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SolarCity has unveiled a line of solar roof tiles:
[Elon] Musk, the chief executive of Tesla Motors and chairman of SolarCity, showcased a line of high-design solar roof tiles that would replace clunky solar panels and tie into an upgraded version of the Tesla wall-mounted battery for those times when the sun doesn't shine. The glass solar shingles resemble French slate, Tuscan barrel tile or more conventional roofing materials with a textured or smooth surface. "The key is to make solar look good," Musk said during the product introduction staged on the old set of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" series, where he had re-roofed four of the Wisteria Lane houses. "If this is done right, all roofs will have solar."
[...] Price and styling will likely prove critical for the industry in attracting customers as current solar power owners have seen some of the benefits of self-generating electricity erode. Utility companies have complained that solar owners haven't been paying their share of the cost to maintain the network of power lines, substations, transformers and power plants that make up the electric grid. Regulators across the country have added costs to solar power owners such as higher rate tiers and mandatory fees that have increased per-household costs by as much as $10 to $20 a month in California, Del Chiaro said.
[...] A 2014 survey by home-solar power provider Lumeta found that slightly under a third of respondents considered appearance very or extremely important, while slightly over a third said the look was slightly important or not important at all. "People spend a lot of time trying to create an attractive home," said Andy Ogden, chairman of the industrial design graduate program at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. "They don't want funny glass boxes stuck on one side of their roof." Making solar roofs more attractive, he said, "increases the number of people who will install solar."
The quartz glass tiles supposedly have 2-3 times the longevity of asphalt tiles. A Powerwall 2 battery with 14 kWh capacity was also unveiled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @04:03PM
This stuff is fake tile, fake shingles, and fake slate.
We had ugly boxes at funny angles covering just part of the roof, and now we're doing fakes. This is all wrong. There is a middle ground. Solar roofs need to look nice, but they don't need to look like something they are not. They just need to be neat and tidy.
Example:
The panels could be purpleish or reddish. The panels could be a meter by a half meter. This isn't inherently ugly. It just needs to cover the entire roof, edge to edge, with one material that lies flat.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 30 2016, @11:03PM
I've never been able to wrap my brain around the reality that solar decreases property value or "looks ugly."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Monday October 31 2016, @06:47AM
I tried to tell that to my neighbour when he didn't see how I could ever want panels on my street-facing roof. You know, the one with the perfect orientation to gather over 320 days of sun per year...
On topic, I'd lie to restate that Integrated Solar Roofs ARE NOT NEW. You can find them in Europe. The sun-deprived Germans have them. The French even have a higher electricity purchase price for them. How the [bleep] is that detail not front and center on any of this "Elon is a genius" pseudo-journalism?