Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reitzensteinm | Hacker News Reader

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So are you saying they staged seven fires, or that after 7 of 240 installations caught fire they only sued because of their conflicting interests?

Tesla installed 29 MW of solar last quarter, compared to a peak of 253 MW at Solar City before the acquisition. First Solar, which isn't an apples to apples competitor since it specializes in utility scale, is on track to produce 1375 MW per quarter of panels this year.

Tesla's solar business is dead. They might turn it around with the solar roof product, but if that succeeds it will make Tesla Energy even less of a competitor to First Solar, since it has zero relevance to utility scale solar.

Even if Walmart had evil intent, why give Solar City the PR boost of hundreds of installations in the hope that they'll fail and they can later sue?

It's easy to make a nice conspiratorial quip, but there's nothing of substance here. Jumping at every shadow just numbs you for when you really should be angry.

I wonder if Tesla moving into utility scale battery makes them a competitor or ally to solar. Both right?

I cannot see how it is anything other than ally. Biggest complaint about solar for utilities is that it needs some offset to match peaks. That is accomplished with batteries.

Generally, batteries compete with the power sources that can be turned on and off quickly with control to meet spiky demand. Solar doesn't produce power at the whims of the operators and is not in that category.

Talk about putting words in someone's mouth. The original comment merely points out an interesting note in that both parties have their own interest in solar. You make so many specific counter-claims to a simple sentence that it seems like you're responding to the wrong comment.

The post he was replying to was clearly implying foul play, as it would not have any relevance to the story otherwise. What I think is odd is the fact that you parse human language like a machine rather than a human. There is more to human language than the extremely literal interpretation of the words in a sentence. Implied meaning is one of those things.

> The Walton Family also happens to own much of First Solar, a competing provider of photovoltaic cells.

Where is foul play implied in that sentence? To me it reads like more of an aside than an allegation of wrong doing. The stakes of this particular suit feel more "business-as-usual" than malicious or strategic.

The Walton family owns a lot of other things as well, but the mention of solar was clearly to suggest a conflict of interest.

If I misinterpreted the parent, I'm genuinely happy to delete my post and apologize. But I don't think I did.

I interpreted the post the same way.

Csteubs is correct - there was no implication of foul play in the original post. Typically when there's an article about a business dispute like this, you would expect the article to include relevant information about overlapping business interests, so I added that for context.

Looks like it's too late to delete or edit, but I'm sorry for misinterpreting what you were saying. Looks like I was the irrationally paranoid one, after all :)

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