271–280 of 290 posts
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Except, unless you are powering a laser pointed offworld, most of that energy is going to end up in your local environment as heat. Or, you meant just your house's greenhouse problem? Running a heat pump or AC would do that.
The heat pump/AC will run on what? If that energy comes from fossil fuels...
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Now think about what will happen after water makes its way into that crack and goes through a few hundred freeze-thaw cycles.
So this technology is useless because years of wear and tear will make you need to replace the roof eventually? Isn't that pretty normal for any house?
It's probably more efficient to replace the entire roof at once, and insurers would almost certainly prefer the entire roof to be the same age, but asphalt does have some advantages for situations in which nearly every storm tears up just a few shingles.
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Your comment is what confuses me. Can you explain how keeping a Tesla car in a garage is related to the parent comment about Elon's product design/marketing/business strategies?
Solar panels do not work well when the car is always garaged. It seems like a gimmick rather than a solid feature that the user actually wants.
I'm a 'comments first' reader myself but TFAs are generally a must read for context and disambiguation before actually wading in.
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I tried an address in Cave Creek AZ. 2000 hours of usable sunlight a year. 4664 sq ft available for panels. Total 20 year savings: $1,000. Seems... underwhelming. Oh, this is for a lease. $2,000 if you have to borrow to install the panels. Still... $100/yr? The only worthwhile benefit is you can afford to pay $21,000 out of pocket.
Those numbers sound way off. My house in Redwood City, CA: 1873 hours of usable sunlight 1561 sqft available for panels (ain't no Cave Creek mansion!) $9000 savings. I left my electric bill at the default $100 estimate, which is close enough. They only defaulted to 3.5kw system for me, I assume based on my electric costs. 247 sqft. Maybe your costs were too low. There's no way an electric bill on a cave creek mansion…
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Solar panels do not work well when the car is always garaged. It seems like a gimmick rather than a solid feature that the user actually wants.
The main source of your confusion stems from misinterpretation of the phrase "Tesla's solar roof" which is solar roofing material produced by Tesla for buildings rather than a solar roof for a Tesla automobile. I'm a 'comments first' reader myself but TFAs are generally a must read for context and disambiguation before actually wading in.
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I would like to see the original inputs that went into the calculation myself. I've searched quite a bit without being able to locate them. As far as I can tell, it's calculated by dividing the (very low) number of acute fatalities from civilian nuclear accidents by the (very high) number of terawatt hours generated by civilian nuclear power plants. If I'm correct that would kind-of be cheating because they're not co…
And if you compare to mining for coal should you not compare the manufacturing/mining that is required for nuclear and solar too?
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He's pitching it as being basically break even, when electricity costs are factored in. My guess is an awful lot of people can afford this, especially for new construction. I think this is key - often the pitch that "sure, it's expensive up front but will save you money in the long run" falls on deaf ears when people don't have the disposable income to immediately absorb that large up front cost, but when you're buyi…
You're aware, of course, that SolarCity's entire business model is leasing solar panels back to consumers with no up-front costs, and a net savings, right?
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I'm not sure. Rumor mill has it that SC has been struggling, and the recent buyout from Tesla makes it look like Musk is transferring cash to himself. Musk talks alot , and I'm still on the fence as to whether this is vaporware meant to distract from that.
The timing may be calculated but that's about it. If a product isn't going to work out, that's one thing, but Musk doesn't waste time on vaporware. Notice that Tesla never put a silly will-never-be-an-actual-product car for display at auto shows.
I had serious misgivings when Tesla/SolarCity announced a switch of focus to building-integrated PV. Historically, BIPV is where a PV technology goes to die after it's failed to compete against incumbent module designs. But these have far better aesthetics than previous BIPV efforts. They look better individually and they aren't clumped in one odd shiny patch on the roof like past BIPV. Search for images of solar shi…
> Search for images of solar shingles and you'll see what I mean about previous attempts. The first 9 images Google returned in the top 2 rows for "solar shingles" have 2 pictures from Tesla/SC's presentation. (~22%). The 3 top rows (13 images) contain 3 images from the presentation (~23%). It looks like you're right about the change to come.
solar shingles -tesla
YMMV :)