Tesla wants to buy Solar City, become an integrated sustainable energy business

Musk wants to offer an integrated solution at Tesla stores: Solar to storage to vehicles.

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Illinoisan[/url]":2jgt8qnh]

...the company has 100MWh-worth of contracts with commercial customers.

What? That's like $7000 worth of electricity (at least with what we pay here). That's nothing. Do you mean MW rather than MWh?

It sounds like its for their storage products and storing electricity is extremely expensive. It's probably worth several tens of millions of dollars.

 

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evighed[/url]":2afhic9b]
That doesn't follow. Solar panels generate power during daylight hours, which include peak power consumption times. Power grid customers with solar will typically consume most of their grid power at night, when power companies have lots of generation capacity and nobody to sell it to. Except for the total number of kWh sold, the arrangement favors power companies.

Peak electricity demand is in the late afternoon to mid-evening, when solar is weakening or non-existent.

http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/l ... ntDay.html
http://www.ieso.ca/Pages/Power-Data/default.aspx

California, Texas and Ontario, the two most populous states and the most populous Canadian province all show the same pattern.

Roof-top solar households consume most of their electricity at the same time everybody else does, when they get home and up to bedtime.

 

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johnsonwax[/url]":139220pp]While there are clear benefits here, the cynical view is that Tesla has set a production targets for the model 3 that nobody other than Musk thinks are realistic. They need a significant amount of capital (upwards of $10B) before they can realize revenue on those vehicles simply due to the long time-to-market for automobiles. SolarCity's subscription model provides cashflow that Tesla needs.

SolarCity sold some of its future cash flow to John Hancock:

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases ... 61532.html

SolarCity is also in need of cash and short-term liquidity.