Freesuns weighs US expansion after Tesla stops selling solar roofs

Kate Collardson handles operations at Solar Service of Colorado, a maintenance and inspection firm, and she has watched roofers lose patience with solar shingle jobs. She said of bringing one in: "You try to put a roofer into the equation and they're going, 'This is taking forever. I'm losing money. I could have sold 10 roofing jobs in the time that it takes me to sell this one'." ^[8] A solar roof usually needs roofers, solar installers and electricians working together. The building regulations also tend to be more complex than for panels ^[7]. Deborah Learoyd, Freesuns' chief executive, said her unit costs are slowly falling ^[20]. She puts much of the price somewhere else: "a lot of the cost is actually the fact that every roof is a little bit different. And so it has to be engineered a little bit differently, installed a little bit differently" ^[5]. Components are still made in small batches, and that limits economies of scale and standardisation ^[6]. The sales pitch is a roof that looks like an ordinary roof. Some people in the US "still hate the look of solar", Collardson said ^[19], and historic buildings face heritage rules that limit changes to their appearance ^[18]. What the owner actually gets is a roof that produces less. Tiles are smaller. They sit close to the roof with less airflow, heat cuts their output, and so far more roof area is needed for the same energy ^[13]. Coloured tiles do worse still. "The reason why all solar cells are black, and increasingly the whole panel is now black, is because black is the best absorbing colour," said Ben Graves, co-founder of UK solar company Sunsave ^[14]. The tile pitch assumes buyers are paying to keep panels out of sight. Graves describes buyers differently: appearance mattered more five years ago, and now "the vast majority of consumers are most interested in how much they can save" ^[16]. Sunsave does not offer solar roofs. "Most people in the UK just don't have enough money to pay for it," Graves said ^[15]. Martin Heinrich, who leads a research group at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, wants a different comparison: "Let's not compare PV roof tiles to a standard PV system, but look at PV roof tiles as generating additional electricity from our roofs instead of just having the roof sit there," he said ^[17]. Service calls are where the premium comes back. "With solar shingles, we don't really have the benefit of that mapping; there's no room underneath the shingle for the electronics," Collardson said. Thermal cameras can find the faulty tiles ^[10]. Reaching them is harder. "You can remove the one in the middle of the array, but you have to walk on the others, and you really shouldn't walk on them because you're going to create micro-fractures and that's going to cause issues down the road," she said ^[11]. Freesuns' momentum rests on its chief executive's own estimate. The BBC report does not give the company's revenue or install count, so the growth figure cannot be sized ^[4]. Tesla is also not the only company to leave the market ^[3]. I'd sort a tile enquiry on two questions. Can the building's appearance change? And is the owner buying savings, or buying output from a roof that would otherwise produce none, as Heinrich frames it ^[17]? Where appearance is fixed and the owner wants generation, tiles are the job, and the supplier should be picked on who will engineer that particular roof and who will service it. A savings buyer with a fixed facade needs the premium and the output gap in writing before anyone books a roofer. If appearance can change and the owner wants savings, put in panels; Graves says most consumers now fall in that box ^[16].