In 2016, Elon Musk stepped onstage to show us the home of the future.  As well as a battery in its two-car garage, the future home had solar roof tiles in a choice of slate grey or Tuscan red.

Tesla acquired Solarcity for $2.6bn in 2016. Marking the deal, a blog post on the Tesla website talked up the prospect of a rooftop solar panel “that looks better and is more durable than a normal roof, that can be easily customized to fit the unique needs of each house, and that will lower costs to the consumer.” Seven years later, having won its lawsuit over the purchase of Solarcity, what was once a pillar of the Tesla strategy has been pushed further and further into the background.  Not much is said any more about the status of the Solar Roof, nor Tesla’s solar efforts more generally. Neither “Solar” nor “Energy Generation” garnered a mention in the company’s Q3 2023 earnings call. Tesla’s latest investor day presentation (subtitle: “Sustainable Energy For All of Earth”) offers some Masa-isms around the company’s plans for storage.

To be fair, there are a few reasons why Tesla might want to offer a nuanced view of its once-vaunted solar business.  Across the solar industry, the bloom is well and truly off the rose. 

Sunrun, once an industry leader with a market cap of $20bn in 2021, now has a market cap of $2bn and recently said it was “rapidly transitioning to a storage-first company.”  Perhaps Sunrun is particularly keen to focus investor attention away from solar, given that it recently announced a $1.2bn goodwill writedown relating to its 2020 purchase of solar company Vivint for $3.2bn.  Many of the largest names in the US solar industry have shared Sunrun’s pain as higher interest rates, cost inflation, California regulatory changes and supply chain issues have checked much of the momentum created by the IRA. The industry’s woes have not passed Tesla by, although it has idiosyncratic challenges as well. Tesla’s solar deployment volumes have been anaemic. 

Produced primarily in its star-crossed Buffalo Gigafactory 2, the Solar Roof is an actual product a person can buy, which isn’t always the case with Tesla launches. But deployments, once targeted by the company to run at 1,000 per week, last year were estimated to average 21 per week. mPrices were hiked in 2021, with at least one customer charged more than double the contract cost, which resulted in a wave of cancellations and a class-action lawsuit that Tesla paid $6mn to settle. Between Tesla’s 10ks of 2021 and 2022, Solar Roof deployments nearly halved.