Five and a half years later, Tesla still seems far from its goal of installing 1,000 PV roofs per week, with Electrek citing an anonymous source who said the company installed just 2.5 megawatts of PV roofs in the second quarter. On a simple calculation of a medium-sized 9.6 kW, Tesla only served about 260 homes last quarter — or about 20 per week.
If you take the average power even lower (say 5 kW), that’s only about 38 PV rooftops installed by Tesla each week — just under 4% of the 1,000 per week goal.
Recall that in 2016, Tesla presented the Solar Roof on the street known as Wisteria Lane – where “Desperate Housewives” was also filmed.
At the time, Musk said that Solar Roof does not need to be specifically mounted to the roof again, because you can use the PV panels directly as a roof. As a stylish alternative, its designed to replace those traditional solar panels that are bolted on.
Embarrassingly, Musk responded last year that they had grossly misjudged the difficulty of installing certain roofs. The field-deployed solution couldn’t be made universal, and at the time the company was forced to raise the Solar Roof quote for certain buyers.
On the other hand, Tesla may also have encountered supply chain challenges. The report notes a sharp drop in PV deployments in the first quarter of the year, which the company blames on delays in importing certain components beyond their control.
Thankfully, the company continued to perform relatively well in its larger solar business, achieving its best quarter in the U.S. residential sector since the acquisition of Solar City in 2017.
For more details, please bear with us until our 2Q 2022 report, due out July 20.
