Tesla Solar Roof is on life support as it pivot to panels
electrek.co62 points by celsoazevedo 4 hours ago
62 points by celsoazevedo 4 hours ago
I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
I think it was a genuine attempt but they failed to find a simple enough solution.
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.
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.
Nah, Elon Musk faked the demo [1] so he could defraud Tesla investors into bailing out his cousins.
[1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
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.
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.
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.
There's a few competitors.
The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Australia is pretty close to the equator
Depending on which part you consider it’s also halfway to the South Pole. Cape York to Tasmania is almost 33° of latitude.
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.
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.
I hope somebody figures out at some point how to do roofing with large integrated panels that could be solar.
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.
~ https://arena.gov.au/projects/integrated-pv-solar-roofing/
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
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.
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.
Is it enough to get you off-the-grid?
https://youtu.be/UJeSWbR6W04?is=7zjKewd_mhUFEX1H - mkbhd has a video about it. Not fully off grid, if I remember correctly but generates pretty much all electricity he needs.
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.
> 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.
You are mixing up Tesla and SpaceX. SpaceX already produces solar panels for the 10,000+ satellites it has in space.
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.
"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.
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.
Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.
He is very critical of Elon Musk, but I never caught him writing something false.
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.