A solar panel is displayed on a wall near signs at the entrance to the new Tesla Inc. showroom in New York.
Mark Kauzlarich | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A US federal agency is considering a former Tesla employee’s complaint about how the company managed and communicated about fire risks and defects in its solar power plants, CNBC has learned from documents received through a request for freedom of information.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is continuing an investigation and also interviewed the former Tesla employee who filed the complaint in the spring of 2019, Steven Henkes, who was then a Tesla solar quality manager.
CNBC learned of the investigation by asking the CPSC for a full copy of the whistleblower. The agency did not want to file the full complaint, but revealed: “The records we are holding are related to an open investigation and consist of internal and external reports.” The exact scope and focus of the investigation is not yet known.
Henkes is also suing Tesla for retaliation.
In a lawsuit filed in Alameda County in November 2020, Henkes said he was fired from his job at Tesla on August 3, 2020, after internally raising safety issues and filing formal complaints at government offices when Tesla failed to could act to rectify and communicate accurately with customers about what he believes are unacceptable fire risks in the company’s solar power plants.
Henkes did not want to speak directly to CNBC, but answered some questions by email through his attorney, Robert Wallace. Henkes believes ‘there is still a real threat to fires due to serial defects in the Tesla installations’, reads a statement from Wallace. “Consumers are not adequately informed about the risks.”
Tesla entered the solar business at the end of 2016 when it acquired SolarCity for $ 2.6 billion. Tesla Energy installs, among other things, photovoltaic roofs, solar power systems on the ground and carports.
Tesla does not make the revenue from solar power on its own. ‘Energy generation and storage’ represented only 6% of the company’s total revenue in 2020, but grew by 30% compared to last year, according to the financial submission at the end of the year. In a January 27 call, Musk told analysts: “We pay a lot of attention to solar power and it’s growing fast. I think it will not be long before Tesla is by far the market leader in solar power.”
Tesla’s systems have been installed at homes, including military housing units in Fort Bliss and other bases, schools in the United States School District of LA, and commercial facilities, including Walmart stores and Amazon warehouses.
As CNBC reported earlier, Tesla solar power plants had previously caught fire. In August 2019, Walmart sued Tesla for negligence after roofing systems installed by Tesla Energy ignited at several Walmart locations.
In the court documents, Walmart said that Tesla could not succeed in properly monitoring, repairing and maintaining these systems even after the fires took place. The fires caused significant damage, and the faulty systems posed serious risks to employees, customers and business, according to Walmart’s complaint.
On November 5, 2019, the companies issued a joint statement saying they look forward to “a safe reorganization of our sustainable energy systems.” ‘The exact terms of the settlement of the companies – and the cost to Tesla – were never disclosed. A Walmart spokesman referred to a subsequent statement in January 2020, saying, “Some of this work may include the replacement of certain solar power equipment.”
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to Greg Sellers, CEO of a solar maintenance and repair company in Morgan Hill, California, the risk of fires is still very low in solar photovoltaic systems, whether they are home or large-scale systems. Research by Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems supports his observation from the field.
Without commenting specifically on Tesla, Sellers explained, “For those of us on the repair and safety side, any incident is too much. Fires are still very rare. That’s why they get so much publicity when it happens.” He said a fire is generally more likely to be caused by a failed installation practice than a component outage. And he said the installation of solar power has gotten better as these systems multiply.
Public safety concerns
CNBC has asked the CPSC – a federal agency tasked with ‘protecting consumers from products that pose a fire, electrical, chemical or mechanical hazard’, to provide a copy of Henkes’ full complaint after it was lawsuit was referred in the fourth quarter of 2020. .
Abioye Ella Mosheim, chief official of the Freedom of Information Act, rejected the CPSC, citing a release for records related to a public inquiry. She wrote: “The records you requested are from the CPSC’s field of law enforcement and active law enforcement records.”
Henkes confirmed through his attorney, Wallace, that the CPSC had interviewed Henkes and asked the former Tesla employee to submit additional material to the agency. The items that Henkes filed in a “CP-15” complaint with the federations include:
· Reports of failure analysis of a third-party engineering firm
· Internal meeting minutes, reports and e-mail
· Examples of customer notification
· Photos of thermal events linked to customer homes
· Meetings and presentations regarding a supplier named Amphenol and Tesla
Henkes wants Tesla to have a reconsideration of its clarity with the customer ‘, his lawyer said on his behalf. The former employee was implementing a permanent countermeasure for the issues he found before he was fired, the lawyer added. However, Henkes claims that at the end of his tenure at Tesla he was “constantly foiled and then fired for continuing to work for public safety.”
Another former Tesla solar worker, who asked to remain anonymous because he still works in the solar power industry, confirmed many of Henkes’ allegations from the public lawsuit.
In particular, this person said that many of Tesla’s solar system installations, especially those that include roof components and Amphenol H4 connectors, pose a significant fire risk and that efforts to repair and adjust Tesla were not transparent or effective. The person also said that the company has not yet repaired or removed all the systems with known fire risks.
Tesla previously outsourced clean-up efforts and outsourced maintenance of its aging solar fleet, but is currently canceling at least some of the contracts and bringing the process back, according to the former employee.