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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.
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!
Home battery installations (including charging control and voltage conversion) of a sufficient size to make buffering worthwhile will cost at least 5000 bucks, probably more. Such a battery might save a couple of hundred bucks a year in metered electricity costs by storing lower-cost electricity and returninging it at times of higher cost. The maths don't add up.
Poor people who rent an apartment in the city rather than owning a suburbian McMansion and who can't drop five figures on a solar/battery installation will have to pay the higher metered electricity rates regardless, of course but they're poor so who cares?
> But the tech is there
Yes, electrolysis and fuel cells exist and have for some decades now. The question is if they are good enough and cheap enough to replace gasoline engines. The answer so far is no, and by such a wide margin that the only people still advocating for such are either hucksters or die-hard hopefuls.
Here's why;
The larger of the two models you linked (The $4000 one) is listed as producing 0.5 liters per minute at 7 bar. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles start at 340 bar, such as the Honda Clarity with it's ~4kg storage tank. The only other HFC vehicle I know of is the Toyota Mirai which uses a 700 bar tank...
Hydrogen is just under 0.0001 kg/L at STP. So for 4kg you need 40,000 liters of gas. That's 80,000 minutes to fill a tank, or just over 55 days. (The pressure difference is so large that the 7 bar is almost negligible here). The Clarity has an EPA rating of 240 miles per tank. It takes over 50 days to refill 240 miles worth of driving, or an equivalent of 0.18 miles of added drivable range per hour.
Compare to an EV recharging at L1 rates, which maxes out at 1.4KW. Even a mediocre EV will get 3 miles per KWh, so at L1 (standard wall outlet) that's about 4 miles of added drivable range per hour. L2 charging at home is about 5 times faster but let's keep it simple.
To get the equivalent hydrogen refueling rate, you'd need about 22 of those units... or $88,000 worth of electrolysis machines. Compressors not included. (The EVSE that plugs your electric car into the wall costs ~$200 for a nice one, and you get one with the car itself.)
The only way to make this economically viable is to consolidate, and leverage economies of scale. An electrolysis setup specially engineered for refueling a single vehicle overnight (8 hours max) might cost $20,000 to be very optimistic, but a $2,000,000 centralized station can perhaps refuel well over 100 cars per day at a few minutes each. Problem is, now you have to built enough $2,000,000 hydrogen fuel stations before enough people will buy HFC vehicles to make it a profitable thing to do. Once upon a time gasoline cars had a similar problem, but considering the only competition at the time was horses or steam powered trucks - and the fact that gasoline stores and transports rather nicely - it wasn't an insurmountable problem.
Hydrogen doesn't even make a whole lot of sense for stationary storage; The losses from electrolysis to storage to generation add up quick, and it has a tough time competing with chemical batteries for $/KWh.
=Smidge=
(I suppose to be perfectly fair with comparisons, a typical gas pump dispenses ~10 GPM, resulting in about 18,000 drivable miles per hour equivalent...)