Is there any competitor in the USA? The idea of roof tiles which are themselves solar panels seems sensible to me, and it's more aesthetically pleasing than putting panels on top of normal tiles.
460W panels can be something like $0.25 USD per STC watt in single pallet quantities shipped as LTL freight.
Or at least if you have to use your roof, just put them on boring aluminum rail mounts on roofs which are a much more known factor for roofing repair and labor.
Assuming you're in the US 48 states there should be plenty of companies that'll take your money for a factory sealed pallet load of panels. They come wrapped up from the factory, basically all they do is do the invoicing/billing to you, they buy them by the 40' or 45' container load and then load them onto trucks at a loading dock.
PV panel factory datasheets will clearly specify how many are on a pallet and how many pallets fit in a single container.
I am curious what the installation process is like. It seems like all the home solar companies I've dealt with want to sell you the whole kit (panels, inverter, etc.). If you've done this, I am curious how your experience was.
There is considerable overlap between the knowledge base for -48VDC telecom battery/DC bus/breaker/fuse panel and distribution systems and PV/off grid solar stuff, so using some of the same people who do on-grid rectifier-to-telecom-DC-power-system work was fairly straightforward for us.
in the marine/rv world there are like walkable solar panels that you can literally just like walk on now, theres solar awnings, i dunno. just in my limited experience i'd be surprised if they dont have the christmas light problem (one goes out many go out) and solar arrays just seem to do awesome in panel configurations and i think in the consumer world theyre reaching 25% conversion, no idea what tesla is marketing but those guys are dorks with marketing anyways
The closest I know of is https://www.gaf.com/en-us/roofing-materials/residential-roof...
The advantage is that you don't have to drill additional holes into your roof, nor do you have to have shingles under the solar panels.
Depending on where you live and how much you pay in taxes, they may be enticing.
They also appear to have been _extremely_ expensive. Like on the order of 10x the cost of a conventional solar installation.
Conventional solar panels look perfectly fine to me, FWIW.
Their solar shingles looks like regular shingles and install on the roof the same way as regular shingles. Installers just need to be regular roofers with some extra training to handle the peculiarities of solar shingles. I don't know about GAF but the extra training for CertainTeed can be done online.
Compare to Tesla Solar Roof where the physical installation requires completely different skills. As a result there are way more crews available who can install GAF or CertainTeed solar shingles than Tesla roofs.
The Tesla roof tiles are more efficient than the solar shingles and they cover the whole roof, whereas the solar shingles usually don't cover the whole roof, so the Tesla roof usually generates more power.
GAF is 140 years old and CertainTeed is 122 years old, and making building materials is their main business. This makes them a lot less risky than Tesla was. If they ever decide to stop doing solar shingles it is almost certain they will handle it better than Tesla since their core business depends on keeping roofing contractors happy. They will almost certainly keep repair parts available, crews will remain available for maintenance.
Even if decades from now replacement solar shingles are not available any dead solar shingle can be replaced with a regular shingle and an electrician can adjust the system accordingly. When the roof reaches end of life and needs to be replaced, you just need an electrician to de-energize the roof and then removing it is just like removing a regular roof.
The Tesla roof on the other hand requires a special crew, both for repairs and replacement. Removing the roof is a much more involved process than removing a solar shingles roof.
This is likely going to screw existing Tesla roof owners. With Tesla actively in the business it was seen as a premium feature, bumping the market value of your house by maybe 5 or so percent.
Now buyers will see a house with one as a potential maintenance liability that will be a nightmare when it reaches EOL. Sellers may have to offer a substantial discount to sell their houses.
It comes down to GAF and CertainTeed treat it as a roof first which has solar technology, whereas with Tesla is more solar technology that is a roof.
I mean vs. a dozen or twenty large, conventional panels.
Maybe we need to adjust our aesthetics before we compromise the engineering overly much.
I think it turns out it was announced too early and attempted to scale before it was ready (turns out it won't be ready at all in this iteration).
That isn't necessarily a downside though. By having panels on a variety of orientations on your roof, you can spread out the generation through the day and mitigate a bit of the duck curve.
https://www.prefa.at/produkt-katalog/solarsysteme/solardachp...
(Yeah, I kind of envy the "A-Frame" that I <rarely> spot in the wild here—so simple). I didn't know the manifold roof was an American thing.
tl;dr - It's driven by internal room shape requirements (plus weak planning; in some jurisdictions "no, that's an eyesore mess, redesign it" it a thing in planning, but I gather largely not in most US juristicitions).