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Report: Solar savings through a SolarCity residential system
Having limited winter daylight hours combined with snow covered rooftops doesn’t make for good check out my huge solar savings conversation this month. But putting that aside, the overall economics behind my solar system tells a far greater story.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll recall that my journey with installing a SolarCity system dates back to late 2014. My system consists of 69 panels at 255W each for a total of 17.6kW (more specs on the system can be found on my Solar Generation page).
Solar Pricing
Massachusetts Electricity prices having been rising at approximately 9.5% year-over-year since 2008. When I started with SolarCity, my electricity price was set at $0.1627 per kWh including delivery, supply and taxes. Prices have continued to climb as seen on this chart.
The state went through a fun over-inflation and correction period in 2015, but the current rate I’m paying for electric is $0.1906 kWh with the best supplier I can find.
SolarCity sets their Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) prices based on your current electricity usage and comparable rates for the area that’s receiving their solar system. I had a number of options when I signed up including a variable rate, a fixed rate and an outright purchase but ended up opting for a 20-year fixed rate plan at $0.1420 kWh.
The way the PPA plan works is that I pay $0.1420 for every kWh generated by the SolarCity panels. The kWh they generate offsets the electricity I would consume. My savings initially worked out to be a difference of $0.0207 kWh or approximately 13% less. Recent savings have been in the $0.0486 kWh mark, or 25%, helped by the rise in electricity rates from utilities.
I incurred no installation or service costs when first setting up my SolarCity system, hence my entire cost for set up is based on the amount of power generated at $0.1420 kWh.
Affiliate: Get a solar cost estimate and find out how much solar can save for your home and business in your area.
Solar Costs
In the last 22 months, I’ve generated a whopping 33.8 MWh (33,800 kWh) of power. My cost for that was $4,800. The SolarCity bill will fluctuate depending on the amount of daylight hour and weather conditions.
In that same period, my electric company reported that I used 23,800 kWh of power. Since the solar power offsets that amount, my actual power use for those 22 months was 57,600 kWh — I use a lot of power between my Tesla, pool, A/C and other electronics we have throughout the house.
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About 59% of the power I need for my house and my Tesla comes from my SolarCity system. I wanted a system that could cover 100% of my needs but National Grid (local electric company) blocked that.
For the 23,800 kWh I purchased from the electric company, I paid $4,595, or $0.1930 kWh (averaged over the 22 months). My total electric cost (money paid to electric company and to SolarCity) for the 22 months was $9,395 or about $427/month.
While I consume a lot of power, 59% of it is provided by the sun.
Solar Savings
When I first signed up with SolarCity, they provided a $1,000 bonus if you registered for a solar system after buying a Tesla. That’s what I did and that’s how I received my $1,000 check form SolarCity.
They also had a referral program at the time which credited you with $250 for each person that signed up for a new system. I managed to get one referral and one more check from SolarCity.
All in all, I started 22 months ago with no money down and $1,250 in my pocket and a nice new solar system on my house. Not a bad start!
Had I purchased all my power from my electricity company at the average of $0.1930 kWh it would have cost me a total of $11,117. But thanks to SolarCity, my total cost was $9,395, so my savings was $1,722 over the 22 months. I expect savings and solar benefits will continue to grow over the next 20 years as the electric company continues to raise their rates.
SolarCity doesn’t fully capture the amount of savings that can be had through their system since the initial quote is based on current electricity rates, at the time of the quote. Rates climb over time especially in dense urban areas.
My savings thus far has been more than twice the amount SolarCity originally outlined! Now, if we add in the referral checks, my savings goes up to $2,972. The referrals don’t necessarily scale over time and may get updated so that needs to be factored into the equation.
Summary
For no money down and no risk, I’ve saved about $3,000 in just under 2 years (27% of what I would have paid) while generating green energy and taking load away from an already overloaded power grid.
When I did the math before signing up I knew the system would be a good deal and I’m very happy to see the results proving out. Since I’m on the power purchase program, I don’t have to worry about equipment depreciation, loss in solar cell effectiveness over time (I only pay for what they generate) or a whole slew of other things. By the time my plan is up, much better systems will be available.
If you’re interested in exploring solar power for your house and have enjoyed my posts thus far, please consider using my referral link to get started. SolarCity will do a free analysis of your situation and let you know if a solar system may work for you: share.solarcity.com/teslaliving
May the Sun be with you!
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
