Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii

Major chunks of Italy are basically outdoor museums that people happen to live in, so even if the math doesn't completely pencil out on these particular first generation panels, it still probably makes sense as a long-term investment to ensure that the next generation of this technology for which the math does work comes into being.

Here's the product datasheet: https://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/documents/rooftile-...

An independent research center lists the efficiency as 0.111: https://integratedpv.eurac.edu/en/products/modules/invisible...

Anybody know how that compares to an average panel on the market today? From a quick search it seems like the best you can actually buy is 0.22 efficiency.

Edit: The best available on this site is 0.216 (https://integratedpv.eurac.edu/en/products/modules/fu-425-m-...), but I think they only test Italian-manufactured products. 0.111 is on the low end, but significantly better than a few things like solar glass.

Here's a plot [1] of PV power, over the whole spectrum. Your envelope appears to be of high quality.

It's unfortunate they don't just have actual numbers on their website, which is a pretty terrible indicator, especially with the orientation of the panels being around 45 degrees.

[1] http://environmath.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/spectral_l... from http://environmath.org/2020/12/17/why-solar-panels-cant-get-...

This is a valid question, idk why you're being downvoted.

You're thinking of SolarCity which was bought by Tesla. There were promises of these kinds of solar cells that I was excited about. Not sure what ever happened to them.

Yes, the Tesla Solar Roof tiles, and they did get some tiny number (thousands or something like that?) installed. I actually had ordered one and was in line to get it installed last year. But the company cancelled it, and then Tesla started cancelling all of them apparently. The reason the installer gave was that the v1/v2 were too labor intensive to be worth it, and they were waiting for the v3, but from reports I read another factor is that Tesla has been completely putting most of their solar stuff on the backburner due to internal dysfunction and redirecting all resources to car production. They've blown off a lot of the promises they made to New York at least for production and from the sound of it it's all a big mess. Which is too bad because from what I saw in person the product looks very good, and installations in Florida survived some big hurricane winds last year. So the durability seems to be as advertised vs wind/hail. And I do care about that on my roof of my house. But it appears to not have been at all a real internal priority.

As it happens I found this exact Italian company a few weeks ago trying to research if anyone else was trying to do the tile approach and was excited that there's at least something, even if they're a long time away if ever from any sort of global scale. But it's an approach I'd really like to see as part of the mix. Just driving around and looking, it's obvious people care about how their homes look. Since technologically it's feasible to have aesthetic solar power, it'd be nice to have a bunch of good options there just as there are for traditional roofs.

As far as Tesla, I wonder if they may come to regret burning some bridges and reducing their early lead/mindshare/diversification. The recent crashing prices for car EVs as other players pile into the space shows some of the risk, I bet they wished they'd put more effort into getting the Cybertruck out right now. They may ultimately feel the same about solar and home/business energy. I've got PowerWalls and are mostly happy with them, but I'm very interested in some of the vanadium redox flow batteries getting developed (like by StorEn) as well. Tesla has had an early lead but I think they could easily still squander that.