SolarCity/Tesla powered house
Credit: SolarCity
Apparently it wasn’t just empty talk when Elon Musk and his cousin Lyndon Rive, CEO of SolarCity, said that “within 10 years, every SolarCity system will come with batteries from Tesla’s Gigafactory“. Tesla’s new Powerwall home battery has barely been announced that SolarCity is already saying that it will offer it as part of its ‘turnkey’ system, along with solar panels and control systems.
In a blog post, Peter Rive, SolarCity’s CTO, reiterated the vision that storage would soon become a default component of his systems: “Using Tesla’s suite of batteries for homes and businesses, SolarCity’s fully-installed battery and solar system costs are one-third of what they were a year ago. We expect costs to continue to decline as manufacturing scales, and over the next 5-10 years, these cost reductions will make it feasible to deploy a battery by default with all of our solar power systems.”
My son-in-law worked for Solar City in Los Angeles for two years. The product is great but the treatment of the salespeople, from what he told me, is modeled after the “Glengarry, Glenross” David Mamet play, where salespeople are pushed to the limit to meet monthly quotas and intimidated and reprimanded when they don’t. The atmosphere in the office was pretty edgy. He is a terrific salesman, but he was dismissed after being the top seller in his office for several months and then failing to meet quotas on a few occasions. It is a very expensive package and requires real skills on the part of the salespeople to convince the buyer. Solar City is the wave of the future, but human beings are in the equation and need to be respected.
Just yesterday I learned that SolarCity was founded by 2 guys who are related to Musk.