Tesla introduces Solar Roof. Roof tiles that are solar panel for maximizing coverage, yet are invisible

[| Rembo |]

On 10/29/2016 at 2:22 PM, Jorgen297 said:

This is actually a good idea imo, covering our roofs before even thinking about Solar Roadways.

SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS

[Bsmith]

This looks amazing, solar cells that look like regular roof tiles, this is certainly a way to bring it to people that don't get panels because of the way that they look and trust me, that are more people then you would expect, considering we have a house block where the buyers got it as an option to get when building for a lower price, but some actually let it slip because of the looks.

this hooked up to something like the Tesla wall(the thing that buys energy on the cheap and stores it for later use or sells it back when the price is beneficial) could be a more drastic decrease in the power bill of common people or people that travel a lot.

 

2 hours ago, DutchTexan said:

-snip-

 

Let's be realistic. Solar will be great, but we are stuck in the 90's here. Early 90's.

okey, nice and reasonable calculations but you are missing the point and a couple of things here.
-first of, your estimation of 11,000 kWh for a single day is more in the direction of what get's used in an entire year! I could nit pick on things like the angle of the panels or their orientation on the east-west line that the sun follows. but that would merely overcomplicate things without much use.

-This is supposed to make solar panels more attractive because most people avoid them because of their looks.

-current, commercial available solar panels are very inefficient and more expensive then needed due to the materials that they are dependent on.
current cells only convert roughly 20% of the light they receive into energy and need materials like gold, cadmium, copper, indium and gallium to name as example. making them not only expensive, but also not very environmental friendly.

We still have a long way to go, but prices for panels are lowering constantly and new developments are almost delivered weekly if not daily, all it takes is a single discovery to increase that 20% efficiency for commercial panels.

 

[Sauron]

We already have solar roofs, in fact my own roof has solar panels on it. This is a good idea to help streamline it, but let's not act as if nobody thought about this before.

[raphidy]

I find it stupid. Where are you going to store energy? In huge battery banks in your garage? Huge flywheel? If you don`t store that energy, you'll have to use it immediately during daytime and most of us won't be there. Re channel the current to the utility would save you on bills, but you won't make money for about 20 years from initial investment.

[tlink]

On 29-10-2016 at 9:07 PM, GoodBytes said:

Well... it is all things that improves over times, not to mention the development of improved installation techniques for such panels. I think it is an exciting first start. Like technology always does over time: things becomes not only cheaper in every way, they become better in every way, making them easier to get, use, and integrate.

 

I see these first gen tiles great for new homes, or people who can afford them. Maybe in a few years we will have a more mainstream solution. The presented tiles are more commonly found on luxurious houses, over your standard mainstream home in any case.

 

Even if the coating block sunlight, instead of having a few large solar panels, you have your roof edge to edge of solar panels which I am sure not only compensates but surpass them if you have a large home, which is common in the US and Canada.

 

they are about 60% as efficient as normal solar panels if we go by how existing tech is. its unrealistic to hold it any higher than that. and those are without a coating of any kind. not to mention that tempered glass is about 3 times more labour intensive than normal tile roofs. they  also lose efficiency due to them heating up quicker, normal solar panels have cooling because air can swoop underneath them and cool the panels which increases efficiency. not to mention that solar panels themselves are not really that efficient. most of the bennefits from solar panels nowdays come from the chinese government subsidizing them heavily. they often sell at a loss. i mean, we have yet to see any numbers but this is not going to be better than normal solar panels in any way shape or form, or they have a revolutionary new way of producing them but i doubt it. solar panels are often created with second hand wafer machines and can only be created in batches, real mass production is near to impossible.

[tlink]

1 hour ago, raphidy said:

I find it stupid. Where are you going to store energy? In huge battery banks in your garage? Huge flywheel? If you don`t store that energy, you'll have to use it immediately during daytime and most of us won't be there. Re channel the current to the utility would save you on bills, but you won't make money for about 20 years from initial investment.

this is why i would love to see more investments into solar power plants, heating liquid salts was really promising because they could hold the heat for overnight etc. but due to the crisis subsidizing stopped so the free market took the easy route.

[The Benjamins]

1 hour ago, raphidy said:

I find it stupid. Where are you going to store energy? In huge battery banks in your garage? Huge flywheel? If you don`t store that energy, you'll have to use it immediately during daytime and most of us won't be there. Re channel the current to the utility would save you on bills, but you won't make money for about 20 years from initial investment.

The electric grids can't us the current you put back into them, it is just wasted energy. And in the USA they are required to provide power to you house even if you are 100% self efficient. so if every house added solar to their roofs power company's will bleed money maintaining a electric grid that no one is using.

[Okjoek]

Personally if I were putting solar pannels on my roof I would not care what it looks like, but I'm more of a function first person.

[The Benjamins]

1 minute ago, Okjoek said:

Personally if I were putting solar pannels on my roof I would not care what it looks like, but I'm more of a function first person.

If you have a HOA they can fine you if they don't like the way it looks. and that is the whole point of this.

[Okjoek]

Just now, The Benjamins said:

If you have a HOA they can fine you if they don't like the way it looks. and that is the whole point of this.

Not sure what HOA stands for, but I assume you're talking about those neighborhoods where the housing industry or whoever is able to get more value out of the houses they sell because the neighborhood looks a certain way. I understand their concern then, but IDK if I share it.

 

I would be the one rich guy who pays the fines, but keeps my house they way I want it to look just to piss them off. Too bad I'm not though =/

[Thunderpup]

This thread highlights one of the things that annoys me about tesla.  They, Tesla, take a product that has existed for years, make it look sexy or sleek, and then market it as if they were the ones to invent it.  Which wouldn't be so bad except for the legions of gullible people who fall for it.

 

All that aside i really like the concept of Solar roofs, and have since i first heard about them well over a decade ago. 

A lot of people are in the same boat i am where i am interested in going solar, but i also need a new roof to include new wood paneling to support the solar set up.  Adding to this installing panels on your new roof may void your warranty, especially if you do the install yourself.  So solar shingles would be a nice way of killing two birds with one stone.

 

The problem has always been a matter of cost & output.  The cost has been very high for the small amount of electricity solar shingles actually generate, and i don't see anywhere that shows Tesla's proposed product solves that in anyway.  

 

That being said an extra competitor in the solar industry is always a good thing.  Extra competition is good for us consumers. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Okjoek said:

Not sure what HOA stands for, but I assume you're talking about those neighborhoods where the housing industry or whoever is able to get more value out of the houses they sell because the neighborhood looks a certain way. I understand their concern then, but IDK if I share it.

 

I would be the one rich guy who pays the fines, but keeps my house they way I want it to look just to piss them off. Too bad I'm not though =/

 

 

HOA stands for "Homeowners Association"  They act like mini-councils for the neighborhood you live in.  Each homeowner can vote and run for a seat on the council.  The council can pass rules and requirements that each homeowner is required to abide by providing they don't violate state or federal law.  Much of which includes the look of your home and property.  Such as only painting your house a set number of colors, or having fencing that isn't rusted.  They can issue you fines for being in violation and levy liens against you property.

 

I never understood how they can legally wield such power over property that you privately own, but they do exist. some are decent, but there are a lot of horror stories about people with bad ones. 

 

 

[jagdtigger]

I just leave this here:

 

[DutchTexan]

11 hours ago, Bsmith said:

This looks amazing, solar cells that look like regular roof tiles, this is certainly a way to bring it to people that don't get panels because of the way that they look and trust me, that are more people then you would expect, considering we have a house block where the buyers got it as an option to get when building for a lower price, but some actually let it slip because of the looks.

this hooked up to something like the Tesla wall(the thing that buys energy on the cheap and stores it for later use or sells it back when the price is beneficial) could be a more drastic decrease in the power bill of common people or people that travel a lot.

 

okey, nice and reasonable calculations but you are missing the point and a couple of things here.
-first of, your estimation of 11,000 kWh for a single day is more in the direction of what get's used in an entire year! I could nit pick on things like the angle of the panels or their orientation on the east-west line that the sun follows. but that would merely overcomplicate things without much use.

-This is supposed to make solar panels more attractive because most people avoid them because of their looks.

-current, commercial available solar panels are very inefficient and more expensive then needed due to the materials that they are dependent on.
current cells only convert roughly 20% of the light they receive into energy and need materials like gold, cadmium, copper, indium and gallium to name as example. making them not only expensive, but also not very environmental friendly.

We still have a long way to go, but prices for panels are lowering constantly and new developments are almost delivered weekly if not daily, all it takes is a single discovery to increase that 20% efficiency for commercial panels.

 

And if the energy harnessed by the panel is on a yearly basis as well? 

[Bsmith]

1 minute ago, DutchTexan said:

And if the energy harnessed by the panel is on a yearly basis as well? 

then you still need to correct the fact that at one end there is the number for daily usage while at the other hand a yearly number has been reduced to be used on daily basis (so far I can see concerning your current formula)

[DutchTexan]

59 minutes ago, jagdtigger said:

I just leave this here:

 

I agree, dial down the hype 

[DutchTexan]

3 minutes ago, Bsmith said:

then you still need to correct the fact that at one end there is the number for daily usage while at the other hand a yearly number has been reduced to be used on daily basis (so far I can see concerning your current formula)

Sorry

 

Maybe you should calculate how many panels you would need and how much it would cost in your area to power something simple like 11,000 kWh. Then, explain how far off I was  

[Bsmith]

Just now, DutchTexan said:

Sorry

 

Maybe you should calculate how many panels you would need and how much it would cost in your area to power something simple like 11,000 kWh. Then, explain how far off I was  

 

I will sent you a PM with the way I would work it out in order not to go off topic here. your attempt wasn't bad but the structure missing makes it hard to correct.

[dalekphalm]

30 minutes ago, DutchTexan said:

Sorry

 

Maybe you should calculate how many panels you would need and how much it would cost in your area to power something simple like 11,000 kWh. Then, explain how far off I was  

You wouldn't need to power 11,000 kWh for a house. That's higher than the average yearly power consumption of a home in the United States:

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3

 

You're looking at somewhere in the range of 30 to 35 kWh per day of power consumption for an American house.

 

I'm not gonna do any of the math though, because I am lazy as fuck

[emille26]

I am really confused about a lot of the discussion on this thread. In the U.S. at least, how viable these are depends on what state you are in. 

 

My father put a 6 KW system on a 4,000 sq/ft house built in the 80's. This is in NJ where there are state subsidies, an SREC market that pays about $1,000 a year (big business can buy them to meet requirements) and the utility company pays him retail value per KwH delivered to the grid when not used at home. 

 

The result- his power bill hovers around $10-$60 in the summer. That does not include the value of the S-REC. mind you this is a big house, and he works from home.

 

pay back period is 5-6 years, not 20. 

 

At low volume, this does not affect the distribution system. However, when enough people do it, utilities need to redesign how they charge for the wires that deliver electricity.

 

Why is this good?- every MW of electricity made by customer solar is a MW that does not need to be produced at a power plant. This matters a lot in states that rely on old coal generation. 

 

In a state like PA, this is not nearly as viable yet. 

[DutchTexan]

35 minutes ago, Bsmith said:

 

 

6 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

 

 

4 minutes ago, emille26 said:

 

@Bsmith and I will get to the bottom of the maths 

[mariushm]

14 minutes ago, emille26 said:

 

Why is this good?- every MW of electricity made by customer solar is a MW that does not need to be produced at a power plant. This matters a lot in states that rely on old coal generation. 

 

 

Not so fast.

 

If a lot of houses would have solar panels and pumps energy into the grid, the electricity company would have problems. For example, let's say that in a city, the solar panels pump 5 megawatts of electricity constantly into the grid but a storm is coming and the winds push big clouds overy the city one day and the solar panels now pump only 1 megawatt into the grid ( or they may not push anything at all).

The demand is still there, so the electricity company has to figure out where to come up with those 4-5 megawatts missing in very short time, like 20-30 minutes, otherwise the voltage and the frequency on the mains circuits will drop outside guaranteed levels .

They may not be able to go hydro or their to their max capacity giving tens or hundreds of megawatts of energy already, they may not be able to "buy" from other states around so they'd have to start emergency power stations that use fuel or gas and systems like turbines which are very inefficient compared to coal stations but start producing energy within 5-10 minutes .. basically by running such emergency statons for 30 minutes to an hour until coal stations can be online or they can buy power from other territories, those stations could produce as much pollution as a coal station running one or two days.

To add pain to that, all those houses with solar panels still continue to use as much power as when the panels were lit with sun, so unless they have local storage, their behavior changes from pushing 5 megawatts into the grid, those houses start to suck 5 megawatts from the grid , so the deficit into the power grid actually doubles from 5mw no longer provided by panels to 10 megawatts

The more houses have panels, the more important it is to have some kind of buffer, local storage of energy, batteries.  It wouldn't surprise me to see Tesla do deals where they energy storage system is bundled with the roof tiles as some kind of "new house" package.

[emille26]

7 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Not so fast.

 

If a lot of houses would have solar panels and pumps energy into the grid, the electricity company would have problems. For example, let's say that in a city, the solar panels pump 5 megawatts of electricity constantly into the grid but a storm is coming and the winds push big clouds overy the city one day and the solar panels now pump only 1 megawatt into the grid ( or they may not push anything at all).

The demand is still there, so the electricity company has to figure out where to come up with those 4-5 megawatts missing in very short time, like 20-30 minutes, otherwise the voltage and the frequency on the mains circuits will drop outside guaranteed levels .

They may not be able to go hydro or their to their max capacity giving tens or hundreds of megawatts of energy already, they may not be able to "buy" from other states around so they'd have to start emergency power stations that use fuel or gas and systems like turbines which are very inefficient compared to coal stations but start producing energy within 5-10 minutes .. basically by running such emergency statons for 30 minutes to an hour until coal stations can be online or they can buy power from other territories, those stations could produce as much pollution as a coal station running one or two days.

To add pain to that, all those houses with solar panels still continue to use as much power as when the panels were lit with sun, so unless they have local storage, their behavior changes from pushing 5 megawatts into the grid, those houses start to suck 5 megawatts from the grid , so the deficit into the power grid actually doubles from 5mw no longer provided by panels to 10 megawatts

The more houses have panels, the more important it is to have some kind of buffer, local storage of energy, batteries.  It wouldn't surprise me to see Tesla do deals where they energy storage system is bundled with the roof tiles as some kind of "new house" package.

I have an annoying "yes, you are correct. . .but" response for you. 

 

You are totally right if there is enough solar, that can be a problem. in a lot of places however,  there is not enough solar yet for this to happen.

 

as for that 4-5 MWs. there are a few ways. one is natural gas peaker plants, or something called demand response. big companies are contacted to curtail usage during that time period. 

 

I don't agree that coal stations are more efficient that turbine gas plants. a new gas plant is like 60% efficient compared to 30% for coal. coal used to be a lot cheaper, but the price of gas in the US actually makes gas plants cheaper than coal now in a lot of places (not all).

 

Also, the 5 to 10 megawatts calculation you have assumes that those houses collectively generate 10 MWs of electricity, consuming half and selling half. the hole would not really be that big.  most of those houses are only selling because it is at a time of day when they are not using at all (think middle of the day, september, no AC on) so they might stop delivering 5MW to the grid, but they would not be immediately using 5 MW.

 

It also depends heavily on advanced the grid is and who the grid operator is. 

 

In TL;DR form. I agree with you, but it really does depend on the system as a whole. 

 

[Bsmith]

@emille26 and @mariushm You guys seem to forget that there are also things like industrial sized "batteries" that are able to store a few MW and give them of when needed. Musk also talk about these in his presentation, those are able to store and divide power to places where it is needed.

[mariushm]

57 minutes ago, Bsmith said:

@emille26 and @mariushm You guys seem to forget that there are also things like industrial sized "batteries" that are able to store a few MW and give them of when needed. Musk also talk about these in his presentation, those are able to store and divide power to places where it is needed.

Not as much as chemical batteries but more like stations which use excess power (or during night when energy is cheaper) to pump water up a hill/mountain in huge reservoirs and when needed let the water drop from height down turbines which produce power when it's more needed.

Other designs use solar power and heating elements to heat up of salt (not quite table salt but similar) to very high temperatures and the salt stays hot for hours... pour water through pipes near the salt and the water heats up and turns to steam which can be used to produce power.

In industrial applications (and often datacenters use them), there's also flywheels : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

 

I don't think (but I may be wrong of course, i don't know everything) there's huge "batteries" out there, as in using lithium or other "classical" chemical battery types for storage, because it's often much cheaper to just buy energy or start a hydro generator when needed for longer than a few hours.

 

For those curious about this subject and want to learn more, you can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'd really like to see the total cost to resurface your roof with these things.