More on that after the jump, first up, the Los Angeles Times:
One evening last year, David Burek noticed charred wood and a burning smell in his attic, near his young sons’ bedroom. He climbed a ladder and saw a melted connector wire from the solar panels installed on the roof of his North Dartmouth, Mass., home. Firefighters rushed over and discovered that flames had burned through the shingles, the roof and a support beam. Luckily, a recent rain had doused it.
A month later, a fire broke out on the roof of Ken Tomasello’s home in Waldorf, Md., sending a section of the ceiling crashing onto a bed. It ultimately caused so much fire, smoke and water damage that Tomasello and his wife lived in a hotel for more than a year.And from FT Alphaville:
The two homes had something in common: SolarCity, now a unit of Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc., had installed their rooftop panels. While these are just a pair of relatively small incidents at a company with some 400,000 solar customers — one of the biggest such portfolios in the U.S. — they add to the growing concern about the safety of Tesla’s solar systems.
In the past couple weeks, both Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have said that Tesla systems caused roof fires at their stores or warehouses. Those were commercial installations. The Burek and Tomasello episodes show there are potentially also problems with residential systems, a much bigger part of the company’s sputtering solar business.
Further underscoring those worries, Tesla has reached out to homeowners across the U.S. to tell them they need preventive maintenance. The company says the remediation effort is designed to ensure that systems last 10 to 20 years. (Business Insider previously reported this program, known internally as Project Titan.)
In an interview, Burek said he heard from Tesla in October 2018 — about five months after his panels had been removed. “When I called Tesla back, they said our system had been flagged for bad connectors,” Burek said. “I told them there was no system to maintain because they’d already caused a fire on my roof.”...MORE
Alphaville’s resident Tesla watcher is away on holidays, but Bethany McLean’s “He’s full of shit” drop in Vanity Fair last weekend about the House of Musk’s dubious SolarCity investments should not go ignored.Izzy's comment on the timing of the great reveal in relation to the SolarCity merger in the bolded para squares perfectly with our (almost) contemporaneous note:
According to Tesla much of McLean’s piece is erroneous. But frankly, we’re mainly interested in just one specific part of the piece and we’re pretty confident McLean is right on this; she does have a knack for homing in on instances of grave corporate misdirection.
And, as her piece hints, none was arguably greater than the highly lauded ‘launch' of Tesla’s Solar Roof on the set of Desperate Housewives on October 28, 2016 -- something Alphaville has always been somewhat curious about.
The timing of the ‘launch’ was awfully convenient, occurring just weeks before a critical shareholder vote on a controversial proposal for Tesla to acquire SolarCity, a related Musk corporate. It’s fair to say, on that basis, establishing a grand vision of how the two companies might complement each other was never going to hurt Musk.
[bolding: Climateer]
But, as McLean notes, concerns about the substance of the spectacle, which you can still watch in its entirety on Vimeo, began to appear almost from the outset:
That October, as Musk was making his pitch about the Solar Roof, a former Fortune 500 executive was watching it online at a friend’s barbecue. The former executive, who had spent years researching solar technology, understood what it took to make the Solar Roof work—and he was confident that Musk hadn’t figured it out. “He spewed total BS,” says the executive, who asked not to be identified. “I was flabbergasted. I was convinced in the moment that the shingles were fake.”The allegation of fakery is important. From the perspective of the world, the roof tiles unveiled by Musk on the day were real and revelatory. Not only were they going to make integrated sustainable electric living possible -- they were set to solve solar’s aesthetic eyesore problem, and in so doing accelerate solar energy adoption.
Nothing said at the ‘launch’ indicated that the featured panels might actually be dummies or that the tech underpinning them had not yet been figured out.
To the contrary, Musk said things like: “The houses you see around you are all solar houses.” A definite suggestion they were being powered by functional solar energy, then.
But he also said things like:
...we’re transitioning from day to night - it’s dusk - and so what’s happening is that the houses are transitioning from the roofs generating power to the battery pack, the Powerwall, producing power.And:
So this is the before shot of that house and now that’s all solar. Yeah. And here we’ve got some close up shots we can show. [VIDEO SHOWS THE TILES UP CLOSE PLAYS ON SCREEN] And if you look carefully you can actually see the solar cells behind the glass. [HOLDING A TILE ON STAGE] This is a textured glass tile, and if you look carefully you can see the solar cells: yeah you can see that.Bolstering the impression the tiles were already functional Musk also told reporters on the day: “We expect to start installing these roofs sometime next year.”
Now take a look at the next house; right, so that house is also solar, and that’s sort of a style of a French slate which is one of the hardest things to do; it’s considered one of the best roofs you can possibly do as a conventional roof. So we said if.. can we make a French slate roof that’s solar that looks as good or better than a conventional French slate roof and we were able to do that as well.
Corporate-issued supporting materials and videos demonstrating how tough the tiles were soon went viral. (Alphaville remembers the media storm well because we were caught on the receiving end of a fair chunk of vitriolic shares by fanboys who were keen to assert the demo proved Musk was indeed a genius). And from that point of view there’s no doubt the event was deemed a PR triumph -- and of course, the Tesla/SolarCity acquisition was approved less than a month later.
And yet, uncomfortable curiosities about how the whole thing was managed began to leak almost immediately....MUCH MORE
Nov. 1, 2016
Tesla, SolarCity Tumble Ahead Of New Merger Financials (TSLA; SCTY)
Attentive reader may have noticed we didn't cover Mr. Musk's press conference on the roof tile solar panels last Friday. We've been at the market long enough to recognize a master magician's "hey, look at this" misdirection. The tiles aren't going to matter to anyone for at least a year, probably two, and by then I would expect the market to have changed to the point that they will be recognized as a niche at best.
The oohing and ahhing from the assembled journos was kinda funny though; in a naïve, never had to bet real money sort of way.
TSLA $189.85 down $7.88 (-3.99%); SCTY $19.00 down 0.60 (-3.06%). Nasdaq down 1.05%.
After last Wednesday's earnings announcement the stock (very) briefly traded as high as $216.48 (16:18:30 PM).Final note: While Ms Kaminska was specifically focused on the roof tile system and the LAT article appears to be focused on the more traditional panels that SCTY was touting, the connections between the individual solar units are very, very similar.
That's down 26 bucks in four trading days. As the retail guys say "And Mr. Bigg, if you annualize that..."
And much more numerous on the roof tiles because of the tiles' smaller size.
