Tesla Motors Inc is ready to start taking deposits for its solar roof tiles.
The company will begin taking orders next month, chief executive officer Elon Musk said on Twitter on Friday.
The company has not disclosed detailed pricing on the tiles, but that would presumably become clear when people start putting down deposits. Installations are to begin in the middle of this year, according to the company’s Web site.
The roof tiles are made of textured glass. From most viewing angles, they look just like ordinary shingles, but they allow light to pass through from above onto a standard flat solar cell.
The plan is for Panasonic Corp to produce the solar cells at Tesla’s factory in Buffalo, New York, and for Tesla to put together the glass tiles and everything that goes along with them.
After Tesla acquired SolarCity Corp in November last year, Musk said Tesla’s new solar roof product will cost less to manufacture and install than a traditional roof — even before savings from the power bill.
“Electricity,” Musk said, “is just a bonus.”
The solar tiles are still likely to be a premium product: The terra cotta and slate roofs Tesla mimicked are among the most expensive roofing materials on the US market — costing as much as 20 times more than cheap asphalt shingles.
The company has been generating a “waiting list” of people who might be interested in the glass solar tiles since the product was unveiled in October last year. The wait might soon be over.
However, it might not be the best time to be a mid-size US rooftop solar company.
Growth is slowing nationally, especially in California, the biggest solar market. Interest rates are creeping up. As larger rivals gain share and expand into new cities and states, some of the smaller ones are looking like possible takeover targets or closing down.
The new landscape is filtering out what Angelo Zino, a New York-based analyst at CFRA Research, described on Friday as “the weaker hands.”
Sungevity Inc filed for bankruptcy this month, following the September last year collapse of Verengo Inc. Another rooftop company, OneRoof Energy Inc, is being wound down.
“It’s a huge inflection point,’’ Spruce Finance Inc chief executive officer Nat Kreamer said in an interview at Infocast’s Solar Power Finance & Investment Summit in San Diego. “There are too many companies going after the same margins at the same time.”
Consolidation is already under way, said David Burton, a New York-based partner at Mayer Brown LLP, who moderated a panel discussion at the event.
“You’ll likely see more acquisitions or bankruptcies from firms that were extremely exposed to California and the southwest,” New York-based Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Hugh Bromley said. “That’s what we saw from Verengo and Sungevity: They didn’t pivot quickly enough into new markets.”
Clean-energy industries have seen consolidation before. Solar manufacturers acquired developers to expand into building power plants. In wind, there were opportunistic acquisitions of small developers by larger power companies.
However, it is a different story now for residential solar, Burton said.
“It’s not an upside kind of thing like with wind, it’s a desperation kind of thing,” Burton said in an interview on Friday. “Some residential solar companies are running out of cash.”
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