Sean Ryan, of the New York State Assembly, says that he is “pleasantly surprised” at Tesla’s progress at its factory in Buffalo. He toured it on Friday. “The factory is built out. It has complete lines running, product moving around, people are there, so it’s really transformed itself into what we’ve been hoping for,” he says.
The Tesla Powerwall 2 is one of the most advanced residential energy storage systems in the world, and it all starts with the batteries. The leadership highlights the fact that Tesla is not only a carmaker, but also a major battery company that sells its batteries in a variety of form factors, including cars like the Model 3 and stationary energy products like the Powerwall.
Tesla is a tech company, not just a car company. Although, some still seem to believe otherwise. Joel Feder sparked a debate on Twitter by voicing his thoughts about Tesla. In his tweet, he says, “Reminder: Tesla is a car company. Tesla is not a tech company. It builds cars.”
From all appearances, 2019 marked the liftoff of Tesla’s Energy division. The company marked a 26% quarter-on-quarter increase in solar installations from 43 MW to 54 MW. Storage saw an equally impressive bump on its larger base from 477 MWh installed in Q3 2019 to 530 MWh in Q4 2019.
The Tesla Solarglass Roof finally makes solar beautiful and easy to look at for folks who don’t appreciate the look of conventional solar panels. I for one love solar and have always enjoyed the look of solar panels on a roof, but I also think the Solarglass roof tiles are more beautiful, more functional, and more durable than most traditional roofing surfaces.
Former Ford CEO Mark Fields had some things to say about Tesla this week. In what may be a surprise to some, Fields says that EVs are the future of the industry and the questions are: when is the payoff, and what are the adoption rates?
Ringing in 2020 brought many changes to the US solar industry, including a drop in the US federal incentive for residential solar systems. The tax credit fell from 30 percent of the solar system cost to 26 percent effective January 1st, 2020. This first step-down in the tax credit is a small piece of recognition for just how much the financials for solar have improved over the last 10 years.
Over the last couple of days, as Tesla continues on this monstrous run, the media seems to have been noting that Tesla is now more valuable than any US automaker’s market cap ever. (Tesla is currently almost exactly the market cap of Ford and GM combined, around $88 billion.) Even though I would now plant myself firmly in the “bull” camp, this is completely untrue, and I think it paints a problematic picture of Tesla.
Greetings from Vermont on New Year’s Day 2020 (at time of writing). Looking back into my archived articles here on CleanTechnica, it appears I have not had anything published since November 20, 2018. My first article regarding our rooftop solar + Tesla Powerwall 2 system was published on April 21, 2018.
Tesla is an innovation powerhouse. As part of that, it publishes a fair number of patents. We don’t get around to publishing stories on every interesting patent we see, so here’s a quick roundup of Tesla patents published in recent months that we haven’t covered.
