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I’m pretty sure solar roof was introduced as a way to pump stock when Tesla was doing poor financially
[1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...
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.
Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?
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 so…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yep. Fred Lambert, the usual suspect.
Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.
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.