These would look great in Arizona. Anyone know the ballpark for roofing a McMansion? Their site doesn’t have pricing.
$7000/kw
which is 140 tiles. So around $50 a tile.
Don't know the size of your mcmansion.
Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
41–50 of 143 posts
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#42The thought of future archaeologists being thoroughly confused by Roman terracotta tiles that apparently generates electricity amuses me.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#43These would look great in Arizona. Anyone know the ballpark for roofing a McMansion? Their site doesn’t have pricing.
This page has pricing: https://www.dyaqua.it/invisiblesolar/_en/rooftile-invisible-...
Looks like 7k euros for I think that is 9 square meters. Not sure what a typical solar install goes for now, but based on this it would cost 70k just in materials for my 1k sqft roof. Doesn't seem economical.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#44Didn't Tesla initially have a plan to disguise solar panels as slate?
I don't know about initially, but yes, Tesla has a solar tile project. It is mostly being installed by third parties now and is very expensive compared to an asphalt roof with panels.
https://www.tesla.com/solarroof
At announcement, different designs were available, but in the end I think they've only offered slate.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The answer for traditional solar panels is about 2 months IIRC. Do you have a citation for that? A quick Google said normal panels take three years.
No, I couldn't find it again, it was just from memory. But a check on your number shows that it came from 2004. The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint.
> The price of solar panels has dropped ~90% since 2004, and price is fairly well correlated with carbon footprint.
Part of that low price was China flooding the market with cheap subsidized cells in other to take the competition out of business. Similar to the way Amazon puts the prices (of products and prime) up in markets where they've already eliminated most of the competition.
I don't think actual energy footprint has reduced by that much, I'm sure it has a bit though.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess that doesn't matter much as long as it pushes customers who would have never otherwise used such things to do so at all. in other words, for historical sites or places where aesthetic matters a lot , the conversation is "should we use these less efficient panels that fulfill our aesthetic requirements, or should we forego the use of solar all together?"
If EROI on those panels is negative then it's better to forgo them.
Even if it's negative it pumps money into the designer solar panel sector which will bring in further investment and research and scale to bring prices down.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
If EROI on those panels is negative then it's better to forgo them.
Even if it's negative it pumps money into the designer solar panel sector which will bring in further investment and research and scale to bring prices down.
Which is useful only if it also eventually makes EROI positive - otherwise, upping the scale and bringing prices down is only accelerating waste.
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer for traditional solar panels is about 2 months IIRC. The answer for these should be significantly less, because you should only count the delta between solar tiles and non-solar tiles rather than the entire footprint.
> The answer for traditional solar panels is about 2 months IIRC. Do you have a citation for that? A quick Google said normal panels take three years.
The carbon footprint idea seems flawed to me. It always just depends how far you look. There are machines making machines making machines and so on, the chain is really long and those early machines in the chain, which may have been necessary to create given product, may not even exist anymore. They might have existed before the product was even invented.
Note that the whole idea was mostly popularized by BP [1][2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint 2. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Monocrystalline Si has a 1.2 eV band gap iirc, meaning it absorbs everything smaller (more energetic) than ~ 1100 nm. Our eyes see, what, 200-600 nm? Removing the 200-600 nm bit leaves you with approx 50% of the energy left between 600 and 1100 nm, glancing at [1] This is all VERY back of the envelope... but I think these lose around half of the energy you'd get out of conventional panels. [1] https://www.researchgat…
The specs show it as .11 efficiency, and normal panels are about .22, so like litterally 1/2. That's pretty darn good for being visually appealing.
on the other side, normal panels will usually cover part of the roof. those tiles will cover entire roof. hence even if efficiency lower, total output will be higher
Re: Solar panels disguised as terracotta tiles in Pompeii
#50Didn't Tesla initially have a plan to disguise solar panels as slate?
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 r…
Did you ever end up finding any other company making any tiles that resembled slate, out of curiosity?