https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/01/amazon-took-solar-rooftops-o...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/tesla-and-walmart-settle-ove...
Might have been a Tesla issue in both cases.
Probably a lot easier on the business risk side of things to not have solar on the roof because then the risk for a fire is massively reduced in the first place.
I couldn't find a local solar installer that wanted to use the type of cheap inverters that Tesla wanted to use. My neighbor has to have Tesla come out about once a year to fix issues.
The first is the "solar roof" sort of thing that... we'll see how maintainable it is, but you get to write a properly large check for it, and most of the people I know with it have a couple Powerwalls, and are quite adverse to sharing any sort of actual pricing on it, muttering about "Well, wife acceptance factor" and "But it'll be worth it in power outages..." and such. In other words, almost certainly north of $5/W, and they likely didn't get an itemized invoice of materials/labor/etc.
Tesla also, in some markets, has a "standard solar panel" offering that typically comes in around $2.50/W, give or take, and... well, you get what you pay for, typically. It ranges from "decent and a good deal" to "a hot mess," and you've no idea what you're going to get ahead of time.
... and then there are people like me who have sub-$1.50/W installs (DIY). Mine came in around there, but after figuring out how to optimize it better, a neighbor's build came in around $1/W for a 21kW system.
//EDIT: And, yes, it takes a lot of learning to do. Cross that with the tens of thousands of dollars saved, I think it's well worth the hassle.
Any ideas on what’s driving the cost for installs in the US compared to the EU? I just drove through Florida on vacation and it’s mind boggling to me how few roofs have PV here.
That's not a solar problem, that's an installer problem. Clearly you need to have well-qualified people doing and regularly inspecting the installing, just as you would with any type of large-scale infrastructure. Bridges also collapse when they're not inspected, airplanes fall out of the sky.
We put solar on our house and did some pretty rigorous research into the tech precisely because of this concern. After spending many nights/hours understanding the tech in this industry, I can confidently say it matters less about the current generation of solar tech. But, while the degree of quality in solar products exist, what really matters are the contractors that install it. I did not read the articles and I don't want to claim that there's direct causation by contractors, but if I were a betting man, I'd easily put money on the quality of the installation as opposed to the actual tech provided.
I think it’s linked to installation. Some sources say they didn’t remove them after the fires