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.
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
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.
[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.
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.
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.
These things carry a lot of current though, so I would certainly not trust anyone without proper tools and training to put them on a roof.
The 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.
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.
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
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/
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.
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.
Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.
He might not specifically lie, but puts such a negative spin on anything Elon-related that the overall result is essentially a lie.
