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Tesla To Close a Dozen Solar Facilities In 9 States (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: Electric car maker Tesla's move last week to cut 9 percent of its workforce will sharply downsize the residential solar business it bought two years ago in a controversial $2.6 billion deal, according to three internal company documents and seven current and former Tesla solar employees. The latest cuts to the division that was once SolarCity -- a sales and installation company founded by two cousins of Tesla CEO Elon Musk -- include closing about a dozen installation facilities, according to internal company documents, and ending a retail partnership with Home Depot that the current and former employees said generated about half of its sales. About 60 installation facilities remain open, according to an internal company list reviewed by Reuters. An internal company email named 14 facilities slated for closure, but the other list included only 13 of those locations.
The shills will always do their best to distort the facts. Is there really a problem when a company reorganizes? no, is there a problem when they are downsizing and shuttering 20% of their business operations, fuck yes.
I've seen short sellers jumping on this, claiming Tesla's energy division is failing, claiming that this is confirmation that the Solar City buyout was a bailout for Elon's cousins.
What I see here is Tesla restructuring to be more efficient and consistent.
Tesla is a company that grew very quickly and incorporated into itself a few smaller companies, the largest of which is Solar City.
As a result of that past there are a lot of roles that grew out of a structure that fit a much smaller company that don't make sense now, roles that are redundant between Tesla and SC, etc.
As far as I understand, SC was more of a distributed solar power company that dealt with all aspects of installation, maintenance, financing, etc.
Tesla's residential energy division is transitioning more towards having solar and battery products being something the consumer or the house builder buys directly as product.
So they sold off the maintenance/upkeep contracts to other solar companies and they're bringing all their sales people inhouse, into the same stores they display and sell their cars in.
Tesla's battery storage division is growing significantly.
And sure, like the with the Model 3 production, their new solar tile/panel factory might be taking longer than expected to ramp up, but I wouldn't take that as failure by any stretch, I often see analysts looking at last year's number, comparing it to this year's number and deciding that because it's lower or higher it is worse, without even considering it in the actual context of how the company is run.
Which isn't remotely what happened here. A dozen solar install locations are not "20% of their business operations".
Tesla's solar division (formerly SolarCity) is transitioning from being a (low margin) installer of other people's solar panels into a solar roofing product manufacturer.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? I can understand seeing Musk as a visionary and even loving his TEsla business. But their SolarCity purchase was a flea ridden dog, its sales since purchase have halved and with the shuttering of these facilities they also lose the contract that sells half their panels, i.e. the Homedepot contract. spinning this as some genius business tactic just makes you look like a retard.
"Rei" making a living as best as it can, that's what's happening.
We'll see in a few years how Tesla does. But California's rules should help Tesla's solar panel and battery business.
The New York Times says California will require that all new homes have solar power, starting in 2020.
Also, a rate change that takes effect in 2019
will charge California customers based on the time of day they use electricity. So homeowners with energy-efficiency features — a battery in particular, allowing energy to be stored for when it is most efficiently used — will avoid higher costs.
"Losing money left, right and centre doesn't mean you're not profitable."
Perhaps not, but there is often a strong correlation between losses and a lack of profitability. Plus which, it's a bit hard to classify closing facilities and firing workers as capital expenditure.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Losing money left, right and doesn't mean you're not profitable.
Losing money is the strategy of the likes of Uber and Amazon.
Being profitable is for ancient, old-fashioned buggy whip bricks and mortar type companies.
Seriously rich folks don't pay any income taxes . . . because, although they live very well, . . . on paper . . . they are losing money.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Solar City acquired its debt load working on the Solar City Gigafactory (Gigafactory 2). It had, and has under Tesla, continually been transitioning from its old, low margin business model to this.
If you have an issue with the facts, explain them, but these are the facts. You don't build the largest solar plant in the US with pocket change.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
What a bigly brave future Elon is creating for all the millennial babbys! Quick, buy smire bitcoins gais!!
Solar City acquired its debt load working on the Solar City Gigafactory (Gigafactory 2). It had, and has under Tesla, continually been transitioning from its old, low margin business model to this.
If you have an issue with the facts, explain them, but these are the facts. You don't build the largest solar plant in the US with pocket change.
So you are saying that their sales operations were losing money, so much so that it was impacting their ability to build the factory. And now they will invest heavily to stay in this same market that they are losing money in.
Which isn't remotely what happened here. A dozen solar install locations are not "20% of their business operations".
It is twenty percent of their sales operations. And they were all losing money or they would not be closing. There is nothing good about that no matter how hard you like to spin it. These are stores that Musk says have the highest foot traffic in retail, yet they still lose money. That says one thing, they can't compete.
The SolarCity purchase was a bad deal for shareholders.
Seriously rich folks don't pay any income taxes . .
It never ceases to amaze me how people believe what they want to believe. I guess you don't know any rich people, or have never looked at where most income tax revenues come from.
Whoooosh!
Solar City acquired its debt load working on the Solar City Gigafactory (Gigafactory 2). It had, and has under Tesla, continually been transitioning from its old, low margin business model to this.
If you have an issue with the facts, explain them, but these are the facts. You don't build the largest solar plant in the US with pocket change.
Musk used Tesla shareholder money to buy SolarCIty - a failing business - from his relatives. A VERY sketchy deal. His relatives piled on debt for the company and Musk bailed them out.
Aa industry that is pretty much controlled by the Chinese because they have a superior product.
Musk then created this bullshit story that the solar panels will have this "synergistic" affect for Tesla. Total bullshit and the Telsa/Musk fanboys ate it up.
Of course, you Tesla Evangelicals NEVER even thought to ask, "Gee, Musk does everything from the ground up because he thinks he can do it better than everyone else because he's an innovative genius!"
Or eh could have even just made a deal with a Chinese company to supply them and conserve his capital to keep Tesla afloat. An EVEN better idea because I'm a better businessman than Musk.
No mater HOW you slice it, Musk's purchase of SolarCity was idiotic and maybe even criminal.
And Rei, your constant apologizing and making excuses for Musk is obvious and getting old.
Stay on the ranch, kid. You belong there.
I would buy some bitcoin, but I've no coin to buy it with...
Clickbait headline: "TESLA CLOSING A DOZEN FACILITIES!!!11!!1!"
Meanwhile, in reality: "Tesla closes 13/14 out of 75 solar panel installation sites."
No wonder Elon Musk wants to get into the journalism accountability business, if he has to deal with nonsense like this all the time.
Tesla's financial structure is a house of cards.
It's board of directors is filled with Musk cronies and a cousin. Musk is a deal maker - that is all.
None have ANY manufacturing experience let alone, auto making experience. This idea that they'll do things different and better than the incumbent auto makers is a nice fairy tale; those auto makers have a century of experience in some cases. And Musk is making a lot of stupid mistakes at YOUR and other stock holders' expense.
My unsolicited advice to you - it sickened me when all those Enron shareholders lost everything:
1. Learn how to read financial statements and study Tesla's.
2. Stop reading puff pieces and comments here written by Musk's publicists and fanboys: think for yourself.
3. Look at the other car companies. Nissan and other Japanese companies have been doing a LOT in the EV market - even building their own battery plants that use their own technology that looks more promising than Tesla's. They don't get the coverage that Musk does because they're not narcissists.
4. The Chinese are getting into the EV market. And so are the Europeans. 2019 is when the shit is going to hit the fan: for Tesla.
5. There is a company already shipping EV semi-trucks: lean about them.
6. And get over your infatuation with Tesla and Musk. NEVER get emotional when it comes to investments.
7. The Chinese control the solar market.
The bigger news is a whistleblower is about to blow off the lid of one of the biggest scams of the decade. Gross margins and production numbers were overstated. Waste is rampant. Faulty batteries were installed in their $80,000+ cars in order to push production numbers up. Elon is going nuts trying to blame it on "shorts". It is very entertaining to see it implode. Meanwhile, Nissan (and others) are making a $30k EV that is available right now, no reservation required. When will Tesla make an affordable car available? Never.
Who the fuck would rely on foot traffic for solar installs?
In Musk-world, any investor who is dissatisfied is a 'short seller.'
Just one component of the illusion being spun.
You don't "rely" on it. You use it as a bullet point.
Many good business ideas fail in the sales and marketing process. And partnering with Home Depot appears to be a weak spot. Can't make any money there and can't sell on your own (possibly as a condition of the HD sales channel). HD caters to crazy little old ladies who insist on buying a flower at a hardware store. Or DIYers who don't notice when they exchange their Blum cabinet hardware line for cheap Chinese knockoffs.
Have gnu, will travel.
https://www.technologyreview.c...
Yeah, it MAY be solved and then again. H2 solves it now and for a long time. yes, fuel cells use platinum... About as much as is used in a catalytic convertor.
so we stop making catalytic convertors and start making fuel cells. net zero change
Their belief system is the result of a lack of self-discipline over their emotions. These immature adults (i.e. Progressives) will cause real harm in the long run if we let them.
Dried up? Gee that is too bad. My neighbor has a Solar City installation, the thing is a reflective eyesore. Certain time of year the reflection off the taxpayer funded solar panels glare so bad you can't even look in the direction of their house. They installed half the solar panels facing NORTH, and these are the problem.
Cutting their relationship with Home Depot, which "generated about half of its sales" is a 50% cut in revenue, though... Combining the two, it's probably closer to a 60% retrenchment of position in the market.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So what you're saying is they made a gross profit on selling product but are losing it on SG&A?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Huh... The top 1% make 20% of all income but pay 40% of all income taxes. Somehow I think they ARE paying income tax. At least, that's what the IRS says...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You add in the Home Depot contract loss and it actually runs towards closer to 25% of their total business operations.
Quit shilling.
Which isn't remotely what happened here. A dozen solar install locations are not "20% of their business operations".
Tesla's solar division (formerly SolarCity) is transitioning from being a (low margin) installer of other people's solar panels into a solar roofing product manufacturer.
In addition, if the US tariff war continues for any length of time, the cost of solar panels from outside of the US will eat into the low profit margin of the home retail solar market. Reorganizing and repositioning the retail solar division makes smart business sense.
The real reason for the merger is to find a use for Tesla car batteries that will eventually have reduced performance but still can be charged. Good idea to install worn batteries in people's garages to store power from the solar panels. In that application, energy-storage-vs-weight ratio doesn't matter. Resolves a huge future recycling problem.
As of a little past 7pm yesterday, the sun, without which these panels donâ(TM)t do anything but sit there and look ugly, by the way, failed. Solar failure is a problem with no known cause or solution. Every day, around the same time, the sun slowly, inexorably disappears, taking with it the light and much of the warmth it provided, and tells NO ONE where it is going, nor when, or even IF it will return. Now some will no doubt argue that it has, every morning in recorded history, returned, faithfully, BUT it never comes back to the spot where it disappeared the previous day, so the fact that it has in THE PAST returned is not proof it WILL return subsequently. Also, the exact time of its return, and location is a matter of mere speculation, offered by so-called astronomers, without proof. Do any of them have a time machine?!? No. As I suspected. So Tesla bailing out of the part of a company that makes panels that are useless without the inconsistent, wandering SUN makes sense. Coal, by contrast, is infinite, (we have as yet found no evidence to suggest that any one piece extracted is the LAST one, as there has, so far, always been a NEXT one,) and works day, or night. Yay coal! Also, if you WASH it after you dig it up, (you wouldnâ(TM)t eat a CARROT you just pulled out of the ground without washing it, would you?!?) it becomes something called clean coal, and oh GAWD I miss Stephen Colbert when he did stuff like this... :( ... back when he was actually funny. I want to go back to a time when Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were BOTH on Comedy Central, Donald Trump was just another stupid asshole, and the US federal government was at least still able to limp.
Ok, I burned a mod point on this for you.
Intelligent mass transit is sorely lacking in the US for many reasons, one of them being that big oil has pushed diesel engines on roads over other solutions, like trains and electric trolleys. Also, the U.S. has very poorly laid out cities compared to Europe, which makes mass transit here a pain. Compare the size of Dallas/Fort Worth to Rome, or Paris, or Frankfurt
Big oil and the traditional auto industry also love fuel cells because it preserves the status quo. Here's why:
1. There's no distribution infrastructure for fuel cell powered cars, and there likely never will be. For now, hydrogen is the only practical fuel for a fuel cell. If you think you are going to make and chill, compress or adsorb hydrogen with your own private little fueling station, then your savings and retirement strategy is likely to be lottery tickets. And shipping/piping hydrogen to a fueling stations is not feasible due to it's low volumetric efficiency. You'd need 4+ tankers hauling cryogenic liquid H2 to equal the energy delivery of a gas/diesel tanker delivery. To be practical, your gas stations would have to be near a rail terminal. The sunk cost of diesel/gasoline distribution in the U.S. is many tens of TRILLIONS of dollars. That's going to be replaced with a hydrogen system... when? The electric grid equivalent is already here.
2. Hydrogen storage techniques would result in a vehicle with a range about the same as a Nissan Leaf. It really does suck as a transportation energy carrier.
3. Fuel cells are very fragile. A little contamination in your fuel from, say, natural gas, and you've ruined the membranes that enable the electron transport. And these membranes contain platinum. Which is more expensive than gold.
4. Large scale hydrogen production is still only economical when converting fossil fuels to hydrogen. Your fuel cell vehicle would still be deriving it's energy from fossil fuels, with all the added inefficiencies of conversion and distribution thrown in. Yes, electrolysis techniques are possible... but not economically competitive. Just use the electricity directly in a battery electric car, which is very efficient.
It is actually exactly the opposite - since Tesla is allegedly making their solar panels in the US, a high import tariff, especially a long-term one, is actually a boon, because it will shield Tesla from cheap foreign competition. So, it makes "smart business sense" for them to expand, and not shut down sales. Kind of like Russian farmers expanded their sales after Putin introduced import restrictions on EU farm goods in 2014.
But of course that's assuming Tesla is a normal company which is maximizing "shareholder value", and not a Ponzi scheme to sell some stock. Which is an assumption without basis in reality.
Yes, and similar quantities of platinum are used in catalytic converters now.
No ICE engine, no catalytic converters. Net zero change.
Check out industrial electrolyzers on Alibaba (22 liters/hour with 6Kw input power at 7 bar) and solutions currently being deployed in Europe and Asia.
You're correct, centralized hydrogen production and distribution has some issues ( metals exposed to hydrogen over time become brittle... coat with polymers? ).
Decentralized production using PV and wind is MUCH more practical and clean.
So what, is this whistler blower your mother?
I'm calling bullshit. The odds are incredibly against you having that kind of insider information and if you did you could find much better things to do with it then waiting for a slashdot article about a Musk business so you could bring it up in an internet forum.
The odds are vastly more likely that, like a child, you are making this up because you either want it to be true or for attention.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
your fuel cell powered vehicle will be at best, half as efficient as an electric car, with likely a fraction of the range:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And bumble bees can't possibly fly.
It makes sense to focus your business on manufacturing your domestic products.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
Minus the cocaine.
Debt isn't the problem, it is its massive shrinking market share and collapse of sales.
Good thing correlation =/= causation.
I don't even have an opinion, I just hate when you fuckers use that shit against my arguments.
The idiots who repeat that "bumblebees" misnomer are usually the same idiots who believe that Bill Gates really thought computers would never have more than 640k RAM. You think that you're providing a witty rejoinder to his comment when, in fact, you're just further demonstrating your own ignorance.
Musk cannot do jack shit about manufacturing, it isn't his thing. If he could, Tesla would be making 5k cars a week last year instead of 1500 today.
He's a (used car) salesman and when he's shutting the sales, you know it is bad. Real bad.
And suppose a Musk "ramps up" their manufacturing of domestic products after a decade or two of capex and R&D, up to the point where they have a yard full of solar shingles, and noone to sell them?
Where do they go from there, rebuild the sales effort from scratch with that massive stock waiting and deteriorating under the tent roof?
You people live in a fantasy world - the reality is Musk is closing down the SolarCity because it is a MASSIVE loss. Actually, it was a massive loss when he fraudulently bought it out and shifted money from investors to his family, that is, to himself.
And you're shilling for a thief, being paid with stolen money. Disgusting.
But then, you said you're from Iceland, right? The country which said "we won't be paying back the money we borrowed from you, thanks". No wonder you love some corporate fraudster. That's your moral standard :)
Actually you need to recalibrate your sarcasm detector... But then, you probably had yours removed when they installed the e-meter.
I got his sarcasm; the issue here is that you're as ignorant as he is, so both of you believe the "Hurr durr scientists thought bumblebees couldn't fly" nonsense. Which is why you completely missed my point.
And then there are just the stupid people like you who miss the point entirely.
so both of you believe the "Hurr durr scientists thought bumblebees couldn't fly" nonsense
Woooooooooooooooosh. Xenu has deprived you of even the smallest trace of intelligence.
In 2015, 141.2 million taxpayers reported earning $10.14 trillion in adjusted gross income and paid $1.45 trillion in individual income taxes.
Oh the poor people having to pay a whole 14% tax. How do they still manage to put food on the table?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
WHY has the noble bigly commander in chief not just banned solar? It's dirty, unamerican, and hurts american jobs. FUCK SOLAR!! COAL IS THE FUTURE!!
Yep, and also from my link, the bottom 50% pay an average of 3.6% income tax rate. We have a HIGHLY progressive tax structure in the US, and the rich pay overwhelmingly the lion's share of taxes (include in capital gains and social security - which everyone in the 10% maxes out - and you'd find about half the Federal receipts come from those rich folks). Yet somehow - it's not enough?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well you can't balance your budget, so clearly it's not enough.
And the rich pay more capital gains taxes than the poor....Why do you think that might be...