Solar Roof

Solar Roof is a roof that makes its own electricity. Instead of bolting panels on top of an existing roof, Tesla replaces the whole roof with interlocking glass tiles that look like premium slate, and those tiles turn sunlight into power for the home. Elon unveiled it on October 28, 2016, as the home-solar centerpiece of his "Master Plan, Part Deux," about three weeks before Tesla closed its purchase of the solar installer SolarCity.

What is Solar Roof?

Solar Roof builds the solar cells into the roof instead of mounting panels on top. It uses two kinds of interlocking tempered-glass tiles. Active tiles hold the solar cells and make electricity, and they are blended with matching steel tiles that have no cells and cover the ridges, edges, and valleys. The finished roof looks like ordinary slate or terracotta while working like a small power plant, feeding the house and charging a Powerwall battery.

Why Solar Roof Exists

Solar Roof was the home-solar pillar of Elon's 2016 master plan. Tesla already had battery storage, and SolarCity, founded in 2006 by Elon's cousins Lyndon and Peter Rive with Elon as chairman and largest shareholder, had the solar-installation side. As Elon wrote, "Now that Tesla is ready to scale Powerwall and SolarCity is ready to provide highly differentiated solar, the time has come to bring them together." Tesla's roughly $2.6 billion all-stock purchase of SolarCity was agreed on August 1, 2016 and closed on November 21, 2016, creating one company with one way to order, install, service, and manage everything from one app, and turning a roof from a pure cost into something that pays you back.

How it Works

Each active tile is rated near 72 watts, where a watt measures how fast the tile makes electricity. That per-tile output is the clearest edge Solar Roof has over rival solar shingles, which usually make less power each. The advantage is real but narrow, because the steel tiles that hold no cells fill so much of the roof that the whole system makes less power per square foot than regular rack-mounted panels. Where Solar Roof really earns its keep is toughness: a Class A fire rating, the highest there is, a Class F wind rating, the top class, tested to 110 mph, and a Class 4 hail rating, also the top class. The 25-year warranty promises at least 95 percent of rated power at five years, then no more than half a percent of decline a year for the next two decades. The tiles come off the line at Gigafactory New York in Buffalo, a 1.2-million-square-foot plant that New York State backed with roughly $959 million in incentives.

The Economics of Solar Roof

Solar Roof is a premium product. Installs commonly run $50 to $62 a square foot and $60,000 to $150,000 before incentives, and it often takes 10 to 20 years for the savings to pay that back. The numbers work best when a roof needs replacing anyway, because then the extra cost is just the solar premium rather than a whole new roof plus panels. In 2021 Tesla raised prices for some customers who had already signed, and in 2023 it settled a class action over the change for $6 million.

Current Status of Solar Roof

Elon set a target of 1,000 installations a week in 2019. Wood Mackenzie estimated about 3,000 U.S. installations over roughly seven years. Tesla's combined solar deployment, panels plus Solar Roof, shows the yearly totals.

Yearly solar deployment reached 348 megawatts in 2022, its best year since 2017, and was 223 megawatts in 2023, the last year Tesla reported it quarter by quarter.

Tesla stopped selling Solar Roof on August 20, 2026. It told its certified installers that the tiles were no longer available to order and that it would supply only conventional solar panels from then on, Electrek reported. Tesla's Solar Roof web page now redirects to its solar panels page. Starting with the first-quarter 2024 report, Tesla had already stopped reporting solar megawatts at all and listed only energy storage. Within the energy generation and storage business, revenue has climbed steeply, and battery storage is doing the lifting.

Segment revenue grew from $2.789 billion in 2021 to $12.771 billion in 2025, up 27 percent year over year.

What Comes Next

Tesla has moved to standard products. In January 2026 it launched its own all-black solar panels, the TSP-415 and TSP-420, built at Gigafactory New York in Buffalo, the plant that made the Solar Roof tiles. Tesla's energy menu now lists Solar Panels, Powerwall, and Megapack. Solar Roof helped create the solar-roofing market, where nail-on shingles such as GAF's Timberline Solar now compete.

The Bottom Line

Solar Roof turned a roof into a power plant, with Tesla installing about 21 to 32 roofs a week at its peak, Electrek reported, and its Buffalo factory now builds Tesla's own solar panels.