Tesla’s solar-shingle stumble

Carmaker’s business plagued by price hikes, unfulfilled promises

On an October evening five years ago, Elon Musk used a former set for “Desperate Housewives” to show off Tesla’s latest innovation: roof shingles that can generate electricity from the sun without unsightly solar panels.

After delays, Tesla began rolling out the shingles in a big way this year, but it is already encountering a problem. The company is hitting some customers with price increases before installation that are tens of thousands of dollars higher than earlier quotes, angering early adopters and raising questions about how Tesla, which is better known for its electric cars, is running its once dominant rooftop solar business.

Dr. Peter Quint was eager to install Tesla’s solar shingles on his 4,000-square-foot home in Portland,

Oregon, until the company raised the price to $112,000, from $75,000, in a terse email.

When he called Tesla for an explanation, he was put on hold for more than three hours.

“I said, ‘This isn’t real, right?’ ” said Quint, whose specialty is pediatric critical care. “The price started inching up. We could deal with that. Then this. At that price, in our opinion, it’s highway robbery.”

The price increases are the latest misstep by Tesla’s solar unit, which also sells conventional panels. The company has gone from the biggest rooftop solar installer in the country to a distant second in the last several years. An effort to win back market share by slashing the price of panels in 2019 has done little to stem the slide.

At the “Housewives” set at Universal Studios in 2016, Musk, the company’s chief executive, promised that Tesla’s new shingles would turbocharge installations by attracting homeowners who found solar panels ugly.

But shingles remain such a tiny segment of the solar market that few industry groups and analysts bother to track installations.

Tesla is not the only company to pursue the idea of embedding solar cells, which covert sunlight into electricity, in shingles. Dow Chemical, CertainTeed, Suntegra and Luma, among others, have offered similar products with limited success.

But given Musk’s success with Tesla’s electric cars and SpaceX’s rockets, Tesla’s glass shingles attracted outsize attention. He promised that they would be much better than anything anybody else had come up with and come in a variety of styles so they could resemble asphalt, slate and Spanish barrel tiles to fit the aesthetic of each home.

Many of those promises remain just that. Tesla sells only one version, which resembles the common asphalt shingle.

Tesla has been losing market share even as demand for rooftop solar has increased sharply as panels have become more affordable. In terms of energy-generating capacity, annual installations are about 13 times as great as they were a decade

A crew installs Tesla solar shingles last month at a home in Warren, Vermont. Tesla is charging tens of thousands of dollars more than earlier quotes to cover roofs with its much-anticipated solar shingles, angering some customers.

ago, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Solar shingles historically have been 20% to 30% less efficient at converting sunshine to electricity than panels, said Vikram Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of EnergySage, a solar comparison-shopping

service. But, he said, solar shingles are appealing to many homeowners because the roofs look like any other.

However, Tesla’s recent price increases suggest that solar shingles will remain a niche product for now, Aggarwal said.