Is there any competitor in the USA? The idea of roof tiles which are themselves solar panels seems sensible to me, and it's more aesthetically pleasing than putting panels on top of normal tiles.

▲

walrus01 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's extremely labor intensive and costly to put stuff up on the roof, and problematic in terms of electrical connector, electrical safety, and being proprietary for mounting and roof repair. Big ass PV panels that are 2.0 x 1.0 meter in size (or larger) are so cheap now for photovoltaic ground mounts that the labor and mounting can actually cost more than the panels.

460W panels can be something like $0.25 USD per STC watt in single pallet quantities shipped as LTL freight.

Or at least if you have to use your roof, just put them on boring aluminum rail mounts on roofs which are a much more known factor for roofing repair and labor.

▲

trueno an hour ago | parent | next [-]

without having looked into the tesla roof tiles like at all (so stop reading here if you want any sort of informed discussion), are these things like placed individually and wired together individually? does every tile get a microinverter or is it like a net of tiles belong to one? is this potentially hundreds of connectors acrossed your roof that would be so many points of failure. if so that seems nuts and hardly worth the absurd cost just for aesthetics. feel like anyone who can afford this could just have whatever roof they want and then have their solar array farm nearby on their presumably many acres of land.

in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways

▲

_JamesA_ 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

How does one go about acquiring these?

	▲	walrus01 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		By googling wholesale solar panel dealers, one example would be https://krannich-solar.com/us-en/ Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock. PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.

▲

rsynnott 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's a slightly weird proposition, in that, well, pitched roofs last about 50 to 100 years, typically (at least here; I gather it _is_ somewhat different in the US due to different materials and building standards). So you probably don't really _want_ to prematurely replace your whole roof, so your market is basically... people who happen to need a roof replaced right now?

They also appear to have been _extremely_ expensive. Like on the order of 10x the cost of a conventional solar installation.

Conventional solar panels look perfectly fine to me, FWIW.

▲

IgorPartola an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are apparently several traditional roof shingle makers who have previewed solar tiles. A friend of mine who is a roofer told me he would not trust Tesla and is waiting for a reliable supplier. Apparently he is a smart man.

▲

JKCalhoun 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Hundreds (and hundreds?) of tiles with twice that number of electrical connectors… what could possible go wrong?

I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.

Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.

▲

readthenotes1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sorta.

The closest I know of is https://www.gaf.com/en-us/roofing-materials/residential-roof...

The advantage is that you don't have to drill additional holes into your roof, nor do you have to have shingles under the solar panels.

Depending on where you live and how much you pay in taxes, they may be enticing.

▲

sorenjan 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Jackery Solar Roof.

▲

Vaslo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Clearly it’s very expensive and people aren’t paying for it.

▲

dbt00 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, it's an impractical idea that nobody wanted.

▲

bjelkeman-again 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I did want it. Would have looked great on my quite old house where it is highly impractical to have conventional solar panels, as there is essentially not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location, and I need new tiles soon anyway.

I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).

	▲	delecti 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> not enough space anywhere to have more than one or two panels in the same location That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.

▲

KeplerBoy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Works perfectly fine in Europe.

https://www.prefa.at/produkt-katalog/solarsysteme/solardachp...

▲

JKCalhoun 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting. They look great on a single-surface roof with 90° edges. It seems that as soon as your roof deviates from that the aesthetics begin to trend toward conventional PV panels (which of course also do not accommodate more complex roof profiles).

	▲	rsynnott 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Bonkers roof profiles are primarily and American thing, to be honest; not that they’re totally non-existent elsewhere, but the super-complex roof on a detached house is very American.