in the US residential solar market since back in 2017 after acquiring SolarCity, but its solar roof deployment is still at a crawl.
While Tesla fans and shareholders often like to say that Tesla is not just an “automaker” but a tech company, or even an AI-company based on CEO Elon Musk’s more recent comments, based on revenue, Tesla is very much an automaker.
Its energy division, which deploys solar power systems and stationary battery packs for energy storage, represents a much smaller part of its business. The company still has the ambition to become a “global decentralized electric utility,” and Musk has said that he expects Tesla’s energy division to eventually be as big or bigger than its automotive division.
That’s still far from a reality considering Tesla Energy brought in $616 million out of the $18.7 billion in revenue the company made last quarter.
Today, Electrek learned that Tesla is making progress with its solar installation as its US residential division, which represents the vast majority of its solar deployment, had its best quarter since 2017 right after the acquisition of SolarCity.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed that Tesla deployed 71.5 MW of solar system in the US residential solar market in Q2 2022. The final number reported by Tesla at the end of the month will be higher since it will include some commercial installations and some installations outside the US.
The bad news is that Tesla’s solar roof product deployment is still disappointedly low.
Tesla has never revealed the mix of solar deployment between solar panels (solar retrofit) and solar roof. The closer it got to releasing data was its previous disclosure that it produced 4 MW of solar tiles in one week in 2020, but that is the actual production of the product and not installation.
In a quarterly report last year, Tesla also said that it doubled solar roof installations, but without revealing the actual deployment rate.
Now Electrek can confirm for the first time that Tesla has deployed 2.5 MW of solar roofs during the second quarter of 2022.
With a conservative average system output of 8 kW, it would mean that Tesla was able to deploy solar roofs on about 300 houses in Q2 or about 23 roofs per week.
It’s nice to see Tesla ramp up its overall solar deployment, but it is clear that Tesla still relies primarily on solar panels.
The solar roof deployment has been quite disappointing.
CEO Elon Musk had set the goal of Tesla deploying 1,000 solar roofs per week, but it looks like the company is roughly at 23 per week as of last quarter.
That’s despite now Tesla deploying version three of the solar roof.
It’s not clear what is the bottleneck at this point. We know that Tesla had a hard time testing the longevity of the roof, but it hasn’t talked about that challenge in years. The installations themselves can be quite hard too as roofs are often very different and therefore hard to standardize.
Fred is the Editor in Chief and Main Writer at Electrek.
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The automaker revealed on Wednesday that its solar deployments cratered by 36% to a total of 223 megawatts (MW) last year, down from 348 MW in 2022. Although high interest rates slowed solar growth in some markets, Tesla’s shrinkage came as the United States notched a record year overall; the U.S. added 33 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023, per estimates from SEIA, a solar industry group.
In Q4 2023, Tesla’s solar deployments dropped 59% year-over-year to 41 MW — down from 100 MW in Q4 2022. Aside from blaming interest rates, the company offered no other explanation for the wattage decline. At least part of the blame may fall on a shift in Tesla’s strategy from installer to supplier. The automaker laid off some of its own solar installers last year and cancelled numerous scheduled “solar roof” installations, per Electrek. Tesla bought SolarCity a little more than seven years ago, for $2.6 billion.
Next to solar, Tesla’s energy generation and storage business is booming (surprise, surprise). The company said its energy storage deployments — which include Powerwall home batteries and utility-scale Megapacks, topped 14,724 megawatt hours (MWh) in 2023, up by 125% from the year earlier.
Despite the overall boom, Tesla commented that it expects some volatility in energy deployments quarter-by-quarter, and the firm’s Q4 results show as much. The automaker deployed 3,202 MWh in Q4 2023; down from the prior three quarters, but up if you compare that figure to the same quarter a year earlier (Q4 2022).
The scale of Tesla’s residential solar business isn’t what it once was. Yet, commercial and home batteries still play a key role in the switch to renewable energy sources, as they store intermittently available clean energy for later use. Such batteries can also help communities, and even entire islands and states, prepare for extreme weather by reducing peak demand on the grid and providing backup energy during outages.
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Tesla announced that it delivered a record number of solar and batteries in Q3 2022. Tesla reported that energy storage deployments increased by 62% year over year from around 1.29 GWh in Q3 2021 to 2.1 GWh in Q3 2022. Tesla’s energy storage deployments include Powerwall home batteries and its utility-scale Megapack. In Tesla’s shareholder letter, it said:
"Energy storage deployments increased by 62% YoY in Q3 to 2.1 GWh, by far the highest level we have ever achieved. This level of growth was accomplished despite semiconductor challenges continuing to have a greater impact on our Energy business than our Automotive business. Demand for our storage products remains in excess of our ability to supply. We are in the process of ramping production at our dedicated 40 GWh Megapack factory in Lathrop, California, to address the growing demand."
“Solar deployments increased by 13% YoY in Q3 to 94 MW, one of the strongest quarters in recent years. While our commercial project deployment can be volatile and was lower YoY, we continued to see YoY growth of our residential projects in Q3. Our solar installation team continues to improve installation efficiency, enabling higher volumes and stronger economics.”
Tesla has been ramping up its hiring, and its MegaFactory in Lathrop, California, is no exception. Here, Tesla is hiring from everything from Mailroom Associate to MegaFactory production associates and material handlers.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk noted that Tesla believes that it can meet the requirements of the Inflation Reduction Act for both its vehicles and energy products. “We do expect to meet IRA requirements,” he said. He also added that Tesla sees its Energy business growing faster than its electric vehicle business.
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