Energy/Industry Renewable Solar Energy Storage Gadgets

Gizmos & Gadgets: A Solar Roof That Will Cost You Less Than a Normal Roof Plus the Cost of Electricity

October 29, 2016

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October 29, 2016 – Yesterday in Los Angeles Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, Solar City and SpaceX went on an outdoor stage surrounded by homes with roofs studded with solar panels. His backdrop showed current carbon dioxide atmospheric levels topping 404 parts per million, and then the hockey stick graph that became all too familiar to us in Al Gore’s movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Why was Musk on stage?

Two reasons.

Musk is an evangelist on a mission to address climate change by replacing carbon emitting industries and products (cars running on internal combustion engine technology) with sustainable, renewable, clean net-zero offerings.
Musk is an entrepreneur who sees the business advantage of being first to market by taking a group of technologies and combining them into a single turnkey solution to meet what he believes consumers want or will want in the near future.

In anticipation of point two Musk earlier this year announced his intention of merging Tesla and Solar City to form a new enterprise named Tesla Energy. Subject to shareholder approval next month, the company Musk envisions, rebranded Tesla Energy, plans to bring to home consumers a new renewable energy system combining integrated roof solar with battery storage. The combination offerings comes as a 7 Kilowatt system with 14 Kilowatt hour output. It is designed to integrate with Tesla’s electric vehicle chargers.

Tesla has been building battery storage ever since it launched its first electric car models. More recently it started building a new gigafactory to manufacture batteries in significant numbers. Last year the company introduced its first Powerpack and Powerwall designed for home, business and utility electrical storage. The products could be integrated with rooftop solar panels but that meant hiring a contractor to put the pieces together.

Powerpack and Powerwall, therefore, were not a fully integrated turnkey offering. Solar City, Musk’s solar panel company could offer Powerpack and Powerwall products with its solar panels but there was nothing seamless about installation.

Now with yesterday’s announcement Musk has revealed a turnkey solar-plus-storage solution capable of powering a four-bedroom home for 24 hours without solar arrays or indefinitely when combined with them. With shareholder blessing, after November 17, Tesla Energy will begin to roll out its retail strategy to sell the technology through a national network of stores in the United States and then in other countries where Tesla currently markets its electric vehicles.

The Powerwall 2 introduced in September of this year is a rechargeable lithium-ion battery pack, liquid thermal controller, integrated inverter and software management system that is part of the Tesla Energy offering. It can be mounted on a wall either indoors or outside. It generates 14-Kilowatt hours of electricity. It is warrantied for unlimited recharge cycles for 10 years.

The solar roof consists of glass tiles embedded with photovoltaic cells. It can be customized for a variety of roof configurations. The tiles can be configured to hide the underlying solar technology while creating a seamless look for the entire roof. Combined with the Powerwall the house can be completely off the grid or can feed any surplus energy back into the grid. Tiles come in four styes: Textured, French Slate, Tuscan or Smooth Glass. The tiles are created with hydrographic printing to emulate shingles you find on roofs everyday. Musk demonstrated their toughness showing the tiles ability to take a hit where normal roof tiles would shatter.

Pricing of Tesla Energy’s turnkey solution starts at $5,500 U.S. Specific pricing on the tiles was not made available other than to state that they would be no more expensive the conventional roofs when the cost of electricity is included.