A Burning Man 299
plants with thousands of panels in the desert, SolarCity will
spread out their panels on the roofs of homes and office
buildings. All these buildings will together form a gigantic
power plant. “We’re an energy company,” Lyndon said. “We
install solar systems for free, and we sell the electricity at
a lower rate than you can buy it from the utility. So given
the option of paying more for dirty power or paying less
for clean power, what would you take?”^237
To convince thousands of customers, SolarCity needed
to make it as easy as possible for them to install the panels
by providing the sales, financing, engineering, installation,
and monitoring. The only thing the customer had to do
was to let SolarCity into the house where the panels would
be installed for free. With the solar panels installed, the
customer had to pay a sum each month to lease them. No
regular maintenance was needed, the only work someone
with solar panels on the roof needed to do was to trim their
trees to avoid shading of the panels.^397
In the future, the excess electricity produced by the
solar panels will most likely be stored in batteries inside
of the house. “We think in the years ahead this will be
the default way that solar is installed,” Peter said. “Getting
the costs down, though, is not going to be an easy task.”^103
His cousin Elon had the same idea. “Future will indeed be
rooftop solar + battery pack, w [with] utility company just
providing backup power,” Elon wrote in a Twitter message.
SolarCity together with Tesla Motors solved one of