Tesla’s new Solar Roof costs less than a new roof plus solar panels

Love or hate Tesla, they are a financial engineering marvel. And it's easy to make an argument that the company needs more cash, but again I don't want to make this into a flame war.

$5-10k on a median sized single family home is the latter, especially if you're closer to the $5k mark. It is likely that you will have problems with the roof after it is installed, and the warranty is going to be garbage.

I would bet a tesla roof actually reduces your house value. Imagine the cost of any roof maintenance, or trying to find a roofer who can work on it without just doing more damage.

Total of parts ~$20k. $12k for construction in the Seattle area seems fair for a complex electrical install that includes a 10 year install and 25 year system warranty.

I think like many things, the last mile of work is way more expensive then people realize. Solar is more than the panels themselves

Note: I could have used cheaper panels, but they take up more roof. I could have also saved money by skipping the per-panel micro-inverters, but then the system is more brittle and less efficient

Will the sun start shining at night in 20 years?

>Fossil fuel generators do NOT ramp up and down quickly.

Natural gas ramps as quickly as it can. But let's assume that's true, that's not a point against me, it's a point against solar because then it means that solar is completely unworkable.

>Every one of these supposed drawbacks of solar also apply to generating power with fossil fuel.

No. Because we know we can power an economy with fossil fuels, and do it in any weather, day or night.

>Fracking causes earthquakes in Oklahoma and wastelands in southeast New Mexico.

Yes. Natural gas isn't great.

>In my view, human addiction to electricity is bad in all forms, but fossil fuels are clearly worse.

Right. That's why we need to get off fossil fuels. But you can't do that with solar or wind.

Here's what works: Nuclear, Hydro, Geothermal - that's basically it and the latter two need particular geography to be viable.

So in 20 years the batteries are able to store half a year worth of electricity? That's quite a lot of MWh in your house.

The whole world doesn't live at the equator.

What batteries? Hate to break it to you, but there is no battery technology capable of storing enough energy to bridge solar intermittency gaps at even the scale of a city.

"comparable price of a typical roof + solar panels"

Having premium concrete shingles isn't a "typical roof". They also use small greyed out text to say they are comparing it to concrete shingles, but use big black text for the higher price, and hide the fact that the Solar Roof is only cheaper because of tax breaks behind a "See More" button.

fredericksburg.com - application cancelled - "He, like other neighbors of the project and another larger one south of Stevensburg, have consistently expressed concerns about impact to their property values ... Orye said he didn’t think solar fit anywhere in Culpeper County, emphasizing its rich historic resources related to the Civil War and early American history."

lakegastongazette-observer.com "Opponents of the project ... turned out in droves at last week’s community meeting", "Many residents expressed concerns about the project’s effects on the ecology and their view", "the commission’s reasons for the denial were fivefold. They said the proposed facility develops more than 500 acres, is removing more than 1,100 acres of agricultural property from production, is proposed to be located in a populated residential area, is located on real estate that is located on the Virginia Scenic Byway and that setbacks and buffers on the proposed project do not adequately address the need to visually block the project from the view of its neighbors"

richmond.com - "a solar project that had significant community opposition", "plans to build a solar energy farm on 1090 acres of a 2998 acre property", "400 acres of the project would [become] a conservation easement" , "The planning commission determined that the proposed use is not in accord with recommendations made in the 2010 Long-Range Comprehensive Plan, in particular since part of the project would fall into the area designated Priority Conservation Area and Protected Land.", "Among the citizen comments that were made, most were in stringent opposition because of the negative ecological impact the project would have on protected wetlands in the area, the only remaining wildlife corridor connecting the James and Appomattox rivers, and on rare and endangered species."

starexponent.com - "Culpeper County will consider placing a cap on 'utility scale solar sprawl' equal to the amount of the renewable energy its residents could actually consume.", "In October, the board approved the county’s first-ever solar farm on 1,000 acres near Stevensburg to the dismay of neighbors, who have since filed a civil suit in the matter asking the circuit court to reverse the approval."

www.pecva.org - looks like last link just shows planning details and doesn't show opposition.

The subsidies are terrible. They are way too narrow and don’t address the root cause of the issue. Climate change is not happening because we don’t have enough renewables, climate change is happening because our GHG emissions are too high.

Tax the emissions and all activities which generate emissions become less appealing, while all opportunities to reduce the emissions become more lucrative. The example of riding a bike instead of buying an EV fits into this as well. With a carbon tax, using a bike would be equally accounted for.

By using subsidies, the government gets to pick the winner and doesn’t let people think. Renewables especially as they are now are a terrible way to tackle the problem. If we used taxes instead of subsidies, I’m afraid that not many renewable power plants would be built, because other alternatives are way more effective at curbing emissions.

Solutions like rooftop solar – and by extension, these Tesla tiles - wouldn’t make a lot of financial sense if people were billed for their electricity appropriately based on costs. The cost of electricity distribution is primarily a fixed cost in the infrastructure and its upkeep. The variable cost of generating the electricity is small in comparison. People, however, are generally billed more in variable cost based on use of electricity rather than with a larger, fixed fee. It’s set up in this way because it makes sense; the poor can afford connecting themselves to the grid and keep the necessities powered, while reckless use of energy i.e. having AC on 24/7 is disincentivized by the cost.

But once people start pushing rooftop solar on their grid and selling the energy back to the grid at the retail price, not the wholesale price, they are being massively subsidized in their electricity generation, as part of the fixed cost of operating the grid was baked into the variable cost of electricity prices. The pushback from utilities comes from exactly this perspective; if more and more people start net-metering their own bills lower with the rooftop solar, then it means that fewer and fewer people will be responsible for appropriately funding the grid.

In an extreme scenario where everyone net-metered their bills down to zero, it would mean that nobody would be paying for the grid. Obviously, such a situation is unsustainable. And even though there’d be plenty of solar to go by in such a situation, the grid would still be a necessity, as is all the generation which functions as a back-up. And somehow, it would all still need to be paid for.

But there’s more to it, too. Net-metering creates a reverse-incentive. Electricity prices in the wholesale market can even go negative if there is overgeneration, because overgeneration is harmful, and it needs to be dealt with. If net-metering practices are in place, and people start doing more and more rooftop solar to the point of more and more frequent overgeneration, the costs of operating the grid go up. Consequently, so would price of electricity. With a net-metering scheme still in place, everyone else is further incentivized to build solar panels on their roof and do the same to avoid paying the high prices.

If the compensation for the electricity fed back into the grid was based on wholesale price instead, then, once average price (and value) of solar-generated electricity goes down, so do the incentives to build more solar panels.

Adding insult to injury, the back-up issue is generally solved by using gas-fired power generation, as batteries cannot address the issue at this scale. Batteries are useful for bridging the gaps in between switching power generation sources, but the kind of quantity of capacity you’d need for a battery-only backup solution is not feasible.

For back-up, gas is the primary back-up solution in California as well as in Australia, and the Russians are building a pipe to supply Germany. Ironically this makes solar generation - when the whole power generation solution is inspected at the grid-level - not all that green. And while this aspect of solar is ignored by subsidies, a carbon tax would still take it into account.

The point being, subsidies can not only be ineffective, they can also be counterproductive in addition to ignoring all the alternatives.

> I, too, believe that taxing actual atmospheric carbon impact would be great, but how would you measure such a thing fairly?

You can measure emissions at sources and impose heavy fines on anyone who tries to circumvent them. The common problem in globalization, though, is defining and applying these standards universally and fairly. If you can’t trust the Germans to not fumble their numbers, what you’d think would happen in some other countries? Still, with a coordinated effort and systems to ensure transparency, it would be possible.

Another method would be to subsidize more effective alternatives or for the government to build the more effective solutions by themselves. While this wouldn’t have the direction-changing impact of the carbon tax, it would be more straightforward to implement without the requirement of tracking pollution. Targets of subsidies could be selected by their impact on emissions per $ invested. Of course, the numbers could be fumbled here as well, but at least the calculations could be made public and be subject to scrutiny.

I can drive to work in 15 minutes. The bus takes over an hour including 30 minutes of walking. There are no bike lanes between home and work, its possible to bike it but really not safe - I'd guess the bike would take about 40 minutes.

I had a colleague who had to travel frequently between Stanford and Berkeley (slightly unusual); it’s a sub-hour drive, but easily takes ~3 hours or more via public transit.

P.S. At least the Valley is fairly bike-friendly by U.S. standard.

Your analogy is more appropriate for space tourism.

Adopt the existing, proven and cost-effective implementation of PV (~3’ x ~5’ aluminum framed panels).

Waiting on Elon to figure out boutique solar so the affluent can all install it first and drive mass adoption (decade?) stalls PV development as much as the US tariff on Chinese-made solar!

This didn't happen because the numbers added up. The government mandated it for political reasons and all parties had to go along.

Though the NHTSA thing you're citing is specifically what the NHTSA told Tesla they weren't allowed to claim.