Tesla's solar factory in Buffalo fizzles

Having seriously contemplated getting one of these roofs, the real problem was working with Tesla. Fine, Tesla sells cars with essentially no customer service. It’s a thing you order off a menu, and they make it and deliver it.

But a roof is fundamentally a custom installation. You need flashings. You need it to integrate with gutters. You need to make sure the thing is compatible with the roof slope. You may need penetrations. You need to have drawings and specs for the contractor and the structural engineer. You probably need a (correct!) permit drawing. Someone needs to answer the phone when the GC calls. And you need the thing installed, on time, competently, so the building can have a roof when it needs it.

Tesla is terrible at this. Any of a large number of roofers who sell products from various large and small roofing vendors can pull it off — it’s not hard, it’s not rocket science, but it requires an actual human who has volition. Maybe AI or really amazing construction software will do this some day, but not yet.

Main problem is that solar roof was never a serious product. It was vaporware announced by Elon to justify bailing out SolarCity with Tesla money. That’s it. Really. There’s nothing more to the story.

I would go even further tbh. Solar panels on the roof isn’t something that people want to hide. Nobody wants to admit it but my guess is the majority of people that get solar panels want to show them off, not hide them.

Edit: and that’s not a judgement by me either. If I had solar panels I’d want to show them off as well. They’d be a good conversation piece for neighbors.

> lots of people who want solar, but my guess is very few are willing to pay even +25% to make it "look seamless", let alone 3x

As someone who's putting solar panels on his roof, the efficiency gap was also a dealbreaker. I don't know how many people are in the overlap of wanting solar panels but finding them visually hideous.

Seamless for us would mean roughly twice as much power output - the gables on our roof are inconveniently sized for standard panels. Combine that with the cost of a new roof and I’d consider it at a modest markup, but they’d have to convince me it has better than Tesla build quality.

It's hard to look at even $25k for a solar roof when I see panels on sunelec.com going for ~ .33/watt, sometimes less.

but how much does a normal tile roof cost? (no solar, no panels)

because the solar roof cost should not be compared to the cost of panels. Its not replacing panels it replacing the entire roof.

The Great American Jobs Scam, which was written almost two decades ago, covers how these handouts never work out in favor of the state/taxpayers.

https://goodjobsfirst.org/gajs/

The biggest receiver of welfare in the US, aside from possibly defense contractors, is Walmart. They pay their employees so little that most of them are dependent upon social programs, and Walmart had dedicated staff for helping employees apply for those programs.

How do you measure 'actually working out'? The generalized NY Excelsior tax-cuts-in-exchange-for-jobs program [1] is much larger than one factory and is regarded by some as having a net positive impact to the state.

[1]: https://dos.ny.gov/system/files/documents/2021/04/excelsiorj...

I don't know, but they'r pretty persistent regardless.

Almost $9 billion in corporate incentives in 2021[0]

https://info.siteselectiongroup.com/blog/largest-economic-in....

So far, the Nevada Tesla Gigafactory stuff is still considered an enormously successful endeavor.

Probably the exception that proves the rule though.

Pretty much every major industrial facility receives lots of stuff. So yes, lots of them have worked out.

A notable good example is the Gigafactory in Nevada, where not only is the Gigafactory doing as well in terms of jobs as expected, but also that in Nevada lots of other battery companies have been growing.

It’s probably the same distribution of return as venture investment: even if one in 20 of 50 work, if they repay their cost a hundred-fold, it’s worth doing more of them, including riskier ones.

Yeah, Tesla's core lifeline for years was state-level ZEV credits, not to mention the various EV subsidy schemes.

> So that's what the whole issue is about - but there's a more blatantly obvious issue, which is that no company or research center in the USA has mastered high-volume monocrystalline silicon ingot production, while Chinese companies have. Why? The US doesn't provide R&D funding for this kind of technological development, hence China is well ahead. In contrast in China this has been under steady development for at least a decade:

Sorry, but that's HIGHLY revisionist.

China dumped cheap, crappy solar cells into the US and wiped out all the domestic manufacturers. I knew of lots of solar installers who got out of the business because they knew they were going to be on the hook when the Chinese solar cells all died early. And in 5 years that was exactly what happened. These tariffs didn't come fast enough, unfortunately.

Another part of the reason why solar installations have slowed down considerably is directly attributable to the fact that homeowners now know that the Chinese cells won't actually last the 15-20 years that they are supposed to. So, unless you can amortize over 5 years, nobody is going to risk installing them. Electricity is neither expensive enough nor sunlight plentiful enough to pull that off in 90+% of the US.