The Loooooong Road To a Tesla Solar Roof --- A Long Island homeowner describes a tedious process that in the end helped lower her electric bill while maintaining the appearance of her Cape Cod-style home.

"I needed a new roof anyway," says Winka Dubbeldam, standing outside her house in Springs, a hamlet on the east end of Long Island. And as long as she was replacing her roof, Dubbeldam, a Dutch-born architect, planned to add photovoltaic panels, to reduce carbon emissions and her electric bills. But the solar power companies she called expected her to apply for building permits, as well as for the rebates and credits that would make the job affordable. "It was dizzying how much paperwork I would have had to do," says Dubbeldam, who runs the New York firm Archi-Tectonics and chairs the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She was also concerned that the panels would mar the appearance of her modest, Cape Cod-style house, which she uses mostly on weekends.

Then Dubbeldam heard about Tesla's Solar Roof, a system of small photovoltaic panels that look like glass roof tiles. Intrigued by the elegance of the product -- in both concept and appearance -- she paid Tesla a $100 deposit in late 2020. Then nothing happened for almost a year. "It was zombie land. I had no idea who's doing what, or what the time frame was. And there was nobody to really call." Frustrated, she says, "I almost canceled because I thought, 'These people are not real.'"

They became real in the summer of 2021, when the company began planning her installation, a process that included using a drone to see if trees were shading too much of her roof and figuring out how many tiles would be needed. The north side slopes steeply, and Tesla said she would have to put a different roof there. "But I wasn't interested in having two different roofs. So we discussed it and that took months," she says. Eventually Tesla agreed to take on the difficult task of mounting its tiles -- in this case "blanks" that lack photovoltaics -- on a roof with a close to a 50% grade. She says that when Tesla agreed to her requests, it didn't know she was a prominent academic or that she might someday talk to a reporter.

Next, a local crew arrived to remove her old roof. Unable to erect scaffolding around the house without destroying trees and shrubs, the workers used a cable system to get up and down.

Then the Tesla team laid down a proprietary membrane that provides insulation and waterproofing. Next came wooden strips to hold the glass tiles in place. Finally they installed the tiles themselves, making provisions for a skylight and various pipes and vents, and using special end pieces to give the edges of the roof a finished look. The job took nearly two weeks. (Tesla's website says the average installation requires five to seven days.)

Dubbeldam's one disappointment is that she asked Tesla for extra insulation but didn't get it. Otherwise, the workers installed the roof so carefully that she asked for only a few small adjustments -- amazing, she says, given her profession and perfectionism.

Tesla also hung several devices on the west wall of the house: a pair of its Powerwall batteries and an inverter, which turns the direct current coming from the roof into alternating current. The batteries fill up on sunny days and then power the house in cloudy weather and at night.

The price of her roof, she says, was $78,000, about $20,000 more than she was quoted for a new roof without solar panels. "For the amount of money they charge it's incredible how much work they did," she says.

She may have gotten a bargain. John Sheldon, director of new business capabilities at Renu Energy Solutions, which installs Tesla Solar Roofs in North Carolina and South Carolina, says, "There were some early adopters who got a great price point. The price from Tesla has gone up. The Solar Roof is a six-figure product -- you can anticipate $150,000 to $250,000 now." Tesla, he adds, changed its pricing model "because they weren't counting all the minute details of different roofs. They weren't prepared for that."

In an April 2021 earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, "If a roof has a lot of protuberances, or if the roof -- sort of the core structure of the roof is rotted out or is not strong enough to hold the Solar Roof, then the cost can be double, sometimes three times what our initial quotes were." Dubbeldam says she was never asked to pay more than the amount she initially agreed to.

The drawn-out process may help explain why in the seven years since Tesla introduced its Solar Roof, the number of completed jobs has failed to meet the company's expectations. Musk, who got into the solar-panel business when Tesla acquired SolarCity in 2016, said in a first quarter 2020 earnings call that by 2021, "We want to have at least 1,000 Solar Roof install teams, taking a week or perhaps a little less than a week to do an install, which gets you 1,000 a week roof installations. We see demand is good, production is good, so it's really all about the install."

But according to a study by Wood Mackenzie, a global consulting firm focused on the energy sector, Solar Roof installations averaged just 21 a week in 2022. Altogether, Tesla has installed only 3,000 solar roofssince it unveiled the product in 2016, according to the March 2023 report. Tesla tweeted that the report was "incorrect by a large margin" but offered no details.

Tesla didn't respond to requests for comment.

Musk said in April 2021 that the solar roof installation process had become a choke point for the company. "We basically made some significant mistakes in assessing the difficulty of certain roofs," he said. "Some roofs are literally two or three times easier than other roofs, so you just can't have a one-size-fits-all situation."

Rebates and a $38,000 tax credit reduced Dubbeldam's final cost to about $30,000. And she expects to recoup that amount quickly. Her electric bill in May 2021 -- pre-Tesla -- was $606. Her bill for May 2023 was under $20. Dubbeldam, who declined to say how much she paid for the 2,500-square-foot house, did worry that if the solar roof increased its value her property taxes would rise. But in most of New York state, solar systems won't raise tax assessments for at least another 15 years.

For Dubbeldam, power outages used to mean running her noisy, gas-guzzling emergency generator. Electronic devices in the house would start to beep, and some, she says, were damaged by surges when the power came back on. Now, she says, "If there's an outage I don't even know it."

There is something else that Dubbeldam -- who came to the U.S. 30 years ago to study but, she quips, "forgot to go home" -- appreciates about Tesla's approach: The company completed all the paperwork required to secure her building permit, state rebate and federal tax credit. "All I had to do was sign a few forms," she says. In addition, other solar installers she had spoken to expected her to waive her right to sue if her roof leaked after the photovoltaic panels were in place. She remembers thinking, "You're going to walk all over my roof, and cut into it, and drill into it, and then if it leaks it's my responsibility. No way."

Tesla provides a 10-year warranty covering its entire system (including "roof mounting and leaks"). Knowing that solar panels lose their effectiveness over time, Tesla also promises to replace a roof if its capacity drops below 80 percent of its initial capacity within 25 years. That could be a costly guarantee. As Tesla noted in its 2021 annual report: "While we have performed extensive internal testing on our products and features, we currently have a limited frame of reference by which to evaluate their long-term quality, reliability, durability and performance characteristics."

Dubbeldam occasionally checks the Tesla app on her phone. It shows her how much electricity her roof is making, how much her house is using, and how much is left in her Powerwall battery. With her house generating power and her compact two-year-old Tesla Y charging in her driveway, Dubbeldam says, "it's going up and going down. It's like a game."" [1]

1. MANSION --- Inside Story: The Loooooong Road To a Tesla Solar Roof --- A Long Island homeowner describes a tedious process that in the end helped lower her electric bill while maintaining the appearance of her Cape Cod-style home. Bernstein, Fred A. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 18 Aug 2023: M.4.