Tesla ditches solar roof — and embraces regular solar panels

Tesla has quietly dropped its solar roof, the shingle-like tiles that generated electricity while looking like a regular roof. The product is no longer listed among home energy options on Tesla's website. It never caught on: Tesla installed only about 3,000 of the roofs nationwide by the end of 2022, a tiny sliver of both the roofing and home solar markets. The roofs cost far more than standard setups, took longer to install, and sometimes warped or produced less power than promised. A competitor, GAF, made a similar product but closed its California solar shingle factory last December and moved operations to Texas.

Instead, Tesla is now making conventional rooftop solar panels — a sleek, all-black design, but functionally a standard panel — at its factory in Buffalo, New York. This is a shift from trying to reinvent the roof to simply building ordinary panels at scale, which is generally what has worked best in the solar industry.

Separately, Tesla has floated a much bigger and less certain project: a possible $10.1 billion solar cell factory near Houston, which could begin construction this year and finish by 2029. Solar cells are the components that actually convert sunlight into electricity, and the U.S. currently doesn't make enough of them to supply its panel factories. New tariffs on imported solar products have added pressure to build more domestic capacity. None of this changes what's available to homeowners today, but it suggests Tesla is moving away from specialty roofing products and toward standard panels made in larger volume.