> The economics never worked either. An average Tesla Solar Roof costs approximately $106,000 before incentives, compared to roughly $60,000 for a traditional roof replacement plus conventional solar panels — a $46,000 premium. The payback period stretches to 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 years for traditional panels.
Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.
Are these payback periods factoring in opportunity cost? If not the game is already lost. If so periods that long are so sensitive to alternate asset returns that they could easily be infinity.
Opportunity cost meaning investing with standard rule of thumb returns? I think usually it's just total cost at installation divided by the product of power generation and energy cost. So that's $ / (W x $/Wh), which should reduce down to just hours that can be trivially converted to years
Cost of alternative investments not pursued as a result of deployed capital.
> Cost of alternative investments not pursued as a result of deployed capital.
Once you’re achieving 30-50% annual returns over 20-30 year horizons (PE, HFT, invite-only HF) , you stop caring about cost of capital for anything less than US$1 million.
But 10% VTI / VOO, sure, factor that 10% into your excel.
Shame.. I've seen one of these in person on a high-end home and its a very nice looking product. I assume the lifespan would be similar to a metal roof.
Regular solar panels work well but are an eyesore on a nice home.
A subjective eyesore shouldn't stop them from getting installed if they're functional.
I tend to think garages are an eyesore, and yet, basically everyone (including me) wants one included with their home.
Similarly the real eyesore in neighbourhoods is all the cars and the assorted infrastructure dedicated to them.
40% of Australian households have rooftop solar. You get used to the look very quickly, and well-installed ones look perfectly fine.
Eyesore? Maybe on well architected multimillion dollar custom homes.
On the average suburban tract home in my corner of the USA, panels are no more ugly than the shingled roofs they sit atop.
There's a third way: in-roof or roof integrated photovoltaics. Normal panels, but integrated into the roof. Those look amazing. Very popular in Switzerland where some villages have strict aesthetic rules for buildings.
Next best thing aesthetically are full-roof racks, where one face of the roof is 100% covered in panels. Nowadays you just have to select the right panel and you can make it tile the plane perfectly.
I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
Didn't they "bail out" solar roof when tesla started making money?
Yeah the Solar City debacle was just one in a long line of crazy stunts that were pulled that if the SEC had any teeth at all, should have gotten someone more than a slap on the wrist.
Or more specifically, didn't Tesla bail out Elon's cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive?
I think it was a genuine attempt but they failed to find a simple enough solution.
I’d say they failed to make it cheap enough, although maybe that goes with “simple.” I needed a roof replacement around the time when this looked like a viable option, but there’s no way I was going to pay a substantial multiple over the price of a normal roof plus solar panels for their snazzy integrated roof.
Invisible solar is a genuine use case in areas with shitty power tripping HOAs, but even regular solar takes a decade to break even, so if you sell something like that at inflated Tesla level prices then they simply never will and there is no reason to buy them in the first place.
My solar install took about 4.5 years to break even, which I understand is maybe a bit below average for where I live (Ireland).
Although isn't there an Irish government grant to help cover the cost of the panel + installation? That would make comparing break even times across countries quite difficult.
Certainly isn’t today. In the U.K. solar panels have about a 14 month payback, no incentives other Thant hey are currently tax free (like food. Electric from the grid has a 5% tax)
On top of that there’s an inverter, and if you can’t use all the power immediately you’d need a battery too, which tends to increase the cost.
The biggest cost though is installation.
I imagine the costs of purchasing and installing the panels in the UK are similar, but in Ireland there's definitely grants:
You do make a good point about VAT on electricity bills also being a factor in the break even calculation. In Ireland it's 9% and that's a temporary cost of living measure and will revert to 13.5% in 2030.
That's where regulation comes in. California for example made it almost impossible for a HOA to block. You're not allowed to add more than $1K to the project with your 'requirements'
It think they under estimate the 'Green bling' factor. For many people if they are going to get solar, they want the neighbours to know. Got to get that virtue signalling in.
Not saying it is a huge factor but it is there.
And to misdirect the acquisition of Solar City, famous for being run by Elons cousins to basically pocket all the tax credits, but which was not going well.
Nah, Elon Musk faked the demo [1] so he could defraud Tesla investors into bailing out his cousins.
The Steel Pulse idea actually sounds sort of possible...
> Musk unveiled on October 28 at an event at Universal Studios’ back lot in Los Angeles, on an old residential set used in Desperate Housewives
> There’s a reason that they announced the idea on a fake block in a fake neighborhood with fake houses!
Interesting read.
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Enron Musk.
I'm no Musk fanboy but I think this kind of maximally cynical take is tiresome. They thought it would work, they expended significant engineering effort and money making it real and producing it and selling it to customers.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.
But fraud was involved.
Financially it was part of SolarCity bailout (Musk's cousin). It heavily heavily penalized Tesla shareholders and smelled of a family bailout. Solar Roof was announced so hastily in October 2016 justify the merger and stave off massive shareholder lawsuits. There was little effort in the roof development after bailout was a success, minus the bait-and-switch lawsuits.
There was genuine concept level development at some point, but it was developed into product after they knew it did not work to keep lawyers happy.
> They thought it would work
That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
Pretty sure this didn’t help either though:
> Customer service complaints are pervasive and consistent. Tesla Energy has a 2.6 out of 5 rating on SolarReviews
Yeah, there's some tubers out there that have absolutely scathing reviews for their customer ervice.
> That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.
Of course the market wanted it. I wanted it. My friends wanted it. But we couldn’t buy it because it was vapourware !
From this to self-driving cars in 2 years to tunnels that will change public transport… maybe Musk should prototype and see what’s actually possible before telling the market. I mean come on - it’s borderline fraud in order to pump stocks - there’s got to be stockholders that are forming class actions as we speak
Both self driving craze and car tunnel madness is only possible at all because how car centric US mindset is. If you even try to suggest that people could instead use good public transport and pedestrian infrastructure they would look at you like you are some sort of crazy.
Musk just takes car centric society pipe dreams and sell it back to them.
Like OMG you transiting to work and can safely stay in your phone 99% of time. In other countries this called train or a bus. Solved in London with 1863 tech.
While i kinda agree with you, it doesn't fly for most US cities.
Most US cities aren't dense at all. A lot of them were built with transportation in mind. London and European cities in general are so much older that their city centers have no real way to accommodate that.
So what do you do? You provide non car options. Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative. Nobody who can choose will take a 2 hour public transit trip over a 20 minute drive. Heck, in a lot of cases biking might be faster than your transit option, albeit riskier
West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit and in my experience is generally better than driving since traffic and parking are awful. Where I live on the west coast is a mid sized city and transit is completely viable, my family only drives on weekends for example.
While there is obviously no one easy solution for every city situation could easily be improved in a lot of them if there was political will. At least it would be 1000% more sane than pitching underground car tunnels.
It obviously take decades not years, but again Tesla full self driving was promissed back in 2016 and something tells me it would be a big success if it will be deployed on scale in 2036.
People don't want to change. In the us on the west coast I would say that public transit has a bit of a stigma. You don't use it unless you have to.
Couldn't be more different in the big European cities, using a car there is (made) cumbersome.
But transit only solves your problem in cities like London. Some people - for some reason I’m still not entirely clear on - seem to like this. But other people - so far the majority - don’t. And for those, self-driving cars solve the transit problem. That’s valuable. And you only need to beat unit economics of taxis. So there is a significant margin to capture
For the 'don't want to live in transit-dense cities like London' crowd, beating the economics of taxis may not be enough since that's not what you're competing with out in the suburbs.
On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.
Self driving cars still create traffic jams and huge environment contamination No problem is solved.
I’ve traveled to a decent number of countries and the only city I’ve been to that wasn’t filled with cars was Venice. I love public transport and I wish the US would do it better, but cars are extremely common all over the place and self-driving is something that would get a lot of traction in lots of countries.
You're not entirely wrong on it being a maximally cynical take, but I think it depends on where the idea originated. Yes, they expended a lot on engineering to make it real, but you can do that with any idea. I think what matters was if it was a feasible idea put forth from a reasonable source or if it was another grand delusion from Musk that everyone just had to make as real as possible despite their own misgivings on the idea.
Imo basically this, the attempt to make it work is downstream of musk deciding it had to be attempted. Musk can decide to spend money on a project whether or not it's genuine or feasible. This seems a clear cut case of musk designing a bad product and engineers doing their best to implement it despite the nonsensical constraints
Solar shingles seems so smart. I guess they couldn’t get the cost down to be competitive.
Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?
Did any other manufacturers build their own version? It seems like the right long term idea but the lack of other players seems to indicate there's some underlying issue that isn't solved yet.
Its not the right long term solution tho, tiny roof tiles as solar panels have so many problems:
- Magnitude higher number of interconnections which impacts reliability and efficiency
- Uniform roof tile style
- Requires entire roof rebuild which is always more expensive than retrofit of panels on top
- Complex installation resulting in less installers available overall for the market
- Crossing of trades between roofing & electrical
A slightly better solution would have been to make the big traditional solar panels your actual roof panels but really retrofitting them on top of panels solves most of those issues above.
There are a few companies, I remember Invisible Solar which produces modules which look like traditional clay tiles.
The market pitch is different tho, they are aimed at providing less effective solar for places where you have a hard need to keep the old look, old churches, monumental buildings and such.
I came across
https://colorsolar.eu/
They can put basically any print on the solar panel
Even just searching in Germany there are at least 4 companies making different designs. I guess they must be selling quite well. Most make non solar tiles of the same size and design for shaded parts of the roof.
There's a few competitors.
The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.
GAF did. There are two issues: 1) too expensive 2) not modular. I like that I can separate my solar decision from my roof decision. Panels make that possible.
I did consider but there are 2 issues.
1. Efficiency. Not all roof parts can be exposed to sun. You overpay
2. You need to time it with roof change
Home insurance also (ie replacement cost after damaging weather event).
I can't help but think that this essentially ruled it out in much of the country -- i get the impression Tesla doesn't tend to consider Midwest markets in their initial engineering
I mean in general it could be a right-ish idea. I myself have noticed when buying solar panels after replacing shingles that basically the per sqm cost of solar panels is like 2x of shingles (of the not super expensive kind). It could be easily more economical to use a modern version of this to replace your roof.
On the other hand, Tesla's solar shingles are tiny compared to panels, more in the shape of actual shingle strips, means tons of connectors, wiring losses, dangerous shorts (these things carry 10s of amps) etc. and probably a nightmare to troubleshoot.
I would not get these for any reason other than aesthetics.
I don't think it really adds up. It's an inconvenient install location and roofs are replaced every 10-20ish years. It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint but the capital costs outweigh that.
IMHO a pergola or carport is going to be better. You lose solar efficiency but gain the benefit of something that provides shade. Especially as solar panels have become an economical roofing option if you don't care about perfect waterproofing.
The problem is the cost. Tiles are pretty small, and you need to wire them together. This means a lot of small-gauge wires going all through your roof.
Multiple tiles also need to be connected in series to get reasonable efficiency, so you get plenty of failure points where one bad connection can cause a significant part of your solar roof to become useless. And you won't be able to easily fix it.
You can obviously fix all these issues, but it makes tiles too expensive.
I looked into it seriously at one point.
Essentially, you are adding another zero to the cost to have hidden solar. A 20k solar install becomes a 200k+ solar roof install.
Even if the final result is great, the economics shrink the possible customer base. Basic solar has gotten so cheap that people aren't worrying if the investment increases the value of the house itself. But very few people are willing to pay 10x for a thing that will never pay itself back in energy or home value. It's like putting a pool in your house - a few buyers will want it, but a lot will run from it because they don't know what to do with it.
So as a result, the target market ends up being super rich dudes in gated communities - the same kind of people buying custom 100k hifi systems and home cinema rooms. It becomes an upsell for people with unlimited budgets.
It's just not a mass market product when the competition is 10x cheaper and dropping daily.
Normal roof tiles are just as ugly as solar panels. They should simply make panels in all sizes so that they cover the roof properly. You probably need only a few custom size ones.
I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.
EVs have speakers for safety, not sonic beauty.
Have you heard of Fratzonic? If you haven't, you can't unhear it.
EVs are required to produce sound for pedestrian safety, but they are absolutely beginning to make faked IC engine sounds for aesthetic appeal. See the Ioniq 5 and Dodge Charger EV.
If it's required, then you can differentiate your product on the market, but the regulatory requirements are driving the decision to spend money on it.
Surely there’s a middle ground where a roof is made of something big and panel-sized, rather than a conventional roof with panels as another layer on top?
This is the roof of an industrial building near here which seems to go with that idea:
While not quite panel-sized, it's much larger tiles and there's not another roof underneath. Probably makes most sense with a new roof, though. The problem is that when a roof lasts 50--80 years, that's not a very big market just for new roofs.
Perfect. That scalloped (overlapping tiles) installation is The Correct Answer™.
Thanks for sharing.
Apologies, my google-fu is weak; I couldn't find more details. It's SON's building? I couldn't find that roof top at that address (using Google Maps).
Gemini seems to have read that article, taken a few details, embellished a few more, and not answered your question.
The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them. There are normal tiles surrounding the panels. This is the style I tend to see now for new builds, but it’s more expensive than just layering on the panels if your roof is already in good shape.
> The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them
Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?
Horses for courses relly. I think the panels are all standard sizes now as well? When done tastefully, they almost seamlessly blend with the tile (limits tile choices), certainly from a distance. Some new builds near me, you can’t really see the panels until up close. Raised panels do have an issue in that birds/rodents/etc. nest below them and can cause major damage if unchecked. This is why pest protection (unsightly up close) is a must. The major cost of dealing with nesting under panels comes from the labour and probable need for scaffolding etc. to resolve - i.e. minimum of £2k.
That and op said it's more expensive. Why would you do it flush, then? Looks? Eh, I prefer practicality over form and many architects would agree with being more honest.
The big problem is that because there is no real ventilation, the panels get hotter and don't produce as much power.
What you put under them also has an effect on how waterproof your roof is long term, plus when you need to replace them finding ones that are the right size are also a pain.
There’re commonly used on new build houses in the UK — new roofs in the UK have a waterproof but breathable membrane under the tiles
Also see https://roofit.solar/ used in a few houses… mainly self build a
or architect designed
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Aside from power-independence, does solar on residential roofs ever make sense? For all the complexity of doing a few houses, you could do an entire parking lot (or empty land) and power the whole neighborhood.
Yeah if you can do it cheap enough. Here in Australia a standard 6.6 kW system (but with a 5kW inverter, maximum most utilities let you export with single phase) costs around $US6000 before subsidies, but around $4500 after. The systems are all basically exactly the same components, and these installers can probably do two houses a day with a stock standard system.
I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.
The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.
It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.
Power Independence isn't even a given, most systems aren't eqipped or designed that you can turn off mains/street power to your house and still have power.
E.g. Disconnecting your energy supplier or a power outage will still result in no power usage, despite solar panels generating power.
More expensive inverters and battery systems allow this, although this is far from the norm.
It's central vs decentralisation.
The electricy is consumed in the houses and not on the empty land.
Parking lots become a win-win with electric cars. They also keep the cars cleen and sun protected.
And it increases installation costs by a pretty huge amount. Installing solar panels in a field is MUCH cheaper than bolting them to a roof or building a structure to hold them above a car park.
Plus, most solar installs are grid connected so a significant portion of the electricity tends not to be consumed where it is produced. It’s not as if installing solar is an alternative to grid connections for most practical reasons.
Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.
They'd actually make economic sense where I live, the only thing that's held me from pulling the trigger is that I want to time it with when I need to have the roof inspected/replaced.
I'm aware of the arguments about how it can be that much cheaper when deployed at mass centralized scale rather than decentralized across a bunch of rooftops, however the way the electric markets are prices is based primarily on the cost to produce the marginal supply, which is usually gas.
So while the power company might flood a bunch of solar panels trying to capture the profit between cost to generate solar vs. cost to generate using gas, those profits haven't been lowering electric costs at residential rates. If anything those costs are still climbing.
It's actually not hard to get rooftop solar to pencil out in that situation, especially if you assume even moderate growth in future electricity rates or inflation. In my own tracker it would even be superior to paying down additional principle on my home mortgage!
Admittedly it would be less of a slam dunk if the net metering was less generous around here as you'd basically be required to add battery to the mix if you weren't already. But even that just prolongs the time to payoff, it still ends up having good ROI economically speaking.
Honestly they only made economic sense in my case because of government incentives. Although if the price continues to fall, they may eventually even make sense in my area without incentives.
Electricity generation in the event of a power outage was another consideration for me.
But yeah as a techy I also just enjoy having them.
I wish that were true, but I suspect more people are doing it to be trendy/appear "green" than basing it on a system lifetime ROI calculation vs. alternatives.
You should take this as a data point where your gut intuition has failed you.
It is really condescending to dismiss their choice as motivated by vanity rather than assuming that other people might have done their homework and made a rational decision. It might very well be that you have done your own homework and it doesn't make sense for your situation, but other people face different tradeoffs which make it worthwhile.
Just looking into it for my house in the UK (read, not very sunny) and it'll pay for itself in around 6 years. Seems like a no brainer for a house I'm not planning on moving out of.
You need only have read the HN front page 4 days ago to have seen one reason why 50,000 people may be motivated to get solar. Nothing trendy going on there, just poor regional planning.
People are rarely willing to spend five figures on something just to be trendy or green.
What alternatives do you have in mind that also have an ROI for the homeowner?
I'm not the one to whom you asked the question - I can think of plenty of things, but by and large most of the home things with ROI make the most sense to invest in when you're buying a new thing anyway - e.g. solar panels when you need a new roof, EV when you need a new car, ventless dryer when you need a new dryer, heat pump when you need new heating/AC, etc.
Off the top of my head the only thing that's really doable without replacing a depreciating asset are certain kinds of insulation upgrades. (And I guess potentially ceiling fan installs.)
When they rolled out the product with tiny tiles I always thought musk was being to ambitious. The smaller the tiles the harder a solar roof gets.
Why are tiles small BTW? Could we use tiles as big as normal solar panels?
My guess would be they are the same size as shingle strips, to make it easier to work with for regular installers rather than specialists.
These things carry a lot of current though, so I would certainly not trust anyone without proper tools and training to put them on a roof.
The problem with solar roofs is that it combines a changing technology, PV solar, to something that does not change, roofs. So now every time the new technology advances you need to pay for the new PV cells and the same roof tiles again. Solar roof will work once the PV tech settles down. From 20% eficiency to 100% it's a long way to go.
I don’t think it’s that good of an idea because only 50% of my roof was good for solar power (that is what faces the sun) so having the entire thing be panels is mostly a waste. I’m sure this is the case for a lot of houses. When I had panels installed, adding them on the “bad side” would only gain a few kwh.
From what I remember they also sold cheaper tiles that looked like the normal ones, but actually didn't have solar panels for this exact problem. I don't think this was much of a factor at all why this didn't work.
The main issue was that normal large panels got a lot cheaper way faster than expected and custom sized ones like that end up costing too much by comparison.
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This is sort of over stated generally.
In Australia where North is “optimal”, even South facing panels produce only 20-30% less and East/West about 15%. It does vary a bit by latitude but it’s not at all pointless to install them in other orientations in many places. I have not done the math to see how much of the world this extends to, but it applies to a fairly large chunk of Australia.
Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/direction/
Tesla’s system also had non solar tiles so you could just skip the panels in whichever parts you wanted.
Roof construction is quite different here to the US though. We never have the plywood layer, it’s either ceramic tile or Colorbond steel directly onto usually wooden sometimes steel beams.
Australia is pretty close to the equator
In the UK, much further from the equator, some people are fitting panels on north-facing roofs. These are most effective on cloudy days.
This is mostly only cost-effective for remote properties where power cuts are common, but it works.
Depending on which part you consider it’s also halfway to the South Pole. Cape York to Tasmania is almost 33° of latitude.
Right. Sydney is at 33.9 S and Darwin is 12.4 S
Quote from the article:
In Sydney, south-facing panels typically produce around 30% less energy than north-facing ones. The steeper the roof, the less they’ll produce. They’ll also produce much more energy in summer than winter.
In the far north, the difference isn’t as great and in Townsville south-facing solar panels will only produce around 15% less energy overall than north-facing ones. Because Queenslanders generally use more electricity in summer than winter due to air conditioner demand, the fact that south-facing panels have considerably higher output in summer can improve self-consumption.
In Darwin, south-facing panels produce about 17% less electricity overall than north-facing ones, and, like in Townsville, they have considerably higher output in summer than winter.
I don't think you typically install PV tiles on the entire Tesla Solar Roof. They have matching non-solar tiles, and you choose how much of the roof will be PV.
Panels are so cheap it doesn't matter.
Regular solar panels yes, but not the Tesla panels!
Tesla [Product] is poorly supported really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point.
Their cars have build quality issues, self driving continues to be "just around the corner", their service centers are cheap, the solar roof is it's own nightmare, the pivot to robots is laughable, the robot taxis are a PR stunt that are amusing but in a cringey way...
And the promises over the years of automatic chargers, replaceable batteries, sensors, etc.
The company had a great idea early, had tons of goodwill, a growing manufacturing capacity, and squandered it chasing whatever Elon dreamt up.
My friend has Tesla solar roof. It's a great product but it's too expensive.
At one point after signing the contract, Tesla mailed him and notified that his previous signed contract was void and they sent him a new contract where the price had doubled to over $100k. They told he he had to sign the new contract in order for it to go forward.
This is classic Elon Musk tactic, which is to do whatever the fuck you want, laws be damned, and then try to bully your way through it. My friend didn't budge. They would call him or email him and kept harrassing him to sign the new contract and he said no. I don't remember there being a lot of news about this but I couldn't believe they had the gall to try this, although as I said, this is classic Elon Musk tactics.
Eventually I think other solar roof customers started to band together, and eventually Tesla caved and honored the original contract, as if they were doing him a favor. I'm not surprised that this technology is going to fail because it's too expensive and Musk's promise of dropping prices, surprise surprise!, never manifested.
I hope somebody figures out at some point how to do roofing with large integrated panels that could be solar.
Yeah, BlueScope Steel (Australia) did this with three separate prototype designs from 2012 - 2015 that were manufactured, installed and currently have had a decade of all weather on house trials.
The Australian market is largely adding trad PV panels to existing housing, but there are signs of greater uptake of integrated PV + weather proof + thermal insulation roofing panels by architects and hopefully will be seen more on new mass produced housing plans.
Who could have expect that one big panel with one connection will have more reliability and better cost than lot of small panels with many connections.
As someone who owns a Solar Roof, this news is disappointing. Many of my friends have said it's the best roof they've ever seen, and I even sometimes get compliments from people who drive past.
Seems like from the comments in this thread there are other companies offering similar roofs now at least.
"the guy at the store said i was the only one who could pull it off"
Any article on Solar Roof that doesn't mention Tesla buying solar roof from Elon musk's cousin when solar roof was going under is an article not worth reading
It's not quite even that - he wanted to bail out his cousin's failing solar business with Tesla shareholders' money, but to try and justify it, they pretended that Solar Roof was a fully developed, ready to sell product that was going to be revolutionary and worth buying SolarCity for, when it was actually just a concept they'd quickly come up with and some 3D renders.
They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.
Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.
Everyone gets caught up in the thermal management stuff and the power density stuff and whatever but to me that's a red herring.
The real issue is that Tesla has never known the ability to produce solar panels at scale and Musk said in that recent interview with Dwarkesh that he intends to do all the solar production in house.
So where's he getting the sand from? How are they going to purify it at scale? How are they going to turn it into ingots and then wafers and then cells and panels when they haven't even been able to produce a slim fraction of panels without all those extra steps over the past decade for their roofs?
And if the goal is to have the industrial capacity to do all this in a few years and produce solar panels on the scale that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just lay those bad boys down en masse on Earth and solve the impending climate crisis and our current energy shortages?
It just doesn't make sense.
> Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.
I'm split on the datacenter-in-space stuff. I don't know whether I should disbelieve it because there is, obviously, no good way to evacuate heat in space, or because Musk talked about it, and he has an uncanny track record of not upholding his promises.
You are mixing up Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space.
> SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space
No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.
This current crop of tech bros and companies really is the worst for humanity. Failed tech and projects I can understand, but it’s the total, consistent and persistent lack of care and disregard for people, customers & the planet. They never clean up their own mess either, and I even disliked the kids who did that at playgroup 40 years ago!! The sole ambition is always money & power. I read that article aghast at multiple points.
I recently had 9.2kw of solar panels installed in the SE of England, the actual cost of the panels themselves was ~£1k. I’ve seen new installs going up with standard cheap panels nicely inset, flush into the roof itself. The roofers themselves have told me they are cheaper than a traditional roof due to the decreasing price of panels and ever increasing price of tile. Got a listed property with a slate roof? Solar could save you potentially £10k+ according to one roofer I spoke to.
Panels were and always were going to be dumb commodity items. There’s literal fields literally filled with the things everywhere. Compare to say something like the PowerWall which they still sell bucket loads of and I have one myself, Elon be damned…
However, the PowerWall still suffers from that worst of all tech bro sins of trying to limit YOUR access to YOUR data. I wanted to add an ESP CYD to display all my Home Assistant data when we had solar installed to help us as a family see what was happening in realtime. It’s incredibly useful - In typical HN fashion I rolled my own and avoided ESPHome, making it just how I wanted and I love it! 3d printed case and all! Boots in 2 seconds and just works!
I had obviously and wrongly assumed the PW3 would be easy as pie. Getting realtime data out of the PW3 is a freaking Kafka-esque nightmare… the only workable solution to which was setting up another dedicated ESP32 to connect directly to the PW own perm on wifi and weird custom API and shunt the data over BT. Tesla could break it all at a moments notice with an update and i’ll be out of hours trying to fix it. The whole thing is cat&mouse hoop jumping, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the earlier console hacking days. Tesla will display the realtime data through their servers, through their app, but if you want that…
Anyway, please everybody who’s all gung ho on the Anthropic and OpenAI hype trains remember - every single big tech company has had the exact same disregard for you, your family, your home and your planet since the start. It’s probably more consistent than Moore’s law at this point. Nothing is going to be different this time around.
The monstrous tech bros destroying humanity by bringing about electric cars, intelligent machines, mapping the world, bringing information to anyone anywhere.
I on the other hand, Maximus Virtus, am a net gain to humanity when I hack into tech products for visualizing my home’s data.
And don't forget the cheap, reusable rockets. Effing tech bros.
"The economics never worked either. An average Tesla Solar Roof costs approximately $106,000 before incentives, compared to roughly $60,000 for a traditional roof replacement plus conventional solar panels — a $46,000 premium. The payback period stretches to 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 years for traditional panels. In 2023, Tesla settled a class-action lawsuit for $6 million after customers accused the company of bait-and-switch pricing, with one plaintiff seeing their contracted price jump from $72,000 to $146,000."
Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.
Integrated solar panels into the tiles are batshit crazy expensive compared to regular big solar panels from China. I was looking how to install them (some other vendor, not Tesla) and was shocked - you can’t plug the small tiles connected together directly into inverter. There is additional power electronics box in between. Economically it makes no sense. The single installation around is at the guy‘s house who had successful 7 figures exit. Of course, the roof looks awesome.
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
I think it had more to do with the reality of the market. Solar panels have become incredibly cheap and that's because they are mass produced and standardized. Everything in the manufacturing process has been optimized. Now it is technically of course possible to make them other form factors, but artisinal solar panels are simply so much more expensive and cannot compete in any meaningful way with regular panels.
A bad idea ruined by poor business practices. Like, it's very hard to see how it could ever compete economically with normal solar panels.
It was a bad idea from the beginning, technically and economically it sucked, the only possible utility was areas with strict heritage constraints which forbade normal rooftop PV.
Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.
He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.
I caught him a few times not writing significant details that go against his narrative.
"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD. "Tesla consistently hides information from the court." There are two different cases separated by years. The police got all the information they needed in the first case. "FSD is 10x worse than the average driver." The uncertainty of the number due to insufficient statistics makes the comparison moot.
"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD.
To be fair that's not a contradiction. If FSD is designed such that a user braking because FSD was about to plow into something, sure the user started driving at the last second, but that is Tesla making a design choice to artificially blame users for FSD being fundamentally unsafe.
The claim was that FSD disengages before collision without user input (presumably to fool someone into thinking that it's the driver's fault). It's not clear who they are trying to fool though. The public will not buy it. NHTSA requires reporting the crash as ADAS-related if ADAS was active at any point during 5 seconds before the crash. The court would just classify this tactic as criminal negligence in the design (if they can detect imminent crash, why they disengage FSD instead of initiating emergency braking?).
All-in-all, the trick that can't fool anyone and that doesn't make any sense. If this claim was true, the only explanation would be that Tesla is evil for the sake of evil and to the detriment to itself. Evil and dumb.
On the other hand, pressing the brake is a common way of disengaging ADAS. Tesla is no better and no worse in this regard than other ADAS manufacturers.
He is extremely negative about Tesla, consistently. He's careful not to open himself to lawsuit with plausible deniability. But he borderline lies. I won't be surprised if he's on the payroll of legacy auto
I don't think he is on payroll, but he was promised Tesla Roadster, when it did not materialize he went on a vengeful crusade. I don't blame the guy, I would do the same.
Is that legit?
Yeah, he was a big Tesla shill, after he got scammed from the Roadster, he did 180 and started pointing everything wrong with Tesla
If you read his articles over the years you would continually think that Tesla should go out of business in the near future, yet they never do.
He might not specifically lie, but puts such a negative spin on anything Elon-related that the overall result is essentially a lie.
Why is this elektrek website still gets quoted? It is a very very biased website. I would dismiss any “opinions” or articles they post.
The reporting on Elektrek is top notch. They care deeply about real sustainable energy and transportation and are willing to dig deep past the marketing and plainly report the facts. I can't count the number of times they've had exclusive scoops or found insightful angles nobody else was concerning.
This may be true, but from an editorial perspective they are openly and aggressively anti-Tesla. I think it's worth noting as this article is Tesla related.
While most every other articles on Tesla (historically) had been fawning megafans.
What about this article do you find questionable? I think it would help to prove your point if you included specific examples.
> The economics never worked either. An average Tesla Solar Roof costs approximately $106,000 before incentives, compared to roughly $60,000 for a traditional roof replacement plus conventional solar panels — a $46,000 premium. The payback period stretches to 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 years for traditional panels.
Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.
Are these payback periods factoring in opportunity cost? If not the game is already lost. If so periods that long are so sensitive to alternate asset returns that they could easily be infinity.
Opportunity cost meaning investing with standard rule of thumb returns? I think usually it's just total cost at installation divided by the product of power generation and energy cost. So that's $ / (W x $/Wh), which should reduce down to just hours that can be trivially converted to years
Cost of alternative investments not pursued as a result of deployed capital.
> Cost of alternative investments not pursued as a result of deployed capital.
Once you’re achieving 30-50% annual returns over 20-30 year horizons (PE, HFT, invite-only HF) , you stop caring about cost of capital for anything less than US$1 million.
But 10% VTI / VOO, sure, factor that 10% into your excel.
Shame.. I've seen one of these in person on a high-end home and its a very nice looking product. I assume the lifespan would be similar to a metal roof.
Regular solar panels work well but are an eyesore on a nice home.
A subjective eyesore shouldn't stop them from getting installed if they're functional.
I tend to think garages are an eyesore, and yet, basically everyone (including me) wants one included with their home.
Similarly the real eyesore in neighbourhoods is all the cars and the assorted infrastructure dedicated to them.
40% of Australian households have rooftop solar. You get used to the look very quickly, and well-installed ones look perfectly fine.
Eyesore? Maybe on well architected multimillion dollar custom homes.
On the average suburban tract home in my corner of the USA, panels are no more ugly than the shingled roofs they sit atop.
There's a third way: in-roof or roof integrated photovoltaics. Normal panels, but integrated into the roof. Those look amazing. Very popular in Switzerland where some villages have strict aesthetic rules for buildings.
Next best thing aesthetically are full-roof racks, where one face of the roof is 100% covered in panels. Nowadays you just have to select the right panel and you can make it tile the plane perfectly.
I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
Didn't they "bail out" solar roof when tesla started making money?
Yeah the Solar City debacle was just one in a long line of crazy stunts that were pulled that if the SEC had any teeth at all, should have gotten someone more than a slap on the wrist.
Or more specifically, didn't Tesla bail out Elon's cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive?
I think it was a genuine attempt but they failed to find a simple enough solution.
I’d say they failed to make it cheap enough, although maybe that goes with “simple.” I needed a roof replacement around the time when this looked like a viable option, but there’s no way I was going to pay a substantial multiple over the price of a normal roof plus solar panels for their snazzy integrated roof.
Invisible solar is a genuine use case in areas with shitty power tripping HOAs, but even regular solar takes a decade to break even, so if you sell something like that at inflated Tesla level prices then they simply never will and there is no reason to buy them in the first place.
My solar install took about 4.5 years to break even, which I understand is maybe a bit below average for where I live (Ireland).
Although isn't there an Irish government grant to help cover the cost of the panel + installation? That would make comparing break even times across countries quite difficult.
Certainly isn’t today. In the U.K. solar panels have about a 14 month payback, no incentives other Thant hey are currently tax free (like food. Electric from the grid has a 5% tax)
On top of that there’s an inverter, and if you can’t use all the power immediately you’d need a battery too, which tends to increase the cost.
The biggest cost though is installation.
I imagine the costs of purchasing and installing the panels in the UK are similar, but in Ireland there's definitely grants:
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/housing-grants...
You do make a good point about VAT on electricity bills also being a factor in the break even calculation. In Ireland it's 9% and that's a temporary cost of living measure and will revert to 13.5% in 2030.
That's where regulation comes in. California for example made it almost impossible for a HOA to block. You're not allowed to add more than $1K to the project with your 'requirements'
What is a HOAs?
Homeowners' associations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
It think they under estimate the 'Green bling' factor. For many people if they are going to get solar, they want the neighbours to know. Got to get that virtue signalling in.
Not saying it is a huge factor but it is there.
And to misdirect the acquisition of Solar City, famous for being run by Elons cousins to basically pocket all the tax credits, but which was not going well.
Nah, Elon Musk faked the demo [1] so he could defraud Tesla investors into bailing out his cousins.
[1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
The Steel Pulse idea actually sounds sort of possible...
> Musk unveiled on October 28 at an event at Universal Studios’ back lot in Los Angeles, on an old residential set used in Desperate Housewives
> There’s a reason that they announced the idea on a fake block in a fake neighborhood with fake houses!
Interesting read.
[dead]
Enron Musk.
I'm no Musk fanboy but I think this kind of maximally cynical take is tiresome. They thought it would work, they expended significant engineering effort and money making it real and producing it and selling it to customers.
The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.
But fraud was involved.
Financially it was part of SolarCity bailout (Musk's cousin). It heavily heavily penalized Tesla shareholders and smelled of a family bailout. Solar Roof was announced so hastily in October 2016 justify the merger and stave off massive shareholder lawsuits. There was little effort in the roof development after bailout was a success, minus the bait-and-switch lawsuits.
There was genuine concept level development at some point, but it was developed into product after they knew it did not work to keep lawyers happy.
> They thought it would work
That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
Pretty sure this didn’t help either though:
> Customer service complaints are pervasive and consistent. Tesla Energy has a 2.6 out of 5 rating on SolarReviews
Yeah, there's some tubers out there that have absolutely scathing reviews for their customer ervice.
> That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.
May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.
Of course the market wanted it. I wanted it. My friends wanted it. But we couldn’t buy it because it was vapourware !
From this to self-driving cars in 2 years to tunnels that will change public transport… maybe Musk should prototype and see what’s actually possible before telling the market. I mean come on - it’s borderline fraud in order to pump stocks - there’s got to be stockholders that are forming class actions as we speak
Both self driving craze and car tunnel madness is only possible at all because how car centric US mindset is. If you even try to suggest that people could instead use good public transport and pedestrian infrastructure they would look at you like you are some sort of crazy.
Musk just takes car centric society pipe dreams and sell it back to them.
Like OMG you transiting to work and can safely stay in your phone 99% of time. In other countries this called train or a bus. Solved in London with 1863 tech.
While i kinda agree with you, it doesn't fly for most US cities.
Most US cities aren't dense at all. A lot of them were built with transportation in mind. London and European cities in general are so much older that their city centers have no real way to accommodate that.
So what do you do? You provide non car options. Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative. Nobody who can choose will take a 2 hour public transit trip over a 20 minute drive. Heck, in a lot of cases biking might be faster than your transit option, albeit riskier
West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit and in my experience is generally better than driving since traffic and parking are awful. Where I live on the west coast is a mid sized city and transit is completely viable, my family only drives on weekends for example.
While there is obviously no one easy solution for every city situation could easily be improved in a lot of them if there was political will. At least it would be 1000% more sane than pitching underground car tunnels.
It obviously take decades not years, but again Tesla full self driving was promissed back in 2016 and something tells me it would be a big success if it will be deployed on scale in 2036.
People don't want to change. In the us on the west coast I would say that public transit has a bit of a stigma. You don't use it unless you have to.
Couldn't be more different in the big European cities, using a car there is (made) cumbersome.
But transit only solves your problem in cities like London. Some people - for some reason I’m still not entirely clear on - seem to like this. But other people - so far the majority - don’t. And for those, self-driving cars solve the transit problem. That’s valuable. And you only need to beat unit economics of taxis. So there is a significant margin to capture
For the 'don't want to live in transit-dense cities like London' crowd, beating the economics of taxis may not be enough since that's not what you're competing with out in the suburbs.
On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.
Self driving cars still create traffic jams and huge environment contamination No problem is solved.
I’ve traveled to a decent number of countries and the only city I’ve been to that wasn’t filled with cars was Venice. I love public transport and I wish the US would do it better, but cars are extremely common all over the place and self-driving is something that would get a lot of traction in lots of countries.
You're not entirely wrong on it being a maximally cynical take, but I think it depends on where the idea originated. Yes, they expended a lot on engineering to make it real, but you can do that with any idea. I think what matters was if it was a feasible idea put forth from a reasonable source or if it was another grand delusion from Musk that everyone just had to make as real as possible despite their own misgivings on the idea.
Imo basically this, the attempt to make it work is downstream of musk deciding it had to be attempted. Musk can decide to spend money on a project whether or not it's genuine or feasible. This seems a clear cut case of musk designing a bad product and engineers doing their best to implement it despite the nonsensical constraints
I'm tired of his cousins
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48166411&goto=item%3Fi...
Solar shingles seems so smart. I guess they couldn’t get the cost down to be competitive.
Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?
Did any other manufacturers build their own version? It seems like the right long term idea but the lack of other players seems to indicate there's some underlying issue that isn't solved yet.
Its not the right long term solution tho, tiny roof tiles as solar panels have so many problems:
- Magnitude higher number of interconnections which impacts reliability and efficiency
- Uniform roof tile style
- Requires entire roof rebuild which is always more expensive than retrofit of panels on top
- Complex installation resulting in less installers available overall for the market
- Crossing of trades between roofing & electrical
A slightly better solution would have been to make the big traditional solar panels your actual roof panels but really retrofitting them on top of panels solves most of those issues above.
There are a few companies, I remember Invisible Solar which produces modules which look like traditional clay tiles.
The market pitch is different tho, they are aimed at providing less effective solar for places where you have a hard need to keep the old look, old churches, monumental buildings and such.
I came across https://colorsolar.eu/ They can put basically any print on the solar panel
Even just searching in Germany there are at least 4 companies making different designs. I guess they must be selling quite well. Most make non solar tiles of the same size and design for shaded parts of the roof.
There's a few competitors.
The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.
GAF did. There are two issues: 1) too expensive 2) not modular. I like that I can separate my solar decision from my roof decision. Panels make that possible.
I did consider but there are 2 issues. 1. Efficiency. Not all roof parts can be exposed to sun. You overpay 2. You need to time it with roof change
Home insurance also (ie replacement cost after damaging weather event).
I can't help but think that this essentially ruled it out in much of the country -- i get the impression Tesla doesn't tend to consider Midwest markets in their initial engineering
I mean in general it could be a right-ish idea. I myself have noticed when buying solar panels after replacing shingles that basically the per sqm cost of solar panels is like 2x of shingles (of the not super expensive kind). It could be easily more economical to use a modern version of this to replace your roof.
On the other hand, Tesla's solar shingles are tiny compared to panels, more in the shape of actual shingle strips, means tons of connectors, wiring losses, dangerous shorts (these things carry 10s of amps) etc. and probably a nightmare to troubleshoot.
I would not get these for any reason other than aesthetics.
I don't think it really adds up. It's an inconvenient install location and roofs are replaced every 10-20ish years. It makes sense from an efficiency standpoint but the capital costs outweigh that.
IMHO a pergola or carport is going to be better. You lose solar efficiency but gain the benefit of something that provides shade. Especially as solar panels have become an economical roofing option if you don't care about perfect waterproofing.
The problem is the cost. Tiles are pretty small, and you need to wire them together. This means a lot of small-gauge wires going all through your roof.
Multiple tiles also need to be connected in series to get reasonable efficiency, so you get plenty of failure points where one bad connection can cause a significant part of your solar roof to become useless. And you won't be able to easily fix it.
You can obviously fix all these issues, but it makes tiles too expensive.
I looked into it seriously at one point.
Essentially, you are adding another zero to the cost to have hidden solar. A 20k solar install becomes a 200k+ solar roof install.
Even if the final result is great, the economics shrink the possible customer base. Basic solar has gotten so cheap that people aren't worrying if the investment increases the value of the house itself. But very few people are willing to pay 10x for a thing that will never pay itself back in energy or home value. It's like putting a pool in your house - a few buyers will want it, but a lot will run from it because they don't know what to do with it.
So as a result, the target market ends up being super rich dudes in gated communities - the same kind of people buying custom 100k hifi systems and home cinema rooms. It becomes an upsell for people with unlimited budgets.
It's just not a mass market product when the competition is 10x cheaper and dropping daily.
Normal roof tiles are just as ugly as solar panels. They should simply make panels in all sizes so that they cover the roof properly. You probably need only a few custom size ones.
I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.
EVs have speakers for safety, not sonic beauty.
Have you heard of Fratzonic? If you haven't, you can't unhear it.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/08/heres-what-the-electric...
EVs are required to produce sound for pedestrian safety, but they are absolutely beginning to make faked IC engine sounds for aesthetic appeal. See the Ioniq 5 and Dodge Charger EV.
If it's required, then you can differentiate your product on the market, but the regulatory requirements are driving the decision to spend money on it.
Surely there’s a middle ground where a roof is made of something big and panel-sized, rather than a conventional roof with panels as another layer on top?
This is the roof of an industrial building near here which seems to go with that idea:
https://nabendynamo.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210426_1...
While not quite panel-sized, it's much larger tiles and there's not another roof underneath. Probably makes most sense with a new roof, though. The problem is that when a roof lasts 50--80 years, that's not a very big market just for new roofs.
Perfect. That scalloped (overlapping tiles) installation is The Correct Answer™.
Thanks for sharing.
Apologies, my google-fu is weak; I couldn't find more details. It's SON's building? I couldn't find that roof top at that address (using Google Maps).
Here's as far as I got: https://gemini.google.com/share/bef19f2b145c
Looks to be this building at that address and I can see the solar tiles on Google Maps: https://maps.app.goo.gl/ECbTUVwiUuDEPy6SA
The article from which I've linked the image is here (in German, though): https://nabendynamo.de/unser-neues-produktionsgebaeude-steht...
The roof is from Sunstyle, as detailed in the article: https://www.sunstyle.com/
Gemini seems to have read that article, taken a few details, embellished a few more, and not answered your question.
The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them. There are normal tiles surrounding the panels. This is the style I tend to see now for new builds, but it’s more expensive than just layering on the panels if your roof is already in good shape.
> The middle ground is integrated solar panels, where you have normal sized panels but they are flush with the rest of the roof and there are no tiles underneath them
Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?
Horses for courses relly. I think the panels are all standard sizes now as well? When done tastefully, they almost seamlessly blend with the tile (limits tile choices), certainly from a distance. Some new builds near me, you can’t really see the panels until up close. Raised panels do have an issue in that birds/rodents/etc. nest below them and can cause major damage if unchecked. This is why pest protection (unsightly up close) is a must. The major cost of dealing with nesting under panels comes from the labour and probable need for scaffolding etc. to resolve - i.e. minimum of £2k.
That and op said it's more expensive. Why would you do it flush, then? Looks? Eh, I prefer practicality over form and many architects would agree with being more honest.
THere is a middle ground which is this: https://www.wienerberger.co.uk/products/roof/in-roof-solar.h...
The big problem is that because there is no real ventilation, the panels get hotter and don't produce as much power.
What you put under them also has an effect on how waterproof your roof is long term, plus when you need to replace them finding ones that are the right size are also a pain.
There’re commonly used on new build houses in the UK — new roofs in the UK have a waterproof but breathable membrane under the tiles
Also see https://roofit.solar/ used in a few houses… mainly self build a or architect designed
Aside from power-independence, does solar on residential roofs ever make sense? For all the complexity of doing a few houses, you could do an entire parking lot (or empty land) and power the whole neighborhood.
Yeah if you can do it cheap enough. Here in Australia a standard 6.6 kW system (but with a 5kW inverter, maximum most utilities let you export with single phase) costs around $US6000 before subsidies, but around $4500 after. The systems are all basically exactly the same components, and these installers can probably do two houses a day with a stock standard system.
I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.
The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.
It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.
Power Independence isn't even a given, most systems aren't eqipped or designed that you can turn off mains/street power to your house and still have power.
E.g. Disconnecting your energy supplier or a power outage will still result in no power usage, despite solar panels generating power.
More expensive inverters and battery systems allow this, although this is far from the norm.
It's central vs decentralisation.
The electricy is consumed in the houses and not on the empty land.
Parking lots become a win-win with electric cars. They also keep the cars cleen and sun protected.
And it increases installation costs by a pretty huge amount. Installing solar panels in a field is MUCH cheaper than bolting them to a roof or building a structure to hold them above a car park.
Plus, most solar installs are grid connected so a significant portion of the electricity tends not to be consumed where it is produced. It’s not as if installing solar is an alternative to grid connections for most practical reasons.
Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.
They'd actually make economic sense where I live, the only thing that's held me from pulling the trigger is that I want to time it with when I need to have the roof inspected/replaced.
I'm aware of the arguments about how it can be that much cheaper when deployed at mass centralized scale rather than decentralized across a bunch of rooftops, however the way the electric markets are prices is based primarily on the cost to produce the marginal supply, which is usually gas.
So while the power company might flood a bunch of solar panels trying to capture the profit between cost to generate solar vs. cost to generate using gas, those profits haven't been lowering electric costs at residential rates. If anything those costs are still climbing.
It's actually not hard to get rooftop solar to pencil out in that situation, especially if you assume even moderate growth in future electricity rates or inflation. In my own tracker it would even be superior to paying down additional principle on my home mortgage!
Admittedly it would be less of a slam dunk if the net metering was less generous around here as you'd basically be required to add battery to the mix if you weren't already. But even that just prolongs the time to payoff, it still ends up having good ROI economically speaking.
Honestly they only made economic sense in my case because of government incentives. Although if the price continues to fall, they may eventually even make sense in my area without incentives.
Electricity generation in the event of a power outage was another consideration for me.
But yeah as a techy I also just enjoy having them.
I wish that were true, but I suspect more people are doing it to be trendy/appear "green" than basing it on a system lifetime ROI calculation vs. alternatives.
You should take this as a data point where your gut intuition has failed you.
It is really condescending to dismiss their choice as motivated by vanity rather than assuming that other people might have done their homework and made a rational decision. It might very well be that you have done your own homework and it doesn't make sense for your situation, but other people face different tradeoffs which make it worthwhile.
Just looking into it for my house in the UK (read, not very sunny) and it'll pay for itself in around 6 years. Seems like a no brainer for a house I'm not planning on moving out of.
You need only have read the HN front page 4 days ago to have seen one reason why 50,000 people may be motivated to get solar. Nothing trendy going on there, just poor regional planning.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090
People are rarely willing to spend five figures on something just to be trendy or green.
What alternatives do you have in mind that also have an ROI for the homeowner?
I'm not the one to whom you asked the question - I can think of plenty of things, but by and large most of the home things with ROI make the most sense to invest in when you're buying a new thing anyway - e.g. solar panels when you need a new roof, EV when you need a new car, ventless dryer when you need a new dryer, heat pump when you need new heating/AC, etc.
Off the top of my head the only thing that's really doable without replacing a depreciating asset are certain kinds of insulation upgrades. (And I guess potentially ceiling fan installs.)
When they rolled out the product with tiny tiles I always thought musk was being to ambitious. The smaller the tiles the harder a solar roof gets.
Why are tiles small BTW? Could we use tiles as big as normal solar panels?
My guess would be they are the same size as shingle strips, to make it easier to work with for regular installers rather than specialists.
These things carry a lot of current though, so I would certainly not trust anyone without proper tools and training to put them on a roof.
The problem with solar roofs is that it combines a changing technology, PV solar, to something that does not change, roofs. So now every time the new technology advances you need to pay for the new PV cells and the same roof tiles again. Solar roof will work once the PV tech settles down. From 20% eficiency to 100% it's a long way to go.
I don’t think it’s that good of an idea because only 50% of my roof was good for solar power (that is what faces the sun) so having the entire thing be panels is mostly a waste. I’m sure this is the case for a lot of houses. When I had panels installed, adding them on the “bad side” would only gain a few kwh.
From what I remember they also sold cheaper tiles that looked like the normal ones, but actually didn't have solar panels for this exact problem. I don't think this was much of a factor at all why this didn't work.
The main issue was that normal large panels got a lot cheaper way faster than expected and custom sized ones like that end up costing too much by comparison.
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This is sort of over stated generally.
In Australia where North is “optimal”, even South facing panels produce only 20-30% less and East/West about 15%. It does vary a bit by latitude but it’s not at all pointless to install them in other orientations in many places. I have not done the math to see how much of the world this extends to, but it applies to a fairly large chunk of Australia. Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/direction/
Tesla’s system also had non solar tiles so you could just skip the panels in whichever parts you wanted.
Roof construction is quite different here to the US though. We never have the plywood layer, it’s either ceramic tile or Colorbond steel directly onto usually wooden sometimes steel beams.
Australia is pretty close to the equator
In the UK, much further from the equator, some people are fitting panels on north-facing roofs. These are most effective on cloudy days.
This is mostly only cost-effective for remote properties where power cuts are common, but it works.
Depending on which part you consider it’s also halfway to the South Pole. Cape York to Tasmania is almost 33° of latitude.
Right. Sydney is at 33.9 S and Darwin is 12.4 S
Quote from the article:
In Sydney, south-facing panels typically produce around 30% less energy than north-facing ones. The steeper the roof, the less they’ll produce. They’ll also produce much more energy in summer than winter.
In the far north, the difference isn’t as great and in Townsville south-facing solar panels will only produce around 15% less energy overall than north-facing ones. Because Queenslanders generally use more electricity in summer than winter due to air conditioner demand, the fact that south-facing panels have considerably higher output in summer can improve self-consumption.
In Darwin, south-facing panels produce about 17% less electricity overall than north-facing ones, and, like in Townsville, they have considerably higher output in summer than winter.
I don't think you typically install PV tiles on the entire Tesla Solar Roof. They have matching non-solar tiles, and you choose how much of the roof will be PV.
Panels are so cheap it doesn't matter.
Regular solar panels yes, but not the Tesla panels!
Tesla [Product] is poorly supported really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point.
Their cars have build quality issues, self driving continues to be "just around the corner", their service centers are cheap, the solar roof is it's own nightmare, the pivot to robots is laughable, the robot taxis are a PR stunt that are amusing but in a cringey way...
And the promises over the years of automatic chargers, replaceable batteries, sensors, etc.
The company had a great idea early, had tons of goodwill, a growing manufacturing capacity, and squandered it chasing whatever Elon dreamt up.
My friend has Tesla solar roof. It's a great product but it's too expensive.
At one point after signing the contract, Tesla mailed him and notified that his previous signed contract was void and they sent him a new contract where the price had doubled to over $100k. They told he he had to sign the new contract in order for it to go forward.
This is classic Elon Musk tactic, which is to do whatever the fuck you want, laws be damned, and then try to bully your way through it. My friend didn't budge. They would call him or email him and kept harrassing him to sign the new contract and he said no. I don't remember there being a lot of news about this but I couldn't believe they had the gall to try this, although as I said, this is classic Elon Musk tactics.
Eventually I think other solar roof customers started to band together, and eventually Tesla caved and honored the original contract, as if they were doing him a favor. I'm not surprised that this technology is going to fail because it's too expensive and Musk's promise of dropping prices, surprise surprise!, never manifested.
I hope somebody figures out at some point how to do roofing with large integrated panels that could be solar.
Yeah, BlueScope Steel (Australia) did this with three separate prototype designs from 2012 - 2015 that were manufactured, installed and currently have had a decade of all weather on house trials.
The Australian market is largely adding trad PV panels to existing housing, but there are signs of greater uptake of integrated PV + weather proof + thermal insulation roofing panels by architects and hopefully will be seen more on new mass produced housing plans.
~ https://arena.gov.au/projects/integrated-pv-solar-roofing/
This Estonian companies does that https://roofit.solar/
Who could have expect that one big panel with one connection will have more reliability and better cost than lot of small panels with many connections.
As someone who owns a Solar Roof, this news is disappointing. Many of my friends have said it's the best roof they've ever seen, and I even sometimes get compliments from people who drive past.
Seems like from the comments in this thread there are other companies offering similar roofs now at least.
"the guy at the store said i was the only one who could pull it off"
Is it enough to get you off-the-grid?
https://youtu.be/UJeSWbR6W04?is=7zjKewd_mhUFEX1H - mkbhd has a video about it. Not fully off grid, if I remember correctly but generates pretty much all electricity he needs.
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Any article on Solar Roof that doesn't mention Tesla buying solar roof from Elon musk's cousin when solar roof was going under is an article not worth reading
It's not quite even that - he wanted to bail out his cousin's failing solar business with Tesla shareholders' money, but to try and justify it, they pretended that Solar Roof was a fully developed, ready to sell product that was going to be revolutionary and worth buying SolarCity for, when it was actually just a concept they'd quickly come up with and some 3D renders.
They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.
Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.
Everyone gets caught up in the thermal management stuff and the power density stuff and whatever but to me that's a red herring.
The real issue is that Tesla has never known the ability to produce solar panels at scale and Musk said in that recent interview with Dwarkesh that he intends to do all the solar production in house.
So where's he getting the sand from? How are they going to purify it at scale? How are they going to turn it into ingots and then wafers and then cells and panels when they haven't even been able to produce a slim fraction of panels without all those extra steps over the past decade for their roofs?
And if the goal is to have the industrial capacity to do all this in a few years and produce solar panels on the scale that he's talking about -- why doesn't he just lay those bad boys down en masse on Earth and solve the impending climate crisis and our current energy shortages?
It just doesn't make sense.
> Tesla's inability to produce solar panels is why I'm most skeptical of the whole terafab datacentre in space stuff.
I'm split on the datacenter-in-space stuff. I don't know whether I should disbelieve it because there is, obviously, no good way to evacuate heat in space, or because Musk talked about it, and he has an uncanny track record of not upholding his promises.
You are mixing up Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space.
> SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space
No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.
This current crop of tech bros and companies really is the worst for humanity. Failed tech and projects I can understand, but it’s the total, consistent and persistent lack of care and disregard for people, customers & the planet. They never clean up their own mess either, and I even disliked the kids who did that at playgroup 40 years ago!! The sole ambition is always money & power. I read that article aghast at multiple points.
I recently had 9.2kw of solar panels installed in the SE of England, the actual cost of the panels themselves was ~£1k. I’ve seen new installs going up with standard cheap panels nicely inset, flush into the roof itself. The roofers themselves have told me they are cheaper than a traditional roof due to the decreasing price of panels and ever increasing price of tile. Got a listed property with a slate roof? Solar could save you potentially £10k+ according to one roofer I spoke to.
Panels were and always were going to be dumb commodity items. There’s literal fields literally filled with the things everywhere. Compare to say something like the PowerWall which they still sell bucket loads of and I have one myself, Elon be damned…
However, the PowerWall still suffers from that worst of all tech bro sins of trying to limit YOUR access to YOUR data. I wanted to add an ESP CYD to display all my Home Assistant data when we had solar installed to help us as a family see what was happening in realtime. It’s incredibly useful - In typical HN fashion I rolled my own and avoided ESPHome, making it just how I wanted and I love it! 3d printed case and all! Boots in 2 seconds and just works!
I had obviously and wrongly assumed the PW3 would be easy as pie. Getting realtime data out of the PW3 is a freaking Kafka-esque nightmare… the only workable solution to which was setting up another dedicated ESP32 to connect directly to the PW own perm on wifi and weird custom API and shunt the data over BT. Tesla could break it all at a moments notice with an update and i’ll be out of hours trying to fix it. The whole thing is cat&mouse hoop jumping, the likes of which I haven’t seen since the earlier console hacking days. Tesla will display the realtime data through their servers, through their app, but if you want that…
Anyway, please everybody who’s all gung ho on the Anthropic and OpenAI hype trains remember - every single big tech company has had the exact same disregard for you, your family, your home and your planet since the start. It’s probably more consistent than Moore’s law at this point. Nothing is going to be different this time around.
The monstrous tech bros destroying humanity by bringing about electric cars, intelligent machines, mapping the world, bringing information to anyone anywhere.
I on the other hand, Maximus Virtus, am a net gain to humanity when I hack into tech products for visualizing my home’s data.
And don't forget the cheap, reusable rockets. Effing tech bros.
"The economics never worked either. An average Tesla Solar Roof costs approximately $106,000 before incentives, compared to roughly $60,000 for a traditional roof replacement plus conventional solar panels — a $46,000 premium. The payback period stretches to 15-25 years, compared to 7-12 years for traditional panels. In 2023, Tesla settled a class-action lawsuit for $6 million after customers accused the company of bait-and-switch pricing, with one plaintiff seeing their contracted price jump from $72,000 to $146,000."
Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.
Integrated solar panels into the tiles are batshit crazy expensive compared to regular big solar panels from China. I was looking how to install them (some other vendor, not Tesla) and was shocked - you can’t plug the small tiles connected together directly into inverter. There is additional power electronics box in between. Economically it makes no sense. The single installation around is at the guy‘s house who had successful 7 figures exit. Of course, the roof looks awesome.
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
I think it had more to do with the reality of the market. Solar panels have become incredibly cheap and that's because they are mass produced and standardized. Everything in the manufacturing process has been optimized. Now it is technically of course possible to make them other form factors, but artisinal solar panels are simply so much more expensive and cannot compete in any meaningful way with regular panels.
A bad idea ruined by poor business practices. Like, it's very hard to see how it could ever compete economically with normal solar panels.
It was a bad idea from the beginning, technically and economically it sucked, the only possible utility was areas with strict heritage constraints which forbade normal rooftop PV.
Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.
He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.
I caught him a few times not writing significant details that go against his narrative.
"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD. "Tesla consistently hides information from the court." There are two different cases separated by years. The police got all the information they needed in the first case. "FSD is 10x worse than the average driver." The uncertainty of the number due to insufficient statistics makes the comparison moot.
"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD.
To be fair that's not a contradiction. If FSD is designed such that a user braking because FSD was about to plow into something, sure the user started driving at the last second, but that is Tesla making a design choice to artificially blame users for FSD being fundamentally unsafe.
The claim was that FSD disengages before collision without user input (presumably to fool someone into thinking that it's the driver's fault). It's not clear who they are trying to fool though. The public will not buy it. NHTSA requires reporting the crash as ADAS-related if ADAS was active at any point during 5 seconds before the crash. The court would just classify this tactic as criminal negligence in the design (if they can detect imminent crash, why they disengage FSD instead of initiating emergency braking?).
All-in-all, the trick that can't fool anyone and that doesn't make any sense. If this claim was true, the only explanation would be that Tesla is evil for the sake of evil and to the detriment to itself. Evil and dumb.
On the other hand, pressing the brake is a common way of disengaging ADAS. Tesla is no better and no worse in this regard than other ADAS manufacturers.
He is extremely negative about Tesla, consistently. He's careful not to open himself to lawsuit with plausible deniability. But he borderline lies. I won't be surprised if he's on the payroll of legacy auto
I don't think he is on payroll, but he was promised Tesla Roadster, when it did not materialize he went on a vengeful crusade. I don't blame the guy, I would do the same.
Is that legit?
Yeah, he was a big Tesla shill, after he got scammed from the Roadster, he did 180 and started pointing everything wrong with Tesla
https://www.thedrive.com/news/24025/electreks-editor-in-chie...
If you read his articles over the years you would continually think that Tesla should go out of business in the near future, yet they never do.
He might not specifically lie, but puts such a negative spin on anything Elon-related that the overall result is essentially a lie.
Why is this elektrek website still gets quoted? It is a very very biased website. I would dismiss any “opinions” or articles they post.
The reporting on Elektrek is top notch. They care deeply about real sustainable energy and transportation and are willing to dig deep past the marketing and plainly report the facts. I can't count the number of times they've had exclusive scoops or found insightful angles nobody else was concerning.
This may be true, but from an editorial perspective they are openly and aggressively anti-Tesla. I think it's worth noting as this article is Tesla related.
While most every other articles on Tesla (historically) had been fawning megafans.
What about this article do you find questionable? I think it would help to prove your point if you included specific examples.
The article seemed fine to me.