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Comment by downtide | Hacker News Reader

I always think replacing traditional roofing materials with something that generates solar energy and keeps the rain off, makes for a good idea.

You can get solar tiles, but I have never seen them in the UK. I have seen houses with panels on top of existing slates/tiles.

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They are in the UK, certainly here in Northern Ireland at least. On the way out of Enniskillen there's an estate with them on it, but you can clearly see the difference between the non-solar and solar tiles in the roof. Here's a couple of products [0] and [1] (I'm not affiliated or connected in any way, just been looking into this while planning my own house).

There's also this stuff [2] but I've never actually seen it installed anywhere yet. It takes a completely different approach and is more like a metal roof than slates.

[0] http://www.solarcentury.com/uk/c21e-tiles-and-slates/

[1] http://www.solexenergy.co.uk/

[2] http://www.viking-house.co.uk/tri-solar-roof.html

(edited for formatting of the references)

Another excellent idea I read about was storing solar heat in massive batteries underground. The battery being made of brick or stone, or earth. You catch heat in the summer and pipe it below ground, and warm up this underground store/battery (away from the water table). Because earth is also a good insulator the heat is localised. And in winter you reverse the process, drawing out the stored heat.

Roads get very hot in the summer (in some places), and if you could store that heat for residential units in the winter that may be better than turning into electrical energy.

Yeah it probably makes more sense to just use this kind of setup [1] except you ditch the mirrors and just embed the pipes directly into the road vs putting solar panels on the road.

[1] http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/kids/images/4-1-1solar_the...

You end up with a lot of similar issues - cost of materials, requires a lot more expertise to install/repair, damage may require replacing larger areas than a few tiles, slick roof surface, etc.

But at least you're not driving on glass or dealing with car accidents on the roof (hopefully)

It's unfortunate that in the most sunny parts, people don't have sloping roofs so panels actually look ugly. Still, roof solar is very popular in southern europe.

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