These are not easy hours for Tesla , the Elon Musk company. Trapped in "an inferno of production" - the founder's own words -, the company seems unable to manufacture its latest electric vehicle, the Model 3 , at the pace demanded by the market. The money he has available to do it is exhausted and Wall Street seems to have lost patience. Only in the last week, the company has lost more than 8,000 million dollars of stock market capitalization.
Let's add an investigation for the accident of a Model X in California that could have been circulating with the autopilot, a reduction in the classification of the bonds issued by the company by a rating company and a call for review of more than 120,000 Tesla vehicles. Model S for a failure in the steering wheel and we will have the particular Via Crucis that faces these days Musk.
But all is not bad news and although it is usually associated with Tesla with the manufacture of vehicles, his other business, that of domestic energy , seems to be finally getting the necessary traction.
This week Tesla has completed the installation in the USA of the first roofs with solar tiles capable of generating solar energy . The tiles, available in four different formats to adapt to various architectural styles, were announced at the end of 2016 but did not start to be manufactured in the plant that the company owns in the city of Buffalo, in the US state of New York, until November. 2017. Only some employees of the company, until now, had been able to test them as part of the testing phase.
The first installation, in a house in a suburb of the city of San José, in California, has finally been completed in less than three weeks and has a generating capacity of 9.9 Kw / h , enough -according to the company- to power all the electrical devices of the house and a high capacity battery that supplies power to the house and recharges electric vehicles at night.
Tesla has also installed a similar roof in a house near the city of San Francisco owned by Tri Huynh, an employee of the Nvidia semiconductor company and hopes to soon offer more real examples of the technology, which is more expensive than installing solar panels directly. on a roof but that has the advantage of camouflage better in the environment. The tiles are indistinguishable from conventional tiles and have a lifetime guarantee against hail and other inclemency.
Not all the surface of these roofs is covered by these concealed solar panels. According to the orientation, the energy needs of the occupants and the latitude of the house, Tesla recommends one coverage or another, usually the figure moves around 35% or 40% of the roof surface .
It is not a cheap technology. The price of solar tiles is $ 425 per square meter of coverage. The replicas that are not capable of generating energy but that are installed to maintain the same aesthetic throughout the roof, cost about 115 dollars per square meter.
For a roof of an average house this can suppose an expense of more than 100,000 dollars once the manpower and the batteries that accompany the system are added but, according to Tesla, the greater durability of these tiles in front of the conventional ones and the saving energy make the result compensate.
For now, the first two clients are delighted with the result, although they have to wait for the local electric company to give them approval to start using them. Huynh, however, confesses that for the set to be to his liking, he still lacks a piece, a Tesla Model 3 that he booked a year ago but still finds himself in that inferno that Musk does not seem to find an outlet for.
