It's going quite well. Tesla Energy can now focus on the mission of speeding our transition to a sustainable renewable energy system under the massive Tesla umbrella, whereas in the past SolarCity was out on an island fighting all the battles for the whole marketplace.
Brutally eliminating the 1-to-1 (usually door-to-door) sales process was the absolute correct move just after acquisition. They're currently setting the bar for low-cost, high quality residential installs at $2.01/Watt forcing the entire market to adapt. At these price points, no installer can afford to pay their sales team the traditional $.75/Watt they demand. The only reasons people aren't buying Tesla Solar hand over fist today is that without sales.....no one knows about it or understands the value. Resisting the impulse to reinstate a traditional sales process is the big indicator to me they're on the right path and determined to do this the right way.
That and the lack of service and communication are the only problems left. Each are easily overcome relative to fighting Warren Buffett and every state government for simple market access.
Should be fairly easy for Tesla to bridge all these gaps in 2021 IF they choose to. I think Elon equates "service" with "sales" since they were handled by the same group in the past, but he'll get past that eventually. Clear and consistent communication with customers about where they stand in the install process will be a huge help and is easy enough to build out internally.
As to how homeowners make the leap from enthusiastic interest to solar buyer more efficiently.....it's being worked on.
Appreciate that. So you feel the future of solar is on rooftops vs. “farms”/large installations? NC has been a leader in large-scale installations (whatever the right unit is) no doubt due to a preference by the influential Duke Power. It also seems possible as a naive person that the numbers could support larger scale installations vs. rooftop. Is part of the issue inefficiency of transmission which rooftop doesn’t have to deal with?