Tesla Inc. has kicked off production of its long-awaited electricity-producing shingles that Elon Musk says will transform the rooftop solar industry.
Manufacturing of the photovoltaic glass tiles began last month at a factory in Buffalo built with backing from New York State, the company said in an email Tuesday. It comes more than a year after Tesla unveiled the shingles to a mix of fanfare and skepticism.
The appeal: a sleek, clean solar product, especially for homeowners seeking to replace aging roofs. The tiles -- from most angles -- look like ordinary shingles. They allow light to pass from above and onto a standard flat solar cell.
Tesla, the biggest U.S. installer of rooftop-solar systems, piloted the product on the homes of several employees. The company expects to begin installing roofs for customers within the next few months.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @05:50PM (2 children)
"They allow light to pass from above and onto a standard flat solar cell."
well that's a lame hack. what i expected was shingles that *are* solar cells and link with each other to transport their bountiful harvest. made tougher and cheaper than normal shingles with better efficiency than "standard" panels. is that so much to ask? if it solves some issue with existing installation methods then swell, but still kind of lame.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @06:20PM (1 child)
> made tougher and cheaper than normal shingles with better efficiency than "standard" panels. is that so much to ask?
A merge of two products that's both better *and* cheaper then either one of them? Sure, sure. Maybe they could be even cheaper if they could also wash the dishes and mow your lawn. Heck, if we stack enough functionality, we could make them almost free!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @08:03PM
Yeah! let's call it the Lawn System. Well, the dishes- the Lawn+Dish System. Well, we might want it to do other stuff - chop logs, start breakfast, let's call it the Doing System. No, that's got no rhythm - how about we call it SystemD?
(Score: 3, Informative) by captain normal on Sunday January 14 2018, @06:13PM (2 children)
Personally I don't much care for Bloomberg. Not enough real information and too much flashy stuff. Tesla's own site is only just a little better, but you do get a lot more info.
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof [tesla.com]
https://www.tesla.com/support/solar-roof-faqs [tesla.com]
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday January 14 2018, @08:43PM (1 child)
It is pretty thin on information.
There was this one hint:
There is also some info in the patents:
https://electrek.co/2017/08/30/tesla-solar-roof-tile-system-explained-patent/ [electrek.co]
Still the whining lament of the first poster AC were wide of the mark. The tile has everything in one package, protective quarts glass, solar cell, electrical connection, etc.
Its said to be hail proof.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Sunday January 14 2018, @10:55PM
That's what the video in the Oz site [tesla.com] shows... and hail is quite frequent here in NSW, though I don't know the "class", I haven't had any of my roof tiles break before even when we get golf ball sized hail.
Aesthetically, it definitely looks a lot nicer than having separate solar panels. Mold and corrosion (if you live near the coastline here) is also a problem, so not sure how they stack up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @10:58PM (2 children)
Traditionally, we have ugly solar panels. You have to have some sort of desire to show off how nerdy or environmentally aware you are.
This new design tries to disguise the solar panels. Variations of it mimic several old-style roof materials. We get fake barrel tile, fake slate, etc.
I prefer a middle ground. Traditional panels were ugly because they were clearly add-on devices, projecting above the roof surface. There was space underneath. It didn't go all the way from edge to edge. The color wasn't the issue. The fact that it was solar wasn't the issue. It just wasn't neat and tidy.
A good design has rectangles of a size that is convenient for roof workers, perhaps 16x32 inches or 20x40 cm. They lie flat and lock together for waterproofing. They are the roof, edge to edge, with only trusses between them and the attic space. The color can be almost anything. It's fine to be maroon, olive, navy, rust, purple, charcoal, or blue.
Being able to be cut to fit complicated roofs is important, but really we should stop that crap. New buildings should have roofs that are rectangles when viewed normal to the surface, but parallelograms when viewed normal to the Earth. That is, they should be tipped rectangles. This gets the slope required for water issues, avoids joints prone to leaking, avoids material waste due to cutting, avoids a shaded side, and IMHO gives a nice clean modern look.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday January 15 2018, @03:47AM (1 child)
I mostly agree.
You can't have any single roof rectangle be too big in high wind areas. There has to be a high pitch and broken roof plan or the roof will generate enough lift to pick the house up in a hurricane. So it is useful to have the roof a more complicated shape.
The roof segments must overlap to be water tight over time. You want gravity to do most of the sealing. That still allows making the roof out of large tiles, many of which are actually panels. Look alike(ish) tiles that can be cut used at the peaks, joints and edges to get the size right and it'd be fine. I'm not sure that a blue PV tile look wouldn't be nice on the right house.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @04:15AM
I'm in Florida, on the coast. Our houses are concrete.
Insurance companies like complicated shapes because the simple shapes were badly done. Simple shapes are strong when done right.
Consider the traditional 2-pane shape, a pair of rectangles joined at the top. The durable and obvious way to construct this is with walls (concrete in Florida) that go up to the roof. Two walls would be rectangles, and two walls would have a peak on top that makes them pentagons. This can be built with tilt-up construction.
That isn't what people built. People made all 4 walls rectangular, then added flimsy wooden triangular wall extensions on top of two of the walls. Those bits of junk would fail. Well duh... but don't blame that on the roof shape.
Concrete houses are not lifting in hurricanes. They may lift in tornadoes. The solution to that is to sink the foundation deeper. You want walls that are continuous concrete from an inch below the roof surface down to several feet under ground. Tornado resistance might not be realistic. We'd like it, but it takes some serious construction.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @11:04PM (1 child)
He put his car factory, his rocket factory, and now his roof factory in states with some serious problems. He faces hostile unions (already bitching) and stupidly high taxes.
He at least put a battery factory in Nevada and a rocket launch site in Texas. Those were sane choices, though the inventory tax in Texas is a bit of trouble. He also has a rocket launch site in California (bad) and two in Florida (good), but those weren't really his choices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 15 2018, @01:17AM
> and now his roof factory in states with some serious problems.
It's not really Elon's factory. The solar roofing factory was mostly built by NY State and it's currently managed by Panasonic who started manufacturing in Buffalo last year. Tesla's roof tile production is just getting started now, have hired an initial crew, with more jobs promised later this year.
Who cares about taxes if the state builds your production line? Plenty of educated and skilled labor in this area which counts for a lot if you are actually _making_ things where quality matters.
This area that used to have big steel plants...which shut down in the 1970s, real rust belt hard times. The local economy was so bad that the Anchor Bar started to deep fry the by-products of butchered chickens as snacks, spiced up with a hot dip...and thus was born Buffalo wings. (I think the wings were being thrown out before the "hot wing" was invented).