Renowned technology entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk has revealed what he would focus on in immediate future — and it is not electric cars or spacecrafts. During the unveiling of Tesla’s Model Y compact electric SUV, Musk said the company will focus on solar roof in 2019. Solar Roof is referred to tesla’s glass solar tiles that comes with an integrated Powerwall battery that the company claimed to be three times stronger than standard roofing tiles and hence, the warranty offered is the lifetime of the house.
“This is definitely going to be the year of the Solar Roof and Powerwall,” said digital news portal Inverse citing Musk as saying during the unveiling in California, adding that such efforts will “ultimately be really critical for transitioning the world to sustainable energy.”
Talking about the company’s goal of a sustainable energy for the future, Musk said that “Solar plus battery plus electric vehicles, we have a fully sustainable future.” “That’s a future you can feel really excited and optimistic about. I think that really matters,” he added.
Solar Roof ain’t altogether a new product for the company. Tesla had introduced prototype of the tiles in October 2016. In fact, for the new business Tesla had also acquired California solar energy services company SolarCity for a whopping $2.6 billion in the same year.
However, Tesla had to go through issues around insufficient capacity to produce its Model 3 that the company started producing in July 2017. With a backlog of nearly 500,000 orders, the company had set a target of producing 5,000 cars per week that it continued to miss till June 2018. 2018, said Musk “felt like probably aging five years in one,” Inverse said.
This caused the Solar Roof project to be sidelined. But now the team can “finally allocate engineering attention” to solar projects.
Nonetheless, it won’t be Tesla alone in the solar tiles market. GAF, among the largest roofing companies globally, Sunrun, Vivint Solar, PetersenDean Roofing & Solar are other solar roofing companies in the US that Tesla would be battling out.