This is exactly the future of solar, Musk announced. “You’ll want to call your neighbors over and say ‘check out the sweet roof.’ It’s not a phrase you hear often.”
The roof tiles are in fact composed of textured glass. From the majority of viewing perspectives, they appear exactly like normal shingles, however they let light to go through from above onto a standard flat solar cell. The approach is designed for Panasonic to generate the solar cells as well as for Tesla to come up with the glass tiles and also whatever will go with them. That’s all based on shareholders authorizing the $2.2 billion acquisition of SolarCity, the leading U.S. rooftop installer, on Nov. 17.
Tesla claims the tempered glass is “tough as steel,” and can weather a lifetime of abuse from the elements. It can also be fitted with heating elements to melt snow in colder climates. “It’s never going to wear out,” Musk said, “It’s made of quartz. It has a quasi-infinite lifetime.”
The costs on the new solar roof is a bit—squishy. Musk asserted that a person who purchases a Tesla roof will save money in comparison with somebody who acquires a comparable standard roof along with electricity from the grid. Yet make no mistake : It is absolutely a premium product, at least when it very first rolls out. The terra cotta as well as slate roofs Tesla mimicked are one of the most very expensive roofing materials available on the market. SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive mentioned that the cost of a standard roof may differ widely, from $7,000 to $70,000—based on materials, size, complexity, location—so providing firm prices of a solar roof at this time is definitely challenging.
