Tesla Solar Sales Declined for 4 Qtrs. Then Tesla Stopped Publishing the Numbers

Summary

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News! I have to put my hands up — when Tesla acquired SolarCity in 2016, I supported the decision. Yes, Elon Musk was chairman of both companies. Yes, it was his cousins who were CEO and CTO, and had founded the company based on a suggestion from Elon Musk at Burning Man. Yes, Tesla was saving SolarCity financially in key ways. Nonetheless, I thought there was superb synergy between the companies and huge potential for more solar sales through the Tesla brand, sales network, and customer base. Since then, Tesla has done some good stuff, but I have to say that I’ve been very disappointed in Tesla’s rather mild, disconnected, and overall lame efforts to sell more rooftop solar power. Something I noticed a while back proved the point. Tesla’s quarterly rooftop solar power installations started dropping, and dropping, and dropping. At some point, I realized this had gone from an up & down segment of Tesla’s business to a long-term, significant decline. I decided to go back and actually see how long Tesla had been seeing its solar business decline. Unfortunately, the findings weren’t uplifting. After it’s “last good quarter,” the 4th quarter of 2022, when 100 megawatts (MW) of solar power were installed, Tesla’s rooftop solar installations declined for at least 4 consecutive quarters. The company published the numbers for those 4 quarters, but then, in the next quarter, Q1 2024, Tesla simply lamented that its solar installations had declined year over year but stopped publishing those figures. Presumably, the rooftop solar sales decline continued — otherwise, Tesla would have highlighted a return to growth. But we just can’t be certain of that in every quarter. In the “Assets” section of Tesla’s quarterly financial reports, the company does still publish “Solar energy systems, net.” And the totals for that have continued to decline in every quarter since then. So, if we presume continued q...