SolarCity

A few months after SolarCity bought the former headquarters of the defunct solar panel manufacturer, Solyndra,  Tesla is now announcing that they signed a lease for the 500,000 square feet plant Solyndra used to operate. The building is located just a few minutes away from Tesla’s Fremont factory.

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The LA Times published an article over the weekend titled “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by government subsidies”. The publication compiled data from government programs and estimated that Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, three companies Musk is involved in, have benefited from “$4.9 billion in government support”. Saturday, I wrote an opinion piece about how I thought the article is grossly one-sided. Since then, the LA Times released a breakdown of the $4.9 billion figure.

Here is the complete breakdown with my comments on each government incentive and information that wasn’t included or simply glanced over in the LA Times article:

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The Times published an article over the weekend titled “Elon Musk’s growing empire is fueled by government subsidies”. The article is well-researched and mostly accurate, but it conveys a clear disdain for the fact that Musk’s companies are taking advantage of the government subsidies available to them.

The publication compiled data from government programs and came to the conclusion that Tesla Motors, SolarCity and SpaceX, three companies Musk is involved in, have benefited from an “estimated $4.9 billion in government support”. I will not dispute the actual amount, but I’d like to bring up a few points which weren’t discussed in the article and that are highly relevant to the subject.

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SolarCity is currently building a solar panel factory in Buffalo. The construction site is not unlike Tesla’s Gigafactory under construction in Nevada. SolarCity’s facility, which could also be dubbed a “Gigafactory” since its planned output is also estimated in gigawatts, has a similar 2-storey steel structure as the one Tesla is building for its battery factory. 

Update: SolarCity and Tesla are not sharing any designs or contractors for their respective factory projects according to Kady Cooper, Director of Communications at SolarCity.

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Thursday night, Tesla unveiled its home battery system starting at $3,000 for a 7kWh pack. Tesla also offers a 10kWh pack for $3,500. These prices don’t include the inverter nor the installation. Today, SolarCity confirmed to Bloomberg that they are selling the new 10kWh battery pack with inverter and installation for $7,140.

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Following Tesla’s introduction of a new selection of battery packs for residential, commercial and industrial use, SolarCity announced the integration of these batteries to their solar system offering. This new offering will include the option to go completely off-grid for select customers starting by home owners in Hawaii.

Combining photovoltaic panels with Tesla’s battery packs will allow home owners to power their house on sunlight day and night.

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11:24 PM
power wall is “beautiful, fits on the wall, garage wall or outside wall of your house. 6 inches thick. 3 feet across and tall. Really easy to fit in garage or your house.”

[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: Connected to Internet.
Smart micro grids
Ten year guarantee
[11:25 PM] Mark Gurman: “Nothing remotely in these price points”
“Our goal here is to fundamentally change how the world uses energy”
[11:26 PM] Seth Weintraub: Tesla’s selling price to installers is $3500 for 10kWh and $3000 for 7kWh. (Price excludes inverter and installation.) Deliveries begin in late Summer.

[11:27 PM] Mark Gurman: Musk says great for cold climates when there are power outages and ice storms
Good thermal management system for very cold environments

[11:29 PM] Jon Jivan: Wayyy below suggested price of $13k by some outlets. Nice to see it come in so cheap.
[11:29 PM] Mark Gurman: “Going to be huge in Germany”

[11:31 PM] Mark Gurman: Doesn’t require heavy foundations
“the integration at the system level is the big differentiator”
Ready to scale to a very large scale today

[11:32 PM] Mark Gurman: they’ve been using it for a year in house

[11:33 PM] Mark Gurman: Tesla will continue to open source the patents on all these
[11:34 PM] Mark Gurman: Giga factory designed in the same as a giant car
Fundamentally different way than approaching manufacturing and engineering

[11:39 PM] Mark Gurman: Installable by two people in half hour to an hour
Installation prices up to distributors

[11:42 PM] Mark Gurman: “This would be bigger in terms of pack utilization than the car industry, actually comparable size”
[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: international, still need to figure out certified installers however

[11:43 PM] Mark Gurman: it’ll scale as fast as we can scale it.

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: international next year
Germany and Australia late this year

[11:44 PM] Mark Gurman: China early next year

Musk said “we own tesla energy.com” when asked if they’d change from tesla motors as name

Update: Here’s our first look. Looks familiar

https://twitter.com/TomerDavid_/status/593964617161805824

https://twitter.com/markgurman/status/593967615887872000

Update: Tesla Energy!

Tesla Energy Press Kit

 

We’ll be covering the Tesla Battery announcement later tonight but Tesla just unleashed the livestream page. Check back soon. We’ll run down the highlights here. We’re expecting Tesla to announce home and industrial battery products that allow users to store solar and lower cost, high availability electricity for use at night or during higher cost/watt time periods.  The battery will be a down payment and rental fee which should more than pay for itself in electric bill savings.

There has been further speculation that, with this announcement, Tesla Motors will change its name to Tesla, Inc or Telsa Energy to note that it is an energy storage company, not just a car company.  We’ll find out more soon, stay tuned.

 

Earlier today, Tesla filed their notice with the SEC for their 2015 annual shareholders meeting to be held on June 9th. In these filings, Tesla is required to review transactions with related parties. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, is Chairman and an important shareholder of SolarCity. Therefore Tesla needs to publicly acknowledge transactions between the two companies.

Tesla recently confirmed in an email to investors that their announcement on April 30th will indeed be a home battery system and an energy storage system for utilities. It has been known for a while that Tesla was testing these home battery systems through SolarCity. In the same filings last year, the company confirmed approximately $1.6 million in revenue from SolarCity during fiscal year 2013 for the sales of stationary batteries.

Today, Tesla confirmed that the revenue from SolarCity for stationary batteries went up to $2.7 million for the fiscal year 2014.

According to Rod Lache from Deutsche Bank, if SolarCity were to reach their goal of 1 million customers by 2018 and if Tesla would equip half of their customers with home battery systems, Tesla could generate $1.5 billion of revenue through 2018 from SolarCity. Tesla made $3.2 billion in revenue last year.

Tesla is going to make a home battery announcement on April 30th. It will be a big deal. But it isn’t hard to find some of the details on the batteries Tesla is going to offer. Analysts, like above^ are claiming to have “secret info” on the announcement: Tesla secretly tested its battery solution with 300 customers.

But that info and much more is available on Solar City’s website. In fact, Tesla’s Home Batteries including pictures and lots of details are all  hidden in plain sight:

Tesla will announce a consumer battery pack for running a house in the coming months

— Seth Weintraub (@llsethj) February 12, 2015

Tesla also gave plenty of details on their earnings call in February where Musk talked about releasing a consumer battery project:

Yes, we’re going to do — we’re going to unveil some of the Tesla home battery consumer battery that will be for you using and people’s houses or businesses, fairly soon. We have to design and it should start going into production probably about six months or so. We’ll probably got to wait to have sort of product availing it’s probably in the next month or two. It’s really great. I’m really excited about it.

If you’ve talked to Solar City, they may have provided you with the specs of Tesla’s prototype battery:

Tesla will certainly announce some new innovations that perhaps differentiate them from other batteries. Being able to Supercharge your Model S at home would be nice. Perhaps a Webb/App controller with some novel uses would be good.

I’d like to see it compared against home generators which cost a lot more, even before considering the savings against time of use metering in power. We’ll be on hand on the 30th to see what is on offer.

 

 

Interesting move. Juniper makes large scale networking equipment that runs on the backbone of the Internet and at ISPs as well as larger corporations. Denholm began her career in Australia serving at Toyota Motor Corporation for seven years and at Arthur Andersen and Company for five years in various finance assignments.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk yesterday said that the company was partnering with other companies in building its battery Giga-factory, a plant that he said that is far larger than any other battery factory on earth. Why? If Tesla is going to go mas market with its Model E, it is going to need to get far more battery power than is available on earth right now.

Musk said they were looking for a US state where the factory was going to be built and would announce plans at next month’s Q4 earnings call. He also said Tesla would be partnering with ‘other companies’ on the plant.  Here’s why I think Tesla will partner with Solar City and Panasonic on the plant:

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Kind of a no-brainer IMO. Fortune doesn’t mention it but Musk has taken to social media and direct communication with the public unlike any CEO and certainly any Car/Aerospace CEO of our time. His honest and often overly transparent views have managed to turn media controversy into positives for the company.

Also throw in the fact that he’s CEO of two game-changing companies and the Chairman and largest stakeholder of another: Solar City….and if he wasn’t so busy, he’d be building a ultra high-speed hyperloop train connecting Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Also he doesn’t seem to be too terribly pretentious..and there you go.

FORTUNE NAMES ELON MUSK THE 2013 FORTUNE BUSINESSPERSON OF THE YEAR

FORTUNE’s 2013 List of the Top 50 People in Business Includes: The “Activist Investor” at #2; “Pony” Ma Huateng at #3; Angela Ahrendts at #4; Jeff Bewkes and Reed Hastings tie for #5

Musk Tells FORTUNE Contributor and TED Curator Chris Anderson About the Early Years at Tesla and SpaceX: “I thought the likeliest outcome was failure”

(New York, November 21, 2013) – Today, FORTUNE reveals its annual choice for Businessperson of the Year and names Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX and Chairman of SolarCity, the 2013 FORTUNE Businessperson of the Year. Chris Anderson, TED Curator, writes the cover story on Musk, comparing him to Steve Jobs. FORTUNE also reveals its list of the Top 50 People in Business for 2013, which includes Pony Ma, Angela Ahrendts, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Warren Buffett, Marissa Mayer, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. FORTUNE Editors write: “Fortune’s annual list is filled with executives who defied expectations (buying a newspaper, leaving luxury for Apple), executed big turnarounds, and delivered stellar results for their shareholders.”

Adam Lashinsky writes the blurb:

Tesla, SpaceX, SolarCity

–Cultural impact
–No. 1 revenue gainer
–No. 2 stock price gainer

It is no Secret that Elon Musk is a triple threat: The co-founder of PayPal has gone on to disrupt aeronautics with Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX; shake up the auto business with Tesla Motors; and retool the energy sector with SolarCity. (He is CEO of the first two companies and chairman and largest shareholder of the third.) But 2013 was an especially notable year for Musk, as investors and consumers wholeheartedly embraced his ideas and vision. After a rocky start a decade ago, Tesla has emerged to become the world’s most prominent maker of all-electric cars. Revenue at Tesla is up more than 12-fold for the first three quarters of the year, and the company is on track to top $2 billion in sales in 2013. The stock is up more than fourfold year to date, and that’s after giving back some gains when recent vehicle sales missed some analysts’ estimates. (A series of troubling car battery fires has not helped.) And just as SpaceX has helped reignite interest in space exploration, Musk’s plans for a “hyperloop” between San Francisco and Los Angeles got Americans buzzing about ultra-high-speed transit when Musk released his design plans in August. Musk’s creations have already made him tremendously wealthy — Bloomberg Wealth says he is worth $7.7 billion — but it is his audacity and tenacity that make him Fortune’s Businessperson of the Year.

Not terribly surprising considering the year and the press. Congrats!
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