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.

Regular solar panels work well but are an eyesore on a nice home.

Didn't they "bail out" solar roof when tesla started making money?

I think it was a genuine attempt but they failed to find a simple enough solution.

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...

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.

EVs have speakers for safety, not sonic beauty.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.

Why are tiles small BTW? Could we use tiles as big as normal solar panels?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/

> 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.

Seems like from the comments in this thread there are other companies offering similar roofs now at least.

Is it enough to get you off-the-grid?

"the guy at the store said i was the only one who could pull it off"

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.

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.

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.

He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.

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.

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.