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1123581321 22 hours ago [-]
My thoughts are generally in line with the conclusion. The growth in the rooftop solar market has come from right-sized installations that can be put up in a day or two by a small crew. Minimizing crew and paperwork costs is important when quoting solar competitively; plus it reduces the complexity of operations at headquarters.
Cheaper installations generally win, especially when the homeowner receives a credit on the install for its projected or actual power generation (only federal credits tended to scale proportionally to the install cost.) This cost pressure has been hard for premium flat panel installers, which are in turn cheaper than Tesla was.
As acceptance of rooftop solar has grown, comfort with its aesthetics has also increased, reducing the need for solar that hides its nature.
Gigachad 18 hours ago [-]
In Australia solar panels are so ubiquitous I don't think you'd even notice them. They just blend in as much as any other functional part of a house.
usrusr 15 hours ago [-]
My perception has long reached the flipping point where sun-facing roof without any solar installed makes the house look like a house in bad maintenance.
pjc50 15 hours ago [-]
I like this perspective and we should propagandize it in the lifestyle magazines.
I've long thought of them as a visible signifier of prosperity and cluefulness, but since they've become standard on new build they just fade into the background.
I've not seen solar-over-thatch yet. I wonder if that exists in the Highlands somewhere.
PopAlongKid 10 hours ago [-]
It's odd that you confuse a massive capital investment with maintenance.
usrusr 8 hours ago [-]
That's just how perception works. It's rarely fair. People who keep their car running perfectly fine for 20 years will appear like they don't care, people who return a young but worn out near-wreck every time the lease runs out will give the opposite impression. And don't get me started about fast fashion!
But it's more than that with residential solar: at least in places where with a heavy oversupply in real estate, "massive capital investment" is hardly a matching term. More like a drop in the ocean, given the amount of capital bound in the whole package.
TitaRusell 11 hours ago [-]
When things get so widespread people stop crying about aesthetics.
Railways, highways, wind turbines- they become part of the landscape.
tootie 10 hours ago [-]
Roads covered with cars are an egregious eyesore and yet everyone is thoroughly acclimated to them. The amount of land we allocate just for parking would be shocking if it weren't so normal.
Speaking of which, solar roofs for parking lots always seemed like a thing we should be doing everywhere. I'm sure it's not cheap to build the structure but it has the added benefit of protecting cars.
RataNova 18 hours ago [-]
And this is probably the core issue. Solar Roof was trying to be a roofing product, an energy product, and a design product all at once
Do you have any pointers like that solroof that don't bother trying to be inactive anymore?
My benchmark there is a ventilated attic with insulation between attic and house, using traditional glass roof structure filled with frameless glass-glass panels instead of human-below rated laminated safety glass.
Like, it can't be that hard to do better when you're not trying to be substantially fancier than a classic gable roof, it's just that the panels need to not be shear-loaded much, and the structure doesn't have to be so pretty from underneath as traditional glass roofs.
cucumber3732842 13 hours ago [-]
The biggest thing that could be done to reduce costs at this point is to make the systems sufficiently self contained (electrically) that the utility is comfortable taking just plugging them in. Cut the licensed electricians and the municipalities out. Make it a purely utility thing.
For small (i.e. residential) installation these parties taking their pounds of flesh represents a double digit percentage of system cost.
bradley13 12 hours ago [-]
Many small solar installations are exactly that. Hang a solar panel over your balcony railing, and plug it into the socket.
Larger installations, of course, will never work that way, simply because they generate too much current for your standard wall plug to handle.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
Those hanging versions are micro units for an apartment. Definitely only offload small amount of load.
All for it but not for simgle family home market.
cucumber3732842 12 hours ago [-]
I meant plug them in like to the meter socket, not like the super low end apartment balcony stuff. But yeah upsizing that incrementally over time could get you there.
Hendrikto 11 hours ago [-]
You can do that in Germany for up to 2kW panels and 800W inverters. You can just buy them off the shelf and plug them in yourself, with no electrician or permit required.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
Oh its wild. Ive been looking at getting solar for about 8 years now. 30k install for 10kw system. Arrays are 10k or less of the total install.
dangus 19 hours ago [-]
This is also representative of Tesla’s stagnation as a company. They essentially have not made a new product since the Model Y came out. No, the Cybertruck doesn’t count, I don’t think we can even consider that a product brought to completion in terms of being an automobile of acceptable market competitiveness.
They are struggling in China which is pretty insane considering their head start in that country.
Clearly the solar roof idea could have been iterated on and made to make more financial sense. I think they could have built it into a panel solution that integrates a standard steel roof.
But again, what it looks like to me is that Tesla hasn’t actually been able to put real money and effort into any products at all. I think all their best people quit, and their leadership is distracted and ineffective.
RataNova 18 hours ago [-]
I think the pattern is less "Tesla can't invent anymore" and more that the company seems much worse at turning ambitious concepts into mature, supported products
dangus 11 hours ago [-]
I think it’s both, but also they don’t even need ambitious concepts. They just need to make vehicles that compete in popular segments and become a proper full range automaker.
Tesla has no 3-row SUV/family vehicle, no subcompact SUV (Kia EV3), no city subcompact car (Renault 5), and no commercial vehicles.
holoduke 14 hours ago [-]
Don't have still highest sales on model 3s?:
dangus 12 hours ago [-]
Tesla is now out of the top 10 list for EV sales in China as a brand.
The Model 3 is not one of the top 5 selling EVs in Europe. Everything in the top 3 has a hatch. Sedans are more popular in the American market but they’re also a dying segment compared to SUVs, while Europe always preferred vehicles with hatchbacks for space efficiency and practicality.
Volkswagen Group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The Skoda Elroq and VW ID.4 together (same platform) outsell the Model Y.
My next prediction is that the Rivian R2 steals about 30% of Model Y sales in the US. It’s priced similarly and it’s a way better vehicle according to early reviews and impressions, and it fits the boxy American SUV off-road aesthetic far better.
pjc50 11 hours ago [-]
Europe now has lots of fairly-local EV options: VW (inc Cupra and Skoda), Renault, even Stellantis. Despite their poor rep they make a lot of cars: Vauxhall/Opel, Fiat etc.
UK now has a significant Chinese presence: Omoda, Jaecoo (Chery), and especially BYD.
dangus 5 hours ago [-]
This is essentially Tesla’s looming biggest problem: they just don’t compete in enough model segments.
No tiny city car hatchback for volume in Europe, no three row SUV for American families, no commercial delivery vehicles (the ideal EV use case), no subcompact SUV, and their pickup truck is way more of a failure than it should have been.
The Cybertruck should have just been called tho Model T, be made to look normal/big manly grill like a Silverado, and have ads for it plastered all over NFL games. Tesla should have easily been able to sell 100,000 units per year in North America but they designed the thing without considering demographic research at all. (Example: many families use the 6 seat configuration of the F-150 to fit the whole family in in lieu of a minivan).
AtlasBarfed 19 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
AtlasBarfed 19 hours ago [-]
Rooftop solar should be more heavily incentivized.
From a disaster situation/civil defense perspective, it provides offgrid durability to communities, and it could be life or death in cold waves or heat waves.
For all the utility companies complaining about EV and alt energy infrastructure adaptation... well, fine, then let consumer PV do a large part of the work. Oh wait, did someone say consumer choice? The utility companies shut up real fast.
So it also counterbalances the political power of utility companies, who are no longer a monopoly, and provides economic competition so utilities can't jack rates if corporate/industrial/(ahem, AI) starts increasing demand and prices.
namibj 14 hours ago [-]
IMHO there should be extra incentives for BIPV just to the amount that would offset the classic shingles underneath because not just doing a simple barn roof (single gable, two pitch) or triangle roof (single pitch) with the slope entirely covered by solar glass of usual 400~800 Wp size modules is where a big part of the excess wasted cost is from.
Just make sure to allow structures that allow module-sized parts of the grid to be replaced with human occupancy windows in a nice and simple way.
pjc50 15 hours ago [-]
> it provides offgrid durability to communities
This needs a small asterisk that many systems are deliberately not "islanding" capable. Mine isn't, but in the ten years I've had my panels I've only ever had a couple of power cuts, one of which was at night.
Xiol 15 hours ago [-]
I'm having solar installed next month and I specifically had to ask for islanding capability. This added about £1500 to the cost of the system, which I can see many people not opting for.
boringg 12 hours ago [-]
Ive seen Battery + islanding sold as a deal sweetener with fed funding part of it. If you live in a grid stable place its kind of expensive for what it is… and no arbitrage wont make the money back in 99% of the places
thelastgallon 14 hours ago [-]
Solar panels have become cheap as dirt and the balance of system is majority of the cost. Installing these massive panels on roof requires a lot more skilled labor and time. Its time to incorporate solar into more areas of the building, build fences with vertical panels, mount them on walls, solar car canopy in front of the garage, optimize for fast installation with ease of installation as well as repair. We should think of more structural solar, solar panels (either by themselves or with their mounting hardware) become part of the structure.
For roofs, hail is another consideration, hail damage causes complication. Age of roof is another consideration, you don't want to do solar anytime, the right time is when the roof needs to be replaced, which is usually ~25 years.
FrojoS 11 hours ago [-]
25 years roof lifetime might be right for cheap asphalt shingles that are popular in the US. Concrete and clay tiles, which are common in e.g. Germany, will last 50y and 100y respectively.
Have always said community solar programs are the way to do residential solar. In those programs, you pay for and own off-site solar panels, then the energy they produce is credited to your electric bill.
They end up installed at commercial locations ideal for solar: often on covered parking, in fields, or on industrial roofs. Easier to repair, they can do larger panels, no issues with your roof line or roof condition.
ymolodtsov 12 hours ago [-]
Now imagine if we create a separate company that invests in infrastructure and sells energy to willing buyers who don't have to deal with this. We could call it an energy company.
tapoxi 6 hours ago [-]
The difference is in motive. You want to have a cheap energy bill, the energy company wants to make a profit that grows every quarter. Those two goals are eternally at odds.
cdmckay 5 hours ago [-]
We could make it so profit wasn’t the prime motivator, instead it’s main motive would be to provide a public good. We would call it a public utility.
ImPostingOnHN 9 hours ago [-]
Now imagine this hypothetical "energy company" has the community over a barrel with no viable alternatives, and uses their monopoly to jack up power rates and screw the community.
elric 8 hours ago [-]
My electricity comes from a cooperative. You have to own at least 1 share in order to become a customer (250eur/share). They sell power at very competitive rates, are powered entirely by renewables owned by their customers, and they actively encourage energy savings. Most years they pay a dividend of around 5% of the share price, which essentially lowers my actual electricity price some more.
And a member of a wind farm project (Ripple Energy) which went bankrupt. So like all small investment schemes, I guess you need to keep a close eye on their financials.
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
That sounds a bit pointless to me. The benefit of putting solar on your house is that your house uses electricity, and transmitting electricity is not actually free.
If you just care about the overall transition to solar (which you should!) then you can pay for green tariffs and invest in existing solar energy companies or ETFs.
ChoGGi 11 hours ago [-]
The panels on my roof go straight to the energy company anyways. You need to add batteries to use it yourself.
IshKebab 9 hours ago [-]
Only the surplus goes straight to the energy company. If you're consuming any energy and producing it from solar you'll use your own solar first, even without batteries.
elric 8 hours ago [-]
Which is maybe 10-20% for most people without batteries. Better than nothing, but not great.
thelastgallon 13 hours ago [-]
(This comment is a US centric observation and may be somewhat relatable to other counties which use shingles. Solar shingles are not a thing in many many countries with billions of people, homes are built with concrete).
Solar shingles (Tesla roof, GAF) seem like a smart idea -- why do 2 layers of install, shingles and solar panels, instead save on both material and labor by using solar shingles.
It didn't work because the shingles are small, massively increasing the number of parts, connectors, and wiring -- and all the intensive skilled labor that it needs. Labor needs to be skilled as well as increases the number of hours. It also increases failure rates (at install time?) as well as lifecycle maintenance costs from repairs. Standard shingled roof (not the solar) is just an illegal immigrant working for $2/hour with a nail gun, unskilled labor, finishes things super super quick.
Could it work in future? We don't know. I think the fundamental constraint is people's existing belief system on what a roof is supposed to look like and unwillingness to consider that all roofs don't have to look the same. Perhaps its possible to let go of existing shingle design, build massive panels and make it a structural roof along with metal, but it may not have any buyers. And most definitely will not be accepted by any HOA. Most of the US in in a HOA regime. Any tiniest variation from the rigid HOA rules and regulations (slightly different shade) will require an entire roof rebuild. The constraint is not technological, but human beliefs (about what a roof should look like) and existing rigid structures on how we organized our society.
It doesn't blend with the surrounding slates (asphalt shingles are rare in the UK, use of asphalt is more for flat roofs and sheds), but .. how much does that really matter? It sounds like US HOAs have replicated the worst aspects of UK "conservation areas", preventing building variation, while not actually preserving anything other than a McMansion style of no historical or aesthetic importance?
cillian64 13 hours ago [-]
I had that style of integrated panels installed on my (Victorian) house in the UK. The slates were old and crumbling so needed replacing and doing integrated panels meant only needing a fraction as much slate which saved a chunk of money. I think the result also looks a lot better than non-integrated panels, at least with slate roofs (which are common in my area)
Apparently integrated panels can be a little less efficient in hot weather as they don't get cooled by airflow under the panels and are less efficient when hotter. But it's a pretty minor effect, maybe a few percent of output. Seems like the best option on a new-build or if you're re-roofing anyway.
morepork 13 hours ago [-]
They also never managed the massive economies of scale for regular solar panels that have driven down prices. Solar panels that can be mounted on any kind of roof, in fields, etc.
t1234s 1 days ago [-]
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.
themafia 23 hours ago [-]
> high-end home and its a very nice looking product
That might just be another way of saying "niche."
t1234s 1 days ago [-]
Regular solar panels work well but are an eyesore on a nice home.
thelastgallon 14 hours ago [-]
When it comes to eyesores, there is nothing worse than garage door(s). The front of the house is mostly a massive ugly garage door. I don't see people ever not having a garage because its an eyesore and it is right in front of you, can't avoid looking at it. Roof stays out of sight unless you want to look at the roof.
Americans come up will all kinds of ridiculous reasons for not using clean energy.
2) Also, we are now bird lovers! Wind turbines killed 2 dozen birds (but cats kill billions of birds). Wind is also an eyesore. Ruins the views from $_.
3) Solar is an eyesore.
4) Electric cars don't work in the cold. (lets ignore Norway, a tropical island)
5) Range anxiety, because I might drive from Florida to Wyoming.
theultdev 11 hours ago [-]
Hey cool this is like those myspace surveys. Let me participate.
1. I support nuclear, really stupid not to use anything else. Blame politicians and the hippies.
2. Yeah wind imo is useless, and it's more than 2 dozen. Quite high, I don't think comparing kills to the top predator is a win. Also windmills are in raptor's paths, generally cats don't eat raptors. Noisy and ugly too.
3. Solar is nice, will use it as aux, but panels and batteries don't come close to a propane generator. Different use-cases.
4. I own a cybertruck and a trailboss, but it's Texas, can't really speak to cold weather ev experiences.
5. Owning an EV I know how they work, anxiety no issue, just hop free SCs and enjoy the ride.
Bonus: Garage doors can look stupid if it's the entire front of the house, like those mcmansions, but can be subtle with a long ranch house for example.
Solar panels always look awful on a roof.
NicuCalcea 11 hours ago [-]
Solar panels may not be everyone's cup of tea, but they're fine, you get used to them. I think windmills look cool as shit. But then I think cybertrucks are one of the ugliest things created by man, so I guess the point is we each have our own taste.
theultdev 10 hours ago [-]
A windmill by itself looks cool as shit. But the landscape gets ruined.
It's the equivalent of 100 radio towers crowding the area. Kind of takes you out of nature.
And I don't have a CT because it's pretty. I have it because it's functional and so fucking cool.
NicuCalcea 7 hours ago [-]
What energy installation improves the landscape? Do oil wells look nicer? If I had a choice of minimal impact on the beauty of the landscape, I'd choose solar and wind.
Great that you like your car, windmills and solar panels are also functional and fucking cool, so I don't know why you've bought up them being ugly. You're happy to drive an ugly car, but draw the line at looking at ugly roofs?
theultdev 7 hours ago [-]
Yes oil wells are nicer due to the fact they aren't 124ft+ tall.
A few select spots for nuclear would be ideal ofc.
No I don't buy things based on whether they are "ugly" or not.
Solar panels don't make any financial sense in my scenario, would take half of their lifespan to break even on the energy savings.
But yeah tastes are different. Personally I find the CT to be a cool look overall, albeit different, so I get why you are so fixated on them.
NicuCalcea 6 hours ago [-]
You're mixing up arguments. I don't know or care if solar makes financial sense for you, it does for many people. I was only addressing the fact that you seem inconsistent on whether something deserves to exist based on whether you think it looks nice. You have the right to drive a huge car that many people find unappealing, but windmills are useless because you don't like looking at them, despite them producing a third of the UK's energy?
I'm not fixated on the cybertruck, you bought it up unprompted. Though I do find it uglier than most cars, I think all of those enormous American "trucks" are an eyesore, and I hope to never see one in person.
theultdev 6 hours ago [-]
> 3. Solar is nice, will use it as aux...
I said I use solar, just think the panels are ugly on a roof. That's subjective also, it's not the reason I don't have them, cost is.
Windmills are useless because of the amount of maintenance, the resources/carbon used to make them, lack of recyclability (huge blade graveyards), and most importantly, it's not a base load. Them being ugly is just the cherry on top.
They are useless when you could just use nuclear.
Yeah you keep wanting to bring it back up though, it wasn't unprompted, the GP mentioned EV and range. I was giving a duality example of owning both vehicle types. You focused on the CT for some odd reason. As did another person.
ChoGGi 11 hours ago [-]
Before you get down voted to oblivion:
> 4. I own a cybertruck
Mind if I ask why?
theultdev 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah I love FSD and I need a lot of space.
Feels like a space ship and I love it more than my ICE truck.
And yeah, realized that would be downvoted. Fun to break the bubble here with other opinions though.
bakies 8 hours ago [-]
not a mill
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
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.
batiudrami 23 hours ago [-]
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.
jofzar 15 hours ago [-]
It's so common for me I literally don't think I see them anymore (because it's just part of the roof)
I know they are on every second house, but gun to my head I could not tell you how many have it on my street.
rob74 15 hours ago [-]
...and don't get me started about all those tin cans with wheels parked all over the place outside of garages! I consider myself lucky to have several windows in my apartment where I usually don't see one of those eyesores when I look out of it...
pbmonster 1 days ago [-]
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.
lefra 19 hours ago [-]
The previous owner own my house installed these (it was mandated by law here at the time). About 90% of the time they leak after about 10 years, and mine did. I had to have the installation re-done over the roof.
tln 22 hours ago [-]
Don't you need fire setbacks? I didn't think full roof racks were possible
pbmonster 18 hours ago [-]
Building codes on that are going to vary locally. They are doable in most of Switzerland if you plan for it: no sky lights, no chimney (there's setbacks and fire codes for those), ect.
tln 6 hours ago [-]
I thought the IFC International Fire Codes were a bit more ubiquitous than they are. Apparently whole roof is possible in a few EU countries. Probably not a good idea for the stick-built houses prevalent in US though
Thanks for sharing
bradley13 12 hours ago [-]
Yep, that's exactly what we did with our new house in Switzerland (a few years back).
anthomtb 23 hours ago [-]
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.
youngtaff 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve never understood why so many houses in the US have felt shingles rather than a longer lasting alternative
Tiles on my house are at least 150yrs old
ChoGGi 10 hours ago [-]
It took about three weeks of labour and just under three grand in cost to redo the shingles on my roof. It was just over two grand for the shingles, the rest for misc. Not including me taking two weeks off of work.
About three weeks because I didn't do it all at once, an 11/12 pitch is tiring to work on. One week per side of stripping/waterproofing, then a couple weekends of shingling.
Edit: the stripping took a week from having two layers of shingles, first layer was cedar than asphalt.
youngtaff 10 hours ago [-]
When we moved in I had my house re-roofed to add insulation and a breathable membrane
Took a day to take all the tiles off the front, add insulation, membrane and batten it. Then another half day or so to put the original tiles back on
Back took slightly longer because we had some alterations done but it was just over a week in total effort
8 hours ago [-]
grosswait 12 hours ago [-]
Economics. No one lives 150 years, so why pay for someone else’s roof when you’ll be making payments for so long.
youngtaff 10 hours ago [-]
You're not paying for someone else's roof… it forms part of the house value when you sell
Given shingles last between 20-30 years someone's got to pay the cost of re-roofing on a regular basis throughout the house's lifetime
Then you've got the added maintenance, flammability and other downsides of a shingle roof to take into account too
IshKebab 11 hours ago [-]
Someone else suggested that you have to replace your roofs every 25 years though. People definitely live for 25 years!!
Also even if you personally don't live that long, it does affect the value. For example a 99 year lease on a property is considerably less valuable than a 999 year lease, even though very few people live more than 99 years.
bluGill 10 hours ago [-]
The shingles used in the us are a good compromise. They are cheap and easy to repair. Clay lasts well overall but one broken tile is going to be expensive to repair.
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
I can hardly see my panels even if i wanted to
freetime2 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
kccqzy 23 hours ago [-]
In my opinion, the Tesla Solar Roof really appealed to people who wanted good looks. They probably already have their “forever” homes and are not thinking of moving at all. It is more about the emotional attachment to this part of your home than its functional aspects. You can buy a $100 dining table from IKEA or you can buy a $1,000 dining table from Pottery Barn or you can buy a custom $5,000 dining table made from a solid piece of wood. It's the same functionality but emotionally very different.
freetime2 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah and I think that's fine - and as I mentioned below my own reasons for installing solar panels were not just financially motivated. But the economics are also hugely important. Most people don't buy $5,000 tables, and most people don't buy Tesla Solar Roofs - the article says they sold 3,000 total in the last decade. And I don't think Tesla wants to be in the bespoke roof business - they want to be selling to the masses (or at least a sizeable well-off segment of the masses).
It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up - and even people who were willing to spend $100K on a Solar Roof faced long delays if they were available at all in their market. Tesla's image has also shifted in the last decade, and having a Tesla parked in your driveway with a powerwall and solar roof doesn't carry quite the same image that it once did - which is important when you are relying on emotions to drive sales.
mbreese 20 hours ago [-]
> the article says they sold 3,000 total in the last decade.
>It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up
I think these two things were highly related. Same with the cost. They couldn’t figure out how to scale up, which kept prices high and volume low. Because of this, it really was a bespoke business. And while, it looks nice, that type of margin just is not going to provide the returns they promised investors.
creshal 16 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Elon's whole shtick is make things scale up that everyone else thinks can't scale up. Sometimes it works (batteries), sometimes it works spectacularly well (Falcon 9), sometimes it fizzles out because it turns out everyone else was right (tunnel boring, solar tiles).
21asdffdsa12 17 hours ago [-]
They could have had that- if they had a standardizeable install method. Aluframes for the roofs, have bespoke solarpanels just slide in and lock up as roof over roof install. The problem there was the statics not working out
21asdffdsa12 17 hours ago [-]
The boss wishes for a product distorts the target audience selection?
brikym 22 hours ago [-]
But we're talking about a utility here. If someone just wants to own fashionable things there are better ways to do that.
akerl_ 22 hours ago [-]
Not if the two things you want are "solar power for your home" and "for your roof to not be covered in obvious solar panels".
I have a Tesla solar roof. I bought it knowing there were cheaper options for equivalent solar power because I liked the aesthetics.
brikym 21 hours ago [-]
Does it actually make sense financially vs investing in something else?
DougN7 20 hours ago [-]
No it doesn’t, but style never makes financial sense.
I mean, if your goal is to absolutely maximize the number in your bank account, no. But then there are other things you could be doing too -- you can do the math and cover all your nutritional needs for under $1 a day, by eating mostly potatoes. But most people prefer to spend 20x that much and have food that tastes decent. And a handful of people will spend 30-40x that to have really nice food.
If you think about money as a tool to maximize your "joy", then whether the Solar Roof is worth it completely depends on your preferences and your financial situation. Most people are fine with black panels; but if you have the money and like the look of the tiles, why not?
akerl_ 20 hours ago [-]
Not really, no.
Forgeties79 21 hours ago [-]
But I guess my first question is why you want solar panels at all then? For most people it’s about saving money long term first, then maybe energy independence (especially in emergencies) if possible, then just wanting to go green. If it’s aesthetics, you can do a cool roof without solar I assume.
What drove you to get solar panels ultimately and why did you go Tesla? Genuinely curious.
I have a feeling you’ll say something i hadn’t considered.
akerl_ 19 hours ago [-]
No, you're pretty spot on. It was the overlap of a couple of factors:
1. I wanted solar & batteries as a buffer for grid outages
2. I wanted to be able to offset some of my energy usage with solar
3. I wanted my roof to look nice, and personally I think solar panels strapped onto a roof don't look very appealing.
4. At the time, Tesla was one of the few names in town for an integrated solar roof.
Saving money wasn't really part of the calculus, which worked out because as the article and parallel comments note, getting a Tesla solar roof is a pretty bad decision if one of your primary factors is cost or saving money on your electric bill.
Forgeties79 10 hours ago [-]
Makes sense! Appreciate the insight
imtringued 15 hours ago [-]
If it was just about good looks, they could have built large panels with smaller tile style panels integrated on top of them and then used faux tiles to cover the gaps without having to actually connect them electrically.
gtowey 21 hours ago [-]
It's even worse than that. They're making the comparison of a solar roof to a new standard roof plus solar panels, but most people absolutely do not replace their roof when they get panels so the cost difference is more like 106k vs 30k.
20 hours ago [-]
imtringued 15 hours ago [-]
There are companies that will install solar shingles into your roof and they only need to remove tiles in the places where the panels will be installed, so the Tesla Solar Roof is expensive even compared to an aesthetically pleasing roof.
somenameforme 16 hours ago [-]
In both cases I'm somewhat curious why seemingly no middle-man 'free solar roof' companies have sprung up where they install it with some sort of arrangement where the panels are free, but they get 90% of the generated revenue until it's paid itself off and then some. So you get a small electricity discount for many years and then eventually a much larger one, and free panels on top.
If they can work out the economics to the point that it's more viable than something like treasuries then I don't see the issue? Of course there's some potential market and other variability, but if this business model is sound then Lloyd's is there to insure it?
gnopgnip 16 hours ago [-]
Something like this exists with PPA solar leases, and with home batteries.
But it’s usually a bad deal for the homeowner compared to a more conventional lease or purchase with a fixed rate. The incentives don’t match up, there is also the issue of the lease buyout if the home is sold.
> "requires on-site renewable electricity generation for new homes in England — solar PV covering around 40% of ground floor area where feasible"
As well as an end to new gas boilers, replaced with a heat pump mandate.
> The estimated build cost increase is around £4,350 per dwelling. FHS-compliant homes are projected to save homeowners around £830 per year on energy bills compared to a typical EPC C home
That .. looks rather different to a $100k gold plated roof.
zdragnar 15 hours ago [-]
You're comparing apples to oranges, at least a bit. $60k for a roof plus solar is going to be for a larger US home compared to a UK home- probably in the 3000 sq ft range, unless it's a very steep roof with lots of dormers or corners. Also, the cost savings for the UK home are due to much higher energy prices- the cost savings would be much smaller in the US.
With that said, Tesla's Solar Roof is definitely the gold plated unreasonably out of touch option.
womble2 10 hours ago [-]
OTOH solar is a lot less useful in the UK than in the US. The southern tip of the UK is north of all the major Canadian cities, in the depths of winter we get about 6 hours of daylight with the sun barely reaching 20 degrees above the horizon. The winter is also where most electricity usage is too, doubly so when you want to replace gas heating with a heat pump. No AC and summer daylight past 10pm means that residential electricy usage in the summer, when solar does make sense, is very low.
zdragnar 3 hours ago [-]
Meh, I've had people come out to give me a quote for rooftop solar and they told me not to bother. Between the latitude (upper Midwest) and tree coverage shading parts of the roof throughout the day, it wouldn't pay off in a reasonable time line.
Mind you, that's with having AC, electric laundry dryer, a private well pump, septic heater and all sorts of other energy hogs trotting about the place throughout the year. I'm not exactly living an ascetic lifestyle myself.
Maybe if I paid the UK's electricity rates it'd be different though.
RataNova 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, and the problem is that the premium isn't small enough to hand-wave away as aesthetics
vishnugupta 19 hours ago [-]
> $106,000 before incentives,
What's the capacity though. Either way this seems extremely high unless we are talking in terms of like 100kw or something. For reference, I recently installed hybrid/net-metered system set up at my home in India; 7kw solar with a 20kWh battery for around $10K. The biggest cost is for the batteries though. The panels themselves have become extremely low price and the prices continue to fall.
It's interesting to see Tesla's solar business getting disrupted by Chinese manufacturers after EV.
decimalenough 18 hours ago [-]
It's not just solar panels, it's a roof replacement and solar panels. In high COL areas, the roof alone would likely cost you $10k+ these days.
formerly_proven 16 hours ago [-]
10k for a SFH roof seems extraordinarily cheap to me for any COL area. I would expect around 50k-60k for a 1000 sq ft roof (not US).
quickthrowman 6 hours ago [-]
$50-60 sq ft is probably 3x too high.
A bundle of shingles is $50, 3 bundles to cover 100 sq ft is $1.50 sq ft in materials. Figure $1.50/sq ft to demo and dispose of the old roof shingles.
Materials and demo comes out to $3,000, figure $500 for tools and nails, mark it up to $4,500-5,000
Probably (4) people can knock out a 1000sq ft roof in an 8 hour day, call it 40 hours of labor for demo and install.
Surely the labor cost and markup is not $1,000 an hour, that’s what it would have to be for a 1000 sq ft roof to cost $50-60k. $125/hr for 40 hours is $5,000.00
mschuster91 15 hours ago [-]
> I would expect around 50k-60k for a 1000 sq ft roof (not US).
That's about 90 m². Here in Germany [1], if it's just replacing tiles, you're looking at 10k, add 20k for adding heat insulation - and you can get 15-20% back with government assistance from that sum. The only way you reach 50k in costs here is if you have to fix structural issues (e.g. rotting wood due to water ingress, but if you take proper care of your roof you won't need to do that - expected life time for roofs is about 80 years for the tiles and much more to the tune of centuries for the wood framing.
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.
freetime2 23 hours ago [-]
No - these numbers likely do not factor in opportunity cost. And yes, you can probably earn a better return elsewhere. But the reasons that I installed rooftop solar were:
* Diversification. These days stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto, and even precious metals are increasingly correlated [1]. Solar panels offer pretty consistent returns regardless of what is happening in the stock market.
* Backup power. I live in an area that is prone to natural disasters. Having a backup power source gives me a bit of peace of mind.
* Hedge against increasing energy prices. My solar panels have actually performed better than I expected due to electricity prices increasing faster than I expected.
* Clean energy. When I turn on my A/C in the summer I take some enjoyment from the fact that it's powered by the panels on my roof and not burning fossil fuels.
* Entertainment. I enjoy nerding out and learning about the tech, monitoring output, etc. A lot of people think solar panels are ugly but I actually like the way they look.
Yes the S&P 500 would have returned signficantly more than my solar panels. But I already have a lot invested in the S&P 500, solar panels were fairly inexpensive and don't make up a significant portion of my overall investments, and the psychological benefits outweigh whatever opportunity cost I have incurred.
There is also the option to finance them. You need to be careful with financing, as I think there are a lot of predatory offers out there. But if you are buying or building a house, for example, and can roll the cost of the panels into your mortgage, then that's going to reduce the up front cost and hence the opportunity cost.
But yeah when you get into the $100K range for a Tesla solar roof, then I think that starts to be a pretty substantial amount for most people that can be better spent elsewhere. Not to mention the delays, customer service issues, etc that people have experienced with Tesla - which can easily offset any peace of mind benefits.
I'm in the same camp as you. I'll add that my panels are returning 16% on capital spent, and it's going up as electricity prices go up.
So, yes, I could probably get a higher return if I invested that capital elsewhere, but, apart from the diversification, I get benefits beyond the raw financial return.
Firstly, earlier this year, we had a cable coming into the house fail. By the time the electrician and city had done all they needed to do to sort it out, almost 4 days had passed. We would have been without power for that time. As it happens we ran completely on solar for that period - freezers stayed frozen, could run the laundry, etc. Some stuff was limited (no oven, no hot water) but the impact was minimal compared to what it might have been.
Secondly, during the day at least, I'm not really fussed about electricity usage. If lights are on, or AC is on or whatever. So there's less "hey, that light is costing money" etc. So we end up using more electricity, but the marginal cost (during the day) is 0. My next car is electric (already on order) and that can charge at home as well (during the day, I work from home) and so that just increases the return (utilization of available power goes up.)
From a financial point of view, for me, it's a no-brainer. Obviously ymmv - everyone's numbers are different. For me the payback is in the 5-6 year range (probably under 5 once the car comes online.)
jonhohle 17 hours ago [-]
In an average year (not the past 4), 16% would be amazing. That it’s effectively guaranteed and will almost certainly increase every year is icing on the cake. I’d take that trade any day.
throwaway2037 16 hours ago [-]
> my panels are returning 16% on capital spent
Can you share your calculations?
mschuster91 15 hours ago [-]
Not OP but I'll run what I plan on doing. In Germany you can get a plug-in ready kit with 2.2 kWh battery and 920W panels for less than 600€ [1]. The panels are about 1.8 m² each (=3.6 m² total), so with on average 1.200 kWh/m² solar radiation and 25% efficiency I'm looking at up to 1080 kWh in energy I'll get out of the system per year.
Electricity here in Germany is expensive at an average 30 ct/kWh, so the panels save 324€ worth of electricity - an ROI of > 50%. Choose some better quality for the inverter and battery and you'll still be north of 30% ROI.
The key thing making this high ROI possible is that it's small. Counterintuitive, yes - but explained by the fact that for larger installations than that, setup costs go up: you need to install the panels on your roof instead of hanging them off your balcony which can be thousands of € in labor, you need to run new power wires...
Are these the kind you could DIY-install on a balcony for example?
mschuster91 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, precisely.
Neywiny 24 hours ago [-]
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
ejoso 24 hours ago [-]
Cost of alternative investments not pursued as a result of deployed capital.
hello8402 23 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ejoso 22 hours ago [-]
Bully for you
loeg 23 hours ago [-]
Usually, no.
dnnddidiej 19 hours ago [-]
Recently got 14kw solar, 30kwh battery, heat pump water heater for c. 20k usd. installed.
Edit: installed for me by trades in that price.
elsonrodriguez 18 hours ago [-]
Self install?
sergiotapia 20 hours ago [-]
I would love some kind of solar, but when I know how cheap it is to install it in places like Africa AND use cutting edge chinese solar/battery tech, my enthusiasm to pay a USA premium makes me just close the tabs. It's too expensive in america for some reason.
freetime2 19 hours ago [-]
I agree it's frustrating. But shouldn't your decision be based on whether it makes financial sense for you, and not whether someone else in a completely different market with a completely different cost structure is paying a lower price than you?
davedx 15 hours ago [-]
IME a lot of the difference between solar for the US vs Europe for example, is that the energy usage in the US is way higher (often due to HVAC usage), so you just need much larger sized systems than in Europe if you want to cover your usage fully. Our house here in NL is 3.5 kWp, people I know in the US have more like 20-30 kWp.
dzhiurgis 16 hours ago [-]
You need to shop around. Problem is solar companies just hiring contractors with little value add. Spend some time looking for contractor yourself and you’ll easily save 30%.
dv_dt 13 hours ago [-]
I keep hoping some architect will take up an residential building design with solar panels to rethink with deeper integration than just a "material" swap out. On the roof, mounting panels inches over the roof, or even as the roof material is a terrible thermal environment. Why not design in a rooftop open air living space, topped with solar panels. Panels get cooler temperatures, the physical roof gets reduced temperatures and probably extended life through shading too. At least for some new building and sites it would be interesting to see.
bradley13 12 hours ago [-]
When we recently build our house, the south side of the roof became mostly solar panels - just a few shingles near top. Solar panels make a perfectly fine roof surface. Underneath the panels is an air gap, with ventilation at the bottom and top. Under the air gap is a plastic underlayment that ensures the roof remains waterproof.
Sure, it was more expensive than a shingled roof, but less expensive than a shingled roof with solar on top. Add to that, it looks better.
aqme28 10 hours ago [-]
I don't know about roofing, but for wall solar there is Solablock (https://www.solablock.com/), which makes solar-embedded masonry. Much better thermal profile and cheaper overall installation costs.
idiotsecant 12 hours ago [-]
You just built another roof on top of your roof.
People generally limit the number of roofs to one, as they are expensive and important for keeping the outside out and the inside in.
Residential roofs are more or less the worst place possible to put solar panels.
itissid 12 hours ago [-]
> People generally limit the number of roofs to one, as they are expensive and important for keeping the outside out and the inside in.
What does this mean?
And why is it the worst place to put solar panels? Is this and America only phenomenon, cause in India people are installing them like hot cakes on the roof. What’s different about roofs here?
sokka_h2otribe 11 hours ago [-]
Your roofs are (often) concrete flat roofs with structural floor
The American roofs mentioned are typically significantly inclined, made of a less rigid material (wood, asphalt shingles), and not built to the expectations of supporting as much.
When OP says 'the worst place' they mean it is not a structural place, it is hard to access, and it serves an important function that is best not to mess with.
Note, I do not fully agree with OP but I get the points made.
idiotsecant 5 hours ago [-]
American roofs are not built to mount anything but lightweight shingles, generally. They need to be designed for the load. Even if you do that, you now have a maintenance item that requires being on your room to perform. The correct place for solar panels is the many, many, many millions of square miles that don't have houses on them.
winfredJa 2 days ago [-]
I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
peterisza 2 days ago [-]
I think it was a genuine attempt but they failed to find a simple enough solution.
hwc 8 hours ago [-]
Aren't you supposed to find the solutions BEFORE you announce the product?
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
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.
moffkalast 2 days ago [-]
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.
cianmm 1 days ago [-]
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).
rgblambda 1 days ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 1 days ago [-]
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.
rgblambda 1 days ago [-]
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.
hvb2 1 days ago [-]
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'
shye 20 hours ago [-]
Of course, the solution to that is to nullify all HOAs, power tripping or not. They were a mechanism to enact segregation, and as such should've had no place when created, and certainly has no place now.
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.
HerbManic 22 hours ago [-]
Sorry I see I am being down voted. Understandable, I do come off a little like a jerk there. I am not anti solar in the least, I just kind it really fascinating how some folks who are very well meaning, also tend to love that they can show off their goodies. I wish it wasn't the case but alas this is how some folks are.
People love to show off houses. Kitchens, bathrooms, etc. And spending £10k on a bathroom doesn't even generate electricity!
I have also become an unironic supporter of virtue signalling, provided it's backed up by actually doing the thing yourself. Because otherwise the alternative is "vice signalling", like "rolling coal", which is much, much worse.
thelastgallon 14 hours ago [-]
Your observation may not be true. People do what they've done before, or what other people do. Putting solar on roof is going against both of those.
There are definitely a few people who want to show off their bling/goodies, but all 326 of them already bought cybertrucks to show off. Solar panels are not something to show off and brag about, its not macho. It would be looked at as feminine technology. If its not making a loud noise, looks big and inspiring (pick up truck), billeting smoke, it has no macho power to show off.
bruce511 21 hours ago [-]
You're not supposed to be down-voted simply because folk "agree or not".
Honestly, I don't agree with you though. Yes, there are ways for folk to signal virtue, and that happens, but I don't think solar power is one of those. Frankly the utility, and financial, returns are just too high.
Obviously ymmv with regard to returns, but I'm getting 16% on capital invested (a number that keeps climbing as electricity costs rise.) That's decent enough that virtue-signalling becomes a meaningless goal. I guess folk might _like_ that they're not burning fossils to get electricity (I do) but the financials dwarf that.
eichin 17 hours ago [-]
Just because there's actual virtue doesn't mean there isn't also virtue signalling going on... especially when it might be (in your particular circles) more taboo to talk about the actual numbers than the "doing it for the environment" part.
bruce511 9 hours ago [-]
I guess it depends on what you mean by virtue signaling, and indeed on how much you care about "visible" things. And to what extent the people around you care.
Where I stay solar is really common (probably > 1 in 10 has it.) Plus the Financials make it easy (if you have the roof and capital.) And here no-one really cares if you're green or not.
The fact that it is green is a bonus. (Which i think most people don't care about.)
I guess you can read virtue-signalling into anything you like, especially if it matters to you personally. I just don't think it comes into play here.
PowerElectronix 1 days ago [-]
Didn't they "bail out" solar roof when tesla started making money?
rpcope1 1 days ago [-]
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.
a4isms 1 days ago [-]
Or more specifically, didn't Tesla bail out Elon's cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive?
vasco 2 days ago [-]
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.
epolanski 15 hours ago [-]
Or the 2019 Roadster scam to inject liquidity through preorders.
habitue 2 days ago [-]
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.
u1hcw9nx 2 days ago [-]
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.
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
What evidence do you have that little effort was put in development? As far as I can tell that not at all the case. The early version was bad and it took multiple generations for it to become a real product.
alfiedotwtf 2 days ago [-]
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
SXX 2 days ago [-]
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.
hnaccount_rng 1 days ago [-]
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
ytpete 1 days ago [-]
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.
sumeno 20 hours ago [-]
Are you claiming that the majority doesn't live in cities? 80% of the US population lives in urban areas. Self driving cars contribute to the transit problem in those areas because it's even more traffic.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
Self driving cars still create traffic jams and huge environment contamination No problem is solved.
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
People use public transport in villages of 20 people where I live. The idea that you need some mega city for public transport to be viable is an American fantasy. Even if its not for everybody, it still makes sense.
Also most people live plenty urban to make public transit perfectly viable.
Self driving cars means even more cars on the road, and reduce the avg occupation even more. Even in a same rural environment this isn't great. And in an urban environment is insanely fucking stupid.
hvb2 1 days ago [-]
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
SXX 1 days ago [-]
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.
hvb2 1 days ago [-]
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.
mulderc 1 days ago [-]
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.
rootusrootus 23 hours ago [-]
> West coast cities like Portland and Seattle both have very good transit
I live in Portland. Traffic is often quite slow. And even then it is much faster than public transit unless your destination is just a few miles away and on the same line.
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
Most US cities centers were not built to late, instead they were bulldozed for the car, those are 2 different things. The US used to have beautiful city centers and nice urban fabric around those centers.
> A lot of them were built with transportation in mind.
Complete nonsense, the Post-1945 push for suberbia had nothing to with 'transportation in mind', the reason they wanted it was totally different.
The reality is more that they pushed suberiba and only then realized the transportation problem it caused, and then they reacted with every increasing highway and stroad building.
> Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative.
Its not an alternative because its either not funded or badly organized.
Its bad because the government doesn't care that its bad, its not actually a fundamental problem.
wat10000 1 days ago [-]
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.
SXX 17 hours ago [-]
Any reasonable large city will be fully packed with cars unless it enforce high parking fees and congestion charges.
No matter how much car infrastructure you build and self driving will only make it worse because it will incentify car use.
oliwarner 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
cheschire 2 days ago [-]
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
pathartl 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, there's some tubers out there that have absolutely scathing reviews for their customer ervice.
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
I don't think it was clear that it would be out compete on price or performance. If you compare roof + solor to solar roof, the idea was that eventually it would compete with doing both separately.
I'm also not sure if its actually worse on longevity.
oliwarner 5 hours ago [-]
It seems fairly clear if you consider a 50-100 year roof (ours is 150 years, and it's only had membrane changes in that time) against a 25 year roof.
I'm sure the steel shingle will last a fair time but if the PV elements need replacing four times a century, that's not a non-trivial cost.
When my PV panels die, it's just £400 a panel, four hex bolts and some quick connectors to replace it. It's no contest.
HighGoldstein 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
xingped 2 days ago [-]
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.
queenkjuul 2 days ago [-]
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
The Steel Pulse idea actually sounds sort of possible...
echelon_musk 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
sieabahlpark 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
ekjhgkejhgk 2 days ago [-]
Enron Musk.
danpalmer 20 hours ago [-]
I bet there's an aspect of normalisation here too. Tesla Solar Roofs were all about looks, all about not looking like you had solar panels, but as the world warms up (pun intended) to solar, having visible panels is less of a concern, and may even be desirable.
RataNova 18 hours ago [-]
Solar Roof made sense when panels were seen as something to disguise
Animats 2 days ago [-]
"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.
lnsru 2 days ago [-]
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.
RataNova 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think the failure is that integrated solar tiles are impossible. It's that Tesla seemed to underestimate how much of this business is execution, service and long-term support rather than just product design
unsnap_biceps 2 days ago [-]
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.
jeffybefffy519 1 days ago [-]
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.
canpan 21 hours ago [-]
There are! This is outside US (Sorry, page is in Japanese)
https://www.ichijo.co.jp/technology/energy/solar/
They are famous for integrating their supply chain, controlling all of the build. If it is possible to make it work financially, they should be able to do it
riffraff 2 days ago [-]
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.
yread 2 days ago [-]
I came across
https://colorsolar.eu/
They can put basically any print on the solar panel
shellfishgene 2 days ago [-]
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.
ZeroGravitas 2 days ago [-]
There's a few competitors.
The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.
killjoywashere 2 days ago [-]
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.
para_parolu 2 days ago [-]
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
ikr678 2 days ago [-]
Home insurance also (ie replacement cost after damaging weather event).
queenkjuul 2 days ago [-]
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
torginus 2 days ago [-]
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.
treis 1 days ago [-]
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.
cyberax 2 days ago [-]
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.
ageitgey 2 days ago [-]
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.
jrmg 2 days ago [-]
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?
ygra 2 days ago [-]
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.
specialist 1 days ago [-]
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.
IneffablePigeon 2 days ago [-]
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.
danans 2 days ago [-]
> 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?
christoph 2 days ago [-]
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.
brikym 22 hours ago [-]
More importantly solar works more efficiently when the panels are cooler. There is a reason most installs have a chunky air gap underneath.
RealityVoid 2 days ago [-]
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.
IneffablePigeon 16 hours ago [-]
Looks, no need for bird caging to stop nests underneath the panels, and I don’t believe it is particularly more expensive if you do it when replacing the whole roof. It’s more expensive if you don’t want to replace your roof.
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.
youngtaff 2 days ago [-]
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
2 days ago [-]
themafia 23 hours ago [-]
You can do that.
If you experience any failure, like a falling tree limb, you're now _required_ to replace panels to restore the integrity of your home.
It's far simpler to be able to just restore a roof, which any builder can do, and then come back and restore the panel layer again later.
ospray 2 days ago [-]
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.
hleszek 2 days ago [-]
Why are tiles small BTW? Could we use tiles as big as normal solar panels?
torginus 2 days ago [-]
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.
ern 16 hours ago [-]
Tesla’s Solar Roof uses string inverters rather than micro-inverters or power optimizers, which means that partial shading on any section of the roof can shut down production for that entire string. This is a significant design limitation that competing solar installers address with panel-level optimization technology from companies like Enphase and SolarEdge.
This seems to be overblown. I've seen plenty of string inverters around without issues, I'm not sure why this being used against Tesla in particular.
szszrk 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe should be rephrased, but still makes sense to me. They use inferior tech for a premium price.
But yeah, not really their unique problem. Just cheaper solution that is out there.
pram 2 days ago [-]
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.
DanielHB 2 days ago [-]
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.
stephen_g 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
lathiat 2 days ago [-]
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.
awestroke 2 days ago [-]
Australia is pretty close to the equator
aeronaut80 2 days ago [-]
Depending on which part you consider it’s also halfway to the South Pole. Cape York to Tasmania is almost 33° of latitude.
lathiat 2 days ago [-]
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.
teamonkey 1 days ago [-]
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.
pavon 2 days ago [-]
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.
nolist_policy 2 days ago [-]
Panels are so cheap it doesn't matter.
stephen_g 1 days ago [-]
Regular solar panels yes, but not the Tesla panels!
panick21_ 14 hours ago [-]
You need to look up what Solar roof actually was, you would design it so that it would only be solar in some places, the others it was just a normal rooftile that looks the same.
clearstack 12 hours ago [-]
Tesla's 10-K breaks Energy Gen & Storage out as its own segment. Megapack (commercial batteries) is doing the heavy lifting there — Solar Roof was always a small piece of an already small segment by revenue
GoToRO 2 days ago [-]
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.
econ 1 days ago [-]
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.
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
EVs have speakers for safety, not sonic beauty.
c6400sc 1 days ago [-]
Have you heard of Fratzonic? If you haven't, you can't unhear it.
I use to have a neighbor with a car that made all nearby buildings shake, 5am every morning, idling for 3-4 minutes. It always made me laugh but it never struck me as beautiful.
snozolli 1 days ago [-]
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.
newsclues 1 days ago [-]
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.
dacops 1 days ago [-]
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.
bilsbie 24 hours ago [-]
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?
dotcoma 17 hours ago [-]
Are there other companies thriving selling solar roofs, or is the idea just too unpractical ?
freediddy 1 days ago [-]
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.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
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.
stephen_g 1 days ago [-]
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.
number6 1 days ago [-]
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.
dghlsakjg 1 days ago [-]
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.
toast0 23 hours ago [-]
I've got a consultant coming over on tuesday to take measurements and give a more solid quote for installation.
We'll see. But I have an outbuilding with a large two plane roof and the south facing plane has no penetrations and is pretty much unshaded. Our utility rates have pretty much doubled over the last three years, and there's another ~30% increase scheduled over the next three years. Said roof is coming up on the end of its expected life, so it may be a good time to put on a new roof and put on solar at the same time.
Could someone get better ROI doing a larger solar project somewhere else? Probably. But if it maths for me, I'm going to do the project on my roof, because I don't have anywhere else to do it (well I could do a ground install, but I'd lose aesthetically)
xnx 22 hours ago [-]
Good plan. Sounds like you're going into it with the right approach. Many homeowners accept the ROI calculation from the salesperson and don't account for opportunity cost and other factors.
toast0 22 hours ago [-]
I did my NPV calculation with probably the wrong interest rate, but I'm also looking at the 10 year NPV of 80% of our kWh charges as my guide (including the published rate increases).
If it maths with that, great. If not, but it's close, we'll look again when we need to do the roof. Utility prices are rising, panel prices are dropping, it'll probably make sense eventually... Installer costs are going up too though.
HDBaseT 1 days ago [-]
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.
tensor 18 hours ago [-]
Yes, they can pay for themselves in about 10 years. This is very easy to look up.
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
Clearly they make economic sense or people wouldn't buy them.
mpyne 1 days ago [-]
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.
freetime2 1 days ago [-]
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.
angry_octet 20 hours ago [-]
You're regurgitating another anti-PV talking point. Even without incentives PVs save you money.
freetime2 20 hours ago [-]
I'm not regurgitating anything. I'm looking at how much electricity my panels generate, and what percentage of it I use, and I can say definitively that it would not make financial sense for me if not for the feed-in tariff program that pays me a guaranteed rate for electricity I sell back to the grid.
You can't just blindly say "PVs save you money". It matters very much how much sunlight you get, the orientation of your roof, how much electricity costs, how much labor and installation costs, etc.
My location is far from ideal for solar. But with incentives - which are funded in my country via a per-kWh surcharge on everyone's electricity bills - it just barely makes financial sense to have solar panels on my roof.
angry_octet 13 hours ago [-]
Unless you have very cheap grid power / terrible sun / needlessly high installation costs, PV will be a winner. So Quebec is bad because electricity is absurdly cheap, and the only benefit is redundancy. California should be absurdly cheap but regulations are out of control. Germany also has insane regulatory burden and expensive labour but grid energy is even more expensive, double the US average.
In very sunny places with expensive grid power a battery is sensible, but again politics often favours flat rate tariffs that discount peak power, which again favours grid incumbents.
So it might not be economic for your region but that is entirely due to regional politics, a default choice to make PV power expensive.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
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.
tasty_freeze 1 days ago [-]
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.
onlypassingthru 1 days ago [-]
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.
xnx 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe a better word would've been "status"? Rich people spend all kinds of money to show off how rich they are. They like to use "green" as a fig leaf so they can pretend it's not about status (e.g. $100K+ electric SUVs).
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
Can't possibly just be because they like those fancy SUVs.
I own an electric car (albeit not an SUV) that cost nearly that much and I can tell you that I didn't give a crap about status, and while the green part was a nice aspect, the main thing is just that I like the car a lot.
When people accuse others of buying something just because it's "green" it's usually actually a case where the thing is just actually good in some way, and the buyer likes it, but the accuser can't accept this. I lost a friend over this when I bought a Prius. It's a genuinely good car that was cheap to drive, but he could not get over his idea that I was a smug "green" asshole merely for owning one and liking the fuel efficiency.
venzaspa 1 days ago [-]
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.
evilduck 1 days ago [-]
What alternatives do you have in mind that also have an ROI for the homeowner?
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
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.)
Gibbon1 22 hours ago [-]
Big picture society wide economics make no sense because utility grade solar costs half as much per installed watt.
On the other hand it can make sense based on arbitrage. In a lot of markets the cost of the system is unfairly subsidized. People on the losing side of that can lower their costs with roof top solar.
angry_octet 20 hours ago [-]
This is completely backwards, residential PV is much much cheaper. Same for battery storage.
wg0 18 hours ago [-]
Cyber truck and boring tunnels of the solar world.
general1465 1 days ago [-]
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.
Rover222 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's a cool idea, but just can't compete economically with normal solar panels.
LunicLynx 14 hours ago [-]
I’m sorry but I don’t understand why this is a story on hacker news. Nothing about this is interesting.
I’m open to understand why I might be wrong though.
I think marketwatch or financial times from the title…
locallost 18 hours ago [-]
It's a good idea if you're driving looking at the rear view mirror. Roof tiles are a thing of the past. It matches what I think a roof is, but if you can do the same thing for a fraction of the price it will win out, and for the new generations, solar panels attached to roofs will be just as normal as tiles for me.
I do think it's an interesting idea to use panels everywhere, but it can't be a complicated and expensive solution. You could maybe use them as a facade or lately people have used them for fences.
gloosx 18 hours ago [-]
How it's going with humans to Mars by 2024? Coast-to-Coast Full-Self Driving? 1 Million Robotaxis? 25000$ Model 2? Hyperloop? 2 trillion $ DOGE Cost Cuts?
Elon Musk is like that developer you hired which always promises "this feature will be ready tommorow" and it end's up in the backlog for 6 years. The richest person in the world who understood that the world is not built on trust anymore and all you need is hype.
tweetle_beetle 17 hours ago [-]
To extend your metaphor further, it would be like also giving them performance bonuses and building them a new home office which they then rent out on AirBnB on the strength of those predictions.
> Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion partly on the strength of this vision [of producing thousands
scotty79 2 days ago [-]
I hope somebody figures out at some point how to do roofing with large integrated panels that could be solar.
defrost 2 days ago [-]
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.
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.
asdff 1 days ago [-]
Seems like from the comments in this thread there are other companies offering similar roofs now at least.
haberdasher 2 days ago [-]
"the guy at the store said i was the only one who could pull it off"
No one should give money to this pedophile especially how killed every department looking into crimes committed by his company or his brothers companies. Such a disgrace to America. [1] [2] [3]
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
stephen_g 1 days ago [-]
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.
Teever 2 days ago [-]
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.
pyrale 2 days ago [-]
> 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.
kortilla 2 days ago [-]
You are mixing up Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space.
objclxt 1 days ago [-]
> 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.
kortilla 22 hours ago [-]
Cells != panels. And why do you think there would be any issue scaling up what they have done for already the largest constellation by a large margin?
outside1234 21 hours ago [-]
This whole article is a summary of Elon Musk in general. Lots of promises, no delivery.
christoph 2 days ago [-]
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.
someluccc 2 days ago [-]
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.
perilunar 1 days ago [-]
And don't forget the cheap, reusable rockets. Effing tech bros.
NikolaosC 15 hours ago [-]
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tyiz 17 hours ago [-]
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transfire 2 days ago [-]
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
_fizz_buzz_ 2 days ago [-]
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.
angry_octet 2 days ago [-]
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.
rsynnott 1 days ago [-]
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.
tensor 18 hours ago [-]
What a ridiculous statement. People get all sorts of roofs with all sorts of trade offs. Looks is absolutely one of them. Also, any product that gets popular eventually gets highly optimized manufacturing pipelines bringing the cost down.
It doesn't need to compete with normal panels on only one metric. People will accept longer payoff times for aesthetics or durability if the ratio is right. Also, who really cares about Tesla at this point? Other companies are now producing these panels.
Like everything Musk, it died because of his poor business practices and his politics. The only thing he seems to excel at these days is extracting government money.
sidcool 2 days ago [-]
Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.
bartvk 2 days ago [-]
He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.
red75prime 1 days ago [-]
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.
adgjlsfhk1 1 days ago [-]
"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.
red75prime 1 days ago [-]
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.
sidcool 1 days ago [-]
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
general1465 1 days ago [-]
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.
sidcool 1 days ago [-]
Is that legit?
general1465 1 days ago [-]
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.
timzaman 20 hours ago [-]
please realize the author (frank lambert) has turned full anti-elon propaganda so take everything he writes with a grain of salt. or better - avoid.
xiphias2 19 hours ago [-]
The magazin was bought I think. There's always some interesting background of the stories.
Solarcity was clearly a great example of Elon's ,,no investor left behind'' philosophy: if he promotes a company and gets investors to invest in it, he is doing whatever he can to make sure that they at least don't lose their money (by merging it to a bigger company he controls), even if it wouldn't be the best financial decision.
So far this strategy has been working quite well for both him and the investors.
tensor 18 hours ago [-]
It would be better for investors if he didn't destroy all his products with both his obscene politics and also his little fantasy pet projects that no one wants. Eventually the house of cards will collapse. At this point all that investors can hope for is something akin to a government bond. Unfortunately one for a government that is currently excelling at depreciating anything related to it.
whatever1 18 hours ago [-]
Oh no! An author is against a billionaire who does nazi salutes and promotes daily white race supremacy content in the social media he owns!
willio58 19 hours ago [-]
I mean.. did he turn anti-Elon or did society turn anti-Elon when Elon started doing insane shit? Reminder: Elon bribed his way into leading a self-formed and now essentially defunct government organization to "save costs" but failed to do so in any meaningful way. He did that like a year ago. Meanwhile, the dude made BILLIONS off of government tax breaks, and still leaches off the government with his other companies.
Frank being against Elon speaks less about Frank and more about Elon in my eyes.
cryptoegorophy 1 days ago [-]
Why is this elektrek website still gets quoted? It is a very very biased website. I would dismiss any “opinions” or articles they post.
infinitewars 1 days ago [-]
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.
corpoposter 1 days ago [-]
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.
infinitewars 23 hours ago [-]
While most every other articles on Tesla (historically) had been fawning megafans.
freetime2 1 days ago [-]
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.
cityofdelusion 21 hours ago [-]
Electrek has a long history of going between blind fanboyism and blind hate, the history is all there to peruse. They only changed their tune with the referral program debacle a few years back which was seen as a betrayal.
It’s hard to trust “reporting” when it’s historically operated more like a tabloid.
freetime2 20 hours ago [-]
I feel that way about the NY Post - a literal tabloid. Occasionally someone shares a story from the NY Post with me, and my first instinct is to think "why are you sharing this rubbish with me". But then I read story - often with the intent of pointing out why it's rubbish, and sure enough more often than not it actually is rubbish - and point out the issues with the reporting.
But sometimes it's not. I'll do my own fact checking (because I don't trust them) - and find out that maybe there is something to the story. Not only that - none of the sources that I typically read are reporting on the issue. And then I'm forced to admit that I actually learned something from the NY Post. And usually I've learned something about my own biases and bias in my regular information sources, too.
My point is this: if you can't get past the source of an article and actually engage with the content - then that says more about your own bias and trustworthiness as a source of information than it does about Electrek.
rsynnott 12 hours ago [-]
> Elon Musk unveiled the product in 2016 with the promise of beautiful solar tiles that would replace your entire roof — and he set a target of 1,000 new Solar Roofs per week by the end of 2019. Nearly a decade later, Tesla has installed roughly 3,000 Solar Roof systems total, stopped reporting deployment numbers, and is now quietly pivoting to conventional solar panels.
Which source would you prefer? Frankly, really only Tesla-obsessive websites are going to be talking about this at all; for any normal business news outlet, something which has sold 3,000 units in ten years isn't worth thinking about at all.
Cheaper installations generally win, especially when the homeowner receives a credit on the install for its projected or actual power generation (only federal credits tended to scale proportionally to the install cost.) This cost pressure has been hard for premium flat panel installers, which are in turn cheaper than Tesla was.
As acceptance of rooftop solar has grown, comfort with its aesthetics has also increased, reducing the need for solar that hides its nature.
I've long thought of them as a visible signifier of prosperity and cluefulness, but since they've become standard on new build they just fade into the background.
I've not seen solar-over-thatch yet. I wonder if that exists in the Highlands somewhere.
But it's more than that with residential solar: at least in places where with a heavy oversupply in real estate, "massive capital investment" is hardly a matching term. More like a drop in the ocean, given the amount of capital bound in the whole package.
Railways, highways, wind turbines- they become part of the landscape.
Speaking of which, solar roofs for parking lots always seemed like a thing we should be doing everywhere. I'm sure it's not cheap to build the structure but it has the added benefit of protecting cars.
My benchmark there is a ventilated attic with insulation between attic and house, using traditional glass roof structure filled with frameless glass-glass panels instead of human-below rated laminated safety glass.
Like, it can't be that hard to do better when you're not trying to be substantially fancier than a classic gable roof, it's just that the panels need to not be shear-loaded much, and the structure doesn't have to be so pretty from underneath as traditional glass roofs.
For small (i.e. residential) installation these parties taking their pounds of flesh represents a double digit percentage of system cost.
Larger installations, of course, will never work that way, simply because they generate too much current for your standard wall plug to handle.
All for it but not for simgle family home market.
They are struggling in China which is pretty insane considering their head start in that country.
Clearly the solar roof idea could have been iterated on and made to make more financial sense. I think they could have built it into a panel solution that integrates a standard steel roof.
But again, what it looks like to me is that Tesla hasn’t actually been able to put real money and effort into any products at all. I think all their best people quit, and their leadership is distracted and ineffective.
Tesla has no 3-row SUV/family vehicle, no subcompact SUV (Kia EV3), no city subcompact car (Renault 5), and no commercial vehicles.
The Model 3 is not one of the top 5 selling EVs in Europe. Everything in the top 3 has a hatch. Sedans are more popular in the American market but they’re also a dying segment compared to SUVs, while Europe always preferred vehicles with hatchbacks for space efficiency and practicality.
Volkswagen Group EVs outsell Tesla in Europe. The Skoda Elroq and VW ID.4 together (same platform) outsell the Model Y.
My next prediction is that the Rivian R2 steals about 30% of Model Y sales in the US. It’s priced similarly and it’s a way better vehicle according to early reviews and impressions, and it fits the boxy American SUV off-road aesthetic far better.
UK now has a significant Chinese presence: Omoda, Jaecoo (Chery), and especially BYD.
No tiny city car hatchback for volume in Europe, no three row SUV for American families, no commercial delivery vehicles (the ideal EV use case), no subcompact SUV, and their pickup truck is way more of a failure than it should have been.
The Cybertruck should have just been called tho Model T, be made to look normal/big manly grill like a Silverado, and have ads for it plastered all over NFL games. Tesla should have easily been able to sell 100,000 units per year in North America but they designed the thing without considering demographic research at all. (Example: many families use the 6 seat configuration of the F-150 to fit the whole family in in lieu of a minivan).
From a disaster situation/civil defense perspective, it provides offgrid durability to communities, and it could be life or death in cold waves or heat waves.
For all the utility companies complaining about EV and alt energy infrastructure adaptation... well, fine, then let consumer PV do a large part of the work. Oh wait, did someone say consumer choice? The utility companies shut up real fast.
So it also counterbalances the political power of utility companies, who are no longer a monopoly, and provides economic competition so utilities can't jack rates if corporate/industrial/(ahem, AI) starts increasing demand and prices.
This needs a small asterisk that many systems are deliberately not "islanding" capable. Mine isn't, but in the ten years I've had my panels I've only ever had a couple of power cuts, one of which was at night.
For roofs, hail is another consideration, hail damage causes complication. Age of roof is another consideration, you don't want to do solar anytime, the right time is when the roof needs to be replaced, which is usually ~25 years.
https://pitchroofing.com/roofing/the-best-time-to-get-a-roof...
They end up installed at commercial locations ideal for solar: often on covered parking, in fields, or on industrial roofs. Easier to repair, they can do larger panels, no issues with your roof line or roof condition.
10/10 would recommend.
And a member of a wind farm project (Ripple Energy) which went bankrupt. So like all small investment schemes, I guess you need to keep a close eye on their financials.
If you just care about the overall transition to solar (which you should!) then you can pay for green tariffs and invest in existing solar energy companies or ETFs.
Solar shingles (Tesla roof, GAF) seem like a smart idea -- why do 2 layers of install, shingles and solar panels, instead save on both material and labor by using solar shingles.
It didn't work because the shingles are small, massively increasing the number of parts, connectors, and wiring -- and all the intensive skilled labor that it needs. Labor needs to be skilled as well as increases the number of hours. It also increases failure rates (at install time?) as well as lifecycle maintenance costs from repairs. Standard shingled roof (not the solar) is just an illegal immigrant working for $2/hour with a nail gun, unskilled labor, finishes things super super quick.
The above is a manual summary from this insightful thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166226
Could it work in future? We don't know. I think the fundamental constraint is people's existing belief system on what a roof is supposed to look like and unwillingness to consider that all roofs don't have to look the same. Perhaps its possible to let go of existing shingle design, build massive panels and make it a structural roof along with metal, but it may not have any buyers. And most definitely will not be accepted by any HOA. Most of the US in in a HOA regime. Any tiniest variation from the rigid HOA rules and regulations (slightly different shade) will require an entire roof rebuild. The constraint is not technological, but human beliefs (about what a roof should look like) and existing rigid structures on how we organized our society.
It doesn't blend with the surrounding slates (asphalt shingles are rare in the UK, use of asphalt is more for flat roofs and sheds), but .. how much does that really matter? It sounds like US HOAs have replicated the worst aspects of UK "conservation areas", preventing building variation, while not actually preserving anything other than a McMansion style of no historical or aesthetic importance?
Apparently integrated panels can be a little less efficient in hot weather as they don't get cooled by airflow under the panels and are less efficient when hotter. But it's a pretty minor effect, maybe a few percent of output. Seems like the best option on a new-build or if you're re-roofing anyway.
That might just be another way of saying "niche."
Americans come up will all kinds of ridiculous reasons for not using clean energy.
1) Nuclear is dangerous, even though it has the safest profile of all energy: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
2) Also, we are now bird lovers! Wind turbines killed 2 dozen birds (but cats kill billions of birds). Wind is also an eyesore. Ruins the views from $_.
3) Solar is an eyesore.
4) Electric cars don't work in the cold. (lets ignore Norway, a tropical island)
5) Range anxiety, because I might drive from Florida to Wyoming.
1. I support nuclear, really stupid not to use anything else. Blame politicians and the hippies.
2. Yeah wind imo is useless, and it's more than 2 dozen. Quite high, I don't think comparing kills to the top predator is a win. Also windmills are in raptor's paths, generally cats don't eat raptors. Noisy and ugly too.
3. Solar is nice, will use it as aux, but panels and batteries don't come close to a propane generator. Different use-cases.
4. I own a cybertruck and a trailboss, but it's Texas, can't really speak to cold weather ev experiences.
5. Owning an EV I know how they work, anxiety no issue, just hop free SCs and enjoy the ride.
Bonus: Garage doors can look stupid if it's the entire front of the house, like those mcmansions, but can be subtle with a long ranch house for example.
Solar panels always look awful on a roof.
It's the equivalent of 100 radio towers crowding the area. Kind of takes you out of nature.
And I don't have a CT because it's pretty. I have it because it's functional and so fucking cool.
Great that you like your car, windmills and solar panels are also functional and fucking cool, so I don't know why you've bought up them being ugly. You're happy to drive an ugly car, but draw the line at looking at ugly roofs?
A few select spots for nuclear would be ideal ofc.
No I don't buy things based on whether they are "ugly" or not.
Solar panels don't make any financial sense in my scenario, would take half of their lifespan to break even on the energy savings.
But yeah tastes are different. Personally I find the CT to be a cool look overall, albeit different, so I get why you are so fixated on them.
I'm not fixated on the cybertruck, you bought it up unprompted. Though I do find it uglier than most cars, I think all of those enormous American "trucks" are an eyesore, and I hope to never see one in person.
I said I use solar, just think the panels are ugly on a roof. That's subjective also, it's not the reason I don't have them, cost is.
Windmills are useless because of the amount of maintenance, the resources/carbon used to make them, lack of recyclability (huge blade graveyards), and most importantly, it's not a base load. Them being ugly is just the cherry on top. They are useless when you could just use nuclear.
Yeah you keep wanting to bring it back up though, it wasn't unprompted, the GP mentioned EV and range. I was giving a duality example of owning both vehicle types. You focused on the CT for some odd reason. As did another person.
> 4. I own a cybertruck
Mind if I ask why?
Feels like a space ship and I love it more than my ICE truck.
And yeah, realized that would be downvoted. Fun to break the bubble here with other opinions though.
I tend to think garages are an eyesore, and yet, basically everyone (including me) wants one included with their home.
40% of Australian households have rooftop solar. You get used to the look very quickly, and well-installed ones look perfectly fine.
I know they are on every second house, but gun to my head I could not tell you how many have it on my street.
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.
Thanks for sharing
On the average suburban tract home in my corner of the USA, panels are no more ugly than the shingled roofs they sit atop.
Tiles on my house are at least 150yrs old
About three weeks because I didn't do it all at once, an 11/12 pitch is tiring to work on. One week per side of stripping/waterproofing, then a couple weekends of shingling.
Edit: the stripping took a week from having two layers of shingles, first layer was cedar than asphalt.
Took a day to take all the tiles off the front, add insulation, membrane and batten it. Then another half day or so to put the original tiles back on
Back took slightly longer because we had some alterations done but it was just over a week in total effort
Given shingles last between 20-30 years someone's got to pay the cost of re-roofing on a regular basis throughout the house's lifetime
Then you've got the added maintenance, flammability and other downsides of a shingle roof to take into account too
Also even if you personally don't live that long, it does affect the value. For example a 99 year lease on a property is considerably less valuable than a 999 year lease, even though very few people live more than 99 years.
Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.
It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up - and even people who were willing to spend $100K on a Solar Roof faced long delays if they were available at all in their market. Tesla's image has also shifted in the last decade, and having a Tesla parked in your driveway with a powerwall and solar roof doesn't carry quite the same image that it once did - which is important when you are relying on emotions to drive sales.
>It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up
I think these two things were highly related. Same with the cost. They couldn’t figure out how to scale up, which kept prices high and volume low. Because of this, it really was a bespoke business. And while, it looks nice, that type of margin just is not going to provide the returns they promised investors.
I have a Tesla solar roof. I bought it knowing there were cheaper options for equivalent solar power because I liked the aesthetics.
https://www.bottegaveneta.com/en-us/men-collection-us/men-ne...
If you think about money as a tool to maximize your "joy", then whether the Solar Roof is worth it completely depends on your preferences and your financial situation. Most people are fine with black panels; but if you have the money and like the look of the tiles, why not?
What drove you to get solar panels ultimately and why did you go Tesla? Genuinely curious. I have a feeling you’ll say something i hadn’t considered.
1. I wanted solar & batteries as a buffer for grid outages
2. I wanted to be able to offset some of my energy usage with solar
3. I wanted my roof to look nice, and personally I think solar panels strapped onto a roof don't look very appealing.
4. At the time, Tesla was one of the few names in town for an integrated solar roof.
Saving money wasn't really part of the calculus, which worked out because as the article and parallel comments note, getting a Tesla solar roof is a pretty bad decision if one of your primary factors is cost or saving money on your electric bill.
If they can work out the economics to the point that it's more viable than something like treasuries then I don't see the issue? Of course there's some potential market and other variability, but if this business model is sound then Lloyd's is there to insure it?
But it’s usually a bad deal for the homeowner compared to a more conventional lease or purchase with a fixed rate. The incentives don’t match up, there is also the issue of the lease buyout if the home is sold.
> "requires on-site renewable electricity generation for new homes in England — solar PV covering around 40% of ground floor area where feasible"
As well as an end to new gas boilers, replaced with a heat pump mandate.
> The estimated build cost increase is around £4,350 per dwelling. FHS-compliant homes are projected to save homeowners around £830 per year on energy bills compared to a typical EPC C home
That .. looks rather different to a $100k gold plated roof.
With that said, Tesla's Solar Roof is definitely the gold plated unreasonably out of touch option.
Mind you, that's with having AC, electric laundry dryer, a private well pump, septic heater and all sorts of other energy hogs trotting about the place throughout the year. I'm not exactly living an ascetic lifestyle myself.
Maybe if I paid the UK's electricity rates it'd be different though.
What's the capacity though. Either way this seems extremely high unless we are talking in terms of like 100kw or something. For reference, I recently installed hybrid/net-metered system set up at my home in India; 7kw solar with a 20kWh battery for around $10K. The biggest cost is for the batteries though. The panels themselves have become extremely low price and the prices continue to fall.
It's interesting to see Tesla's solar business getting disrupted by Chinese manufacturers after EV.
A bundle of shingles is $50, 3 bundles to cover 100 sq ft is $1.50 sq ft in materials. Figure $1.50/sq ft to demo and dispose of the old roof shingles.
Materials and demo comes out to $3,000, figure $500 for tools and nails, mark it up to $4,500-5,000
Probably (4) people can knock out a 1000sq ft roof in an 8 hour day, call it 40 hours of labor for demo and install.
Surely the labor cost and markup is not $1,000 an hour, that’s what it would have to be for a 1000 sq ft roof to cost $50-60k. $125/hr for 40 hours is $5,000.00
That's about 90 m². Here in Germany [1], if it's just replacing tiles, you're looking at 10k, add 20k for adding heat insulation - and you can get 15-20% back with government assistance from that sum. The only way you reach 50k in costs here is if you have to fix structural issues (e.g. rotting wood due to water ingress, but if you take proper care of your roof you won't need to do that - expected life time for roofs is about 80 years for the tiles and much more to the tune of centuries for the wood framing.
[1] https://www.obi.de/magazin/energiesparen/daemmung/dachdaemmu...
* Diversification. These days stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto, and even precious metals are increasingly correlated [1]. Solar panels offer pretty consistent returns regardless of what is happening in the stock market.
* Backup power. I live in an area that is prone to natural disasters. Having a backup power source gives me a bit of peace of mind.
* Hedge against increasing energy prices. My solar panels have actually performed better than I expected due to electricity prices increasing faster than I expected.
* Clean energy. When I turn on my A/C in the summer I take some enjoyment from the fact that it's powered by the panels on my roof and not burning fossil fuels.
* Entertainment. I enjoy nerding out and learning about the tech, monitoring output, etc. A lot of people think solar panels are ugly but I actually like the way they look.
Yes the S&P 500 would have returned signficantly more than my solar panels. But I already have a lot invested in the S&P 500, solar panels were fairly inexpensive and don't make up a significant portion of my overall investments, and the psychological benefits outweigh whatever opportunity cost I have incurred.
There is also the option to finance them. You need to be careful with financing, as I think there are a lot of predatory offers out there. But if you are buying or building a house, for example, and can roll the cost of the panels into your mortgage, then that's going to reduce the up front cost and hence the opportunity cost.
But yeah when you get into the $100K range for a Tesla solar roof, then I think that starts to be a pretty substantial amount for most people that can be better spent elsewhere. Not to mention the delays, customer service issues, etc that people have experienced with Tesla - which can easily offset any peace of mind benefits.
[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/14/h...
So, yes, I could probably get a higher return if I invested that capital elsewhere, but, apart from the diversification, I get benefits beyond the raw financial return.
Firstly, earlier this year, we had a cable coming into the house fail. By the time the electrician and city had done all they needed to do to sort it out, almost 4 days had passed. We would have been without power for that time. As it happens we ran completely on solar for that period - freezers stayed frozen, could run the laundry, etc. Some stuff was limited (no oven, no hot water) but the impact was minimal compared to what it might have been.
Secondly, during the day at least, I'm not really fussed about electricity usage. If lights are on, or AC is on or whatever. So there's less "hey, that light is costing money" etc. So we end up using more electricity, but the marginal cost (during the day) is 0. My next car is electric (already on order) and that can charge at home as well (during the day, I work from home) and so that just increases the return (utilization of available power goes up.)
From a financial point of view, for me, it's a no-brainer. Obviously ymmv - everyone's numbers are different. For me the payback is in the 5-6 year range (probably under 5 once the car comes online.)
Electricity here in Germany is expensive at an average 30 ct/kWh, so the panels save 324€ worth of electricity - an ROI of > 50%. Choose some better quality for the inverter and battery and you'll still be north of 30% ROI.
The key thing making this high ROI possible is that it's small. Counterintuitive, yes - but explained by the fact that for larger installations than that, setup costs go up: you need to install the panels on your roof instead of hanging them off your balcony which can be thousands of € in labor, you need to run new power wires...
[1] https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/2092828...
[2] https://www.swm.de/unternehmen/magazin/energie/pv-ertrag-im-...
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.
Edit: installed for me by trades in that price.
Sure, it was more expensive than a shingled roof, but less expensive than a shingled roof with solar on top. Add to that, it looks better.
People generally limit the number of roofs to one, as they are expensive and important for keeping the outside out and the inside in.
Residential roofs are more or less the worst place possible to put solar panels.
What does this mean?
And why is it the worst place to put solar panels? Is this and America only phenomenon, cause in India people are installing them like hot cakes on the roof. What’s different about roofs here?
The American roofs mentioned are typically significantly inclined, made of a less rigid material (wood, asphalt shingles), and not built to the expectations of supporting as much.
When OP says 'the worst place' they mean it is not a structural place, it is hard to access, and it serves an important function that is best not to mess with.
Note, I do not fully agree with OP but I get the points made.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association
Not saying it is a huge factor but it is there.
People love to show off houses. Kitchens, bathrooms, etc. And spending £10k on a bathroom doesn't even generate electricity!
I have also become an unironic supporter of virtue signalling, provided it's backed up by actually doing the thing yourself. Because otherwise the alternative is "vice signalling", like "rolling coal", which is much, much worse.
There are definitely a few people who want to show off their bling/goodies, but all 326 of them already bought cybertrucks to show off. Solar panels are not something to show off and brag about, its not macho. It would be looked at as feminine technology. If its not making a loud noise, looks big and inspiring (pick up truck), billeting smoke, it has no macho power to show off.
Honestly, I don't agree with you though. Yes, there are ways for folk to signal virtue, and that happens, but I don't think solar power is one of those. Frankly the utility, and financial, returns are just too high.
Obviously ymmv with regard to returns, but I'm getting 16% on capital invested (a number that keeps climbing as electricity costs rise.) That's decent enough that virtue-signalling becomes a meaningless goal. I guess folk might _like_ that they're not burning fossils to get electricity (I do) but the financials dwarf that.
Where I stay solar is really common (probably > 1 in 10 has it.) Plus the Financials make it easy (if you have the roof and capital.) And here no-one really cares if you're green or not.
The fact that it is green is a bonus. (Which i think most people don't care about.)
I guess you can read virtue-signalling into anything you like, especially if it matters to you personally. I just don't think it comes into play here.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Also most people live plenty urban to make public transit perfectly viable.
Self driving cars means even more cars on the road, and reduce the avg occupation even more. Even in a same rural environment this isn't great. And in an urban environment is insanely fucking stupid.
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
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.
Couldn't be more different in the big European cities, using a car there is (made) cumbersome.
I live in Portland. Traffic is often quite slow. And even then it is much faster than public transit unless your destination is just a few miles away and on the same line.
> A lot of them were built with transportation in mind.
Complete nonsense, the Post-1945 push for suberbia had nothing to with 'transportation in mind', the reason they wanted it was totally different.
The reality is more that they pushed suberiba and only then realized the transportation problem it caused, and then they reacted with every increasing highway and stroad building.
> Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative.
Its not an alternative because its either not funded or badly organized.
Its bad because the government doesn't care that its bad, its not actually a fundamental problem.
No matter how much car infrastructure you build and self driving will only make it worse because it will incentify car use.
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.
> Customer service complaints are pervasive and consistent. Tesla Energy has a 2.6 out of 5 rating on SolarReviews
I'm also not sure if its actually worse on longevity.
I'm sure the steel shingle will last a fair time but if the PV elements need replacing four times a century, that's not a non-trivial cost.
When my PV panels die, it's just £400 a panel, four hex bolts and some quick connectors to replace it. It's no contest.
May I present to you the Apple corporation, at least until recently.
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48166411&goto=item%3Fi...
[1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
> There’s a reason that they announced the idea on a fake block in a fake neighborhood with fake houses!
Interesting read.
Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.
- 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.
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.
The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?
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.
Also see https://roofit.solar/ used in a few houses… mainly self build a or architect designed
If you experience any failure, like a falling tree limb, you're now _required_ to replace panels to restore the integrity of your home.
It's far simpler to be able to just restore a roof, which any builder can do, and then come back and restore the panel layer again later.
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.
This seems to be overblown. I've seen plenty of string inverters around without issues, I'm not sure why this being used against Tesla in particular.
But yeah, not really their unique problem. Just cheaper solution that is out there.
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.
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.
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.
This is mostly only cost-effective for remote properties where power cuts are common, but it works.
I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/08/heres-what-the-electric...
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.
Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?
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 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.
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.
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.
We'll see. But I have an outbuilding with a large two plane roof and the south facing plane has no penetrations and is pretty much unshaded. Our utility rates have pretty much doubled over the last three years, and there's another ~30% increase scheduled over the next three years. Said roof is coming up on the end of its expected life, so it may be a good time to put on a new roof and put on solar at the same time.
Could someone get better ROI doing a larger solar project somewhere else? Probably. But if it maths for me, I'm going to do the project on my roof, because I don't have anywhere else to do it (well I could do a ground install, but I'd lose aesthetically)
If it maths with that, great. If not, but it's close, we'll look again when we need to do the roof. Utility prices are rising, panel prices are dropping, it'll probably make sense eventually... Installer costs are going up too though.
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.
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.
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.
You can't just blindly say "PVs save you money". It matters very much how much sunlight you get, the orientation of your roof, how much electricity costs, how much labor and installation costs, etc.
My location is far from ideal for solar. But with incentives - which are funded in my country via a per-kWh surcharge on everyone's electricity bills - it just barely makes financial sense to have solar panels on my roof.
In very sunny places with expensive grid power a battery is sensible, but again politics often favours flat rate tariffs that discount peak power, which again favours grid incumbents.
So it might not be economic for your region but that is entirely due to regional politics, a default choice to make PV power expensive.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090
I own an electric car (albeit not an SUV) that cost nearly that much and I can tell you that I didn't give a crap about status, and while the green part was a nice aspect, the main thing is just that I like the car a lot.
When people accuse others of buying something just because it's "green" it's usually actually a case where the thing is just actually good in some way, and the buyer likes it, but the accuser can't accept this. I lost a friend over this when I bought a Prius. It's a genuinely good car that was cheap to drive, but he could not get over his idea that I was a smug "green" asshole merely for owning one and liking the fuel efficiency.
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.)
On the other hand it can make sense based on arbitrage. In a lot of markets the cost of the system is unfairly subsidized. People on the losing side of that can lower their costs with roof top solar.
I’m open to understand why I might be wrong though.
I think marketwatch or financial times from the title…
I do think it's an interesting idea to use panels everywhere, but it can't be a complicated and expensive solution. You could maybe use them as a facade or lately people have used them for fences.
Elon Musk is like that developer you hired which always promises "this feature will be ready tommorow" and it end's up in the backlog for 6 years. The richest person in the world who understood that the world is not built on trust anymore and all you need is hype.
> Tesla acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion partly on the strength of this vision [of producing thousands
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/
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/jeffrey-epst...
[2] https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-jeffrey-epstein-h...
[3] https://www.denverpost.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-epstein-fi...
They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't need to compete with normal panels on only one metric. People will accept longer payoff times for aesthetics or durability if the ratio is right. Also, who really cares about Tesla at this point? Other companies are now producing these panels.
Like everything Musk, it died because of his poor business practices and his politics. The only thing he seems to excel at these days is extracting government money.
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/24025/electreks-editor-in-chie...
He might not specifically lie, but puts such a negative spin on anything Elon-related that the overall result is essentially a lie.
Solarcity was clearly a great example of Elon's ,,no investor left behind'' philosophy: if he promotes a company and gets investors to invest in it, he is doing whatever he can to make sure that they at least don't lose their money (by merging it to a bigger company he controls), even if it wouldn't be the best financial decision.
So far this strategy has been working quite well for both him and the investors.
Frank being against Elon speaks less about Frank and more about Elon in my eyes.
The article seemed fine to me.
It’s hard to trust “reporting” when it’s historically operated more like a tabloid.
But sometimes it's not. I'll do my own fact checking (because I don't trust them) - and find out that maybe there is something to the story. Not only that - none of the sources that I typically read are reporting on the issue. And then I'm forced to admit that I actually learned something from the NY Post. And usually I've learned something about my own biases and bias in my regular information sources, too.
My point is this: if you can't get past the source of an article and actually engage with the content - then that says more about your own bias and trustworthiness as a source of information than it does about Electrek.
Which source would you prefer? Frankly, really only Tesla-obsessive websites are going to be talking about this at all; for any normal business news outlet, something which has sold 3,000 units in ten years isn't worth thinking about at all.