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The picture that Walmart is painting of Tesla / SolarCity installation and O & M practices in its lawsuit is not a pretty one.
Yesterday afternoon, Walmart filed suit against Tesla over fires which it alleges originated at PV installations designed, installed, owned and maintained by Tesla / SolarCity at its stores in three states.
Walmart counts seven fires in total, but only under contract with Tesla and SolarCity before the acquisition. These are starting to march through November 2018, and include an array that was supposed to be de-energized that still caught fire in November.
The retail giant is one of the largest retailers in the world, and one of the largest retailers in the world. These represent more than half of the sites where Walmart has solar installed, and would definitely reduce Walmart's enviable ranking among corporations that have gone solar.
"Failure to live up to industry standards"
But perhaps the most important part of this case is the very serious allegations that Walmart is making about installation and operations and maintenance practices at Tesla. The 114-page summons, posted online by Electrek, is rather damning.
To be clear, Walmart is not claiming that solar is not safe; but rather that Tesla did a profoundly bad job of installing and maintaining these systems.
The state of the obvious, properly designed, installed, inspected, and maintained solar systems, are not spontaneously combusted, and the occurrence of multiple fires involving Tesla's solar systems is unmistakable, but is overwhelming. and plaudicially indicative of systemic, extended failures by Tesla to meet the standard of care, as set forth in the governing contracts, and to the solar systems installed at Walmart's stores.
Walmart says that inspections of the systems revealed widespread, systemic negligence and failure to abide by prudent industry practices, operating, and maintaining its solar systems, and that this has greatly increased the risk of fires.
Among the pieces of evidence for this, Walmart states that it is a large number of microcracks, hotspots and backsheet damage, which suggests the installation of damaged solar panels.
For example, solar panels across the world have identified localized hotspots or localized areas of excessive temperature-and-yellow encapsulant and micro-cracks, which are precursors to hotspots. Many of these defects have been shown to be readily identifiable with the use of standard equipment, which has been shown to be insufficiently reliable.
Another allegation is that Tesla's inspection teams did not have the necessary skills to do their job:
Walmart quickly discovered that Tesla routinely deployed to inspect the solar systems and lacks basic solar training and knowledge. Tesla's staff did not know, for example, how to conduct inspections or how to use simple tools, such as temperature-measuring "guns" used to detect hotspots, and a Tesla employee failed to identify multiple hotspots that Walmart's consultants observed.
But Walmart also stresses that many of the problems originated with a "neglected approach" to the installation of the systems, and here it blames SolarCity's business strategy.
On information and belief, Tesla's predecessor-in-interest-SolarCity-had adopted a business-as-a-business-as-a-business-as-a-business-and-business the original installation work had not been properly hired, trained, and supervised.
A bad look for solar
There is a bit of irony that these allegations of shoddy practices to maximize the profitability of the country. and contractors.
Regardless, it is far from the first criticism that it has been made of solar energy. the acquisition by Tesla. However, most of the previous allegations seen by pv magazine centered around shady sales practices, not the safety of its facilities.
It remains to be seen how much these headlines will cost the overall solar industry. But the larger question is whether or not they are effectively policing themselves against bad actors.
Solar Power International in Salt Lake City on September 25th.
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