Tesla “developed” those solar tiles as a fucking scam to sell investors on the Solarcity merger to bail his family out. It only ever came to fruition to keep him out of prison for outright fraud rather than just “fibbing”. He bet the wellbeing of every employee and shareholder on that absolute dumpster fire of a company, literally scamming investors, just to save his ass, and it was nothing short of dumb fucking luck that kept it all burning to the ground, as he himself stated in a deposition.

Like everything else Musk does, those solar tiles are a way for wealthy people to greenwash their decadent lifestyle, while also allowing them to stay NIMBYs who don’t want to ruin the look of their gaudy McMansions. Normal arrays cost fractions of what those tiles do, work better, and don’t require replacing your entire roof for them.

Powerwalls were just a way to get rid of out of spec cells to people at 10x what their value is in an automotive pack. A home ESS is much gentler on them comparatively, so even out of spec cells work fine.

You want to talk about clean transportation? He came up with the literal pipe dream of the Hyperloop to keep cities from funding actual high-speed and light rail projects, so people would have to buy his shitboxes.

Literally everything he does is to keep his game as a greasy car salesman/government welfare queen going (see, SpaceX), and nothing more. Any positive benefits conferred from this are basically just a coincidence.