Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's what baffles me about this whole thing. Unless your roof is rectangular with homogeneous shadows, if you connect the shingles, say, in rows, you'll have unbalanced voltages. Is the plan to have a microinverter per row of shingles?
There's two types of tiles. I suspect they just use the same number or row and then fill in any gaps with the non-solar tiles.
Solar Roof
421–430 of 455 posts
Re: Solar Roof
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is tautological; the reason poor people don't get a lot of tax breaks is because they don't pay a lot of taxes. The government does spend a lot of money helping poor people, but not via tax credits.
It's not a tautology because tax credits aren't the only possibility for providing incentives. Imagine you worked for $10/hour, and somehow got put in charge of designing the incentives. Do you think they would look like this? I don't.
Anyway, you're coming at this all wrong. If I was in charge of designing this program, my mandate would not be to help poor people or rich people, it would be to increase solar power. How do you increase solar power? By paying for part of it. Who benefits? Whoever's buying it. Who pays to install solar power? Not poor people.
Re: Solar Roof
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is tautological; the reason poor people don't get a lot of tax breaks is because they don't pay a lot of taxes. The government does spend a lot of money helping poor people, but not via tax credits.
It's not a tautology because tax credits aren't the only possibility for providing incentives. Imagine you worked for $10/hour, and somehow got put in charge of designing the incentives. Do you think they would look like this? I don't.
That might be a desirable outcome, if you are more opposed to rich people getting tax breaks than you are to fossil fuels. But in that case, why not just raise taxes on rich people, and leave the solar incentive out of this?
Re: Solar Roof
#424Re: Solar Roof
#425Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of municipalities have given too much thought to widespread solar use and I wonder if this will fall afoul of possible future regs.
Re: Solar Roof
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is tautological; the reason poor people don't get a lot of tax breaks is because they don't pay a lot of taxes. The government does spend a lot of money helping poor people, but not via tax credits.
I'm speaking of incentivizing reducing power usage in the general case, not merely tax credits. The current solution is "let's give wealthy people more money to play with" (to questionable benefit to the general welfare). I should be clear I'm not saying I oppose tax credits for reducing usage; I'm just saying that poor people aren't getting the same kinds of benefits for using less power, even though they are using…
Re: Solar Roof
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 21, thus I have no idea what roofs normally cost. I assume they're very very heavily below ~80k? For a "regular" house, what would a roof cost? 4k? 10k? 500?
My roof is 1600 sq ft. It had a metal roof on it, which is considered more expensive than asphalt. It was 40 years old, which is the how long metal roofs are expected to last. I replaced it myself for around $2000. Most of the cost was $1600 for the metal roof. Then there was $400 in special nails and trim parts and sealer. It would have cost a little more if it wasn't metal before since I'd have to have added the sp…
Many homes, even ones they're building now, are not designed to support anything more than a few layers of standard asphalt shingles.
BTW, it's ridiculous that we're talking "down" to asphalt shingles now because of this. Some of those come with 50+-year warranties now...
Re: Solar Roof
#428In modeling whether this makes sense, I looked at my annual electricity bill, which comes in at about $1,800/year. That's not enough savings opportunity to justify a ~$70,000 roof+batteries. However, when I add 2 electric cars, the savings nearly triple [0]. Instead of buying gasoline, I'll be paying for electricity. At $5,400/year, spending $70,000 starts to make some sense. On the other hand, if I put up ugly panel…
Re: Solar Roof
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that include the increased risks of nuclear war, new disease vectors etc? Because, while the probable outcome is relatively little impact the butterfly effect means you can get some less predictable results indirectly. Aka migration causes war X which due to _ spiraled into WWIII. Granted the world without global warming could alos end randomly as well so you can just say unknown unknowns are always a risk even…
increased risks of nuclear war you do realize that initiating nuclear war is suicide, right? the u.s. took advantage of the only chance of actually using one because they were the only nuclear power at the time.
Re: Solar Roof
#430I think Elon got ripped off on his last shingle roof. The bar chart is nice but off by at least 150%. I've had many roofing subcontractors as clients past and present in Northern California. Based on an average of 870 roofs in 2016 for Single Family Residential homes in the bay area, Asphalt shingle roofs are $3.12 per square foot for materials and labor. The highest was $5.75 psf and the lowest $2.35 psf. Note that…
The roof launch event was very clear that this is a product that competes against premium roofs. Asphalt shingle roofs aren't premium roofs. As an example, for high-end housing developments, many of them do not allow asphalt shingle roofs. If that's not your thing, great. Then this isn't the product for you.
*Shitty in how they look, not how they perform.
I can drive through a 600k+ neighborhood (5x-6x higher than the average house in my metro) and see this terrible looking shingle. I honestly feel bad for Mr. Jones who can't afford a new cedar (or fake cedar) roof because the option of a nice asphalt isn't allowed in his HOA.
https://aos.iacpublishinglabs.com/question/aq/1400px-788px/s...