So let's take a look at some of these roofs well as messily. What we're really looking for here is how do we have a solar roof that is better than a normal roof that looks better, lasts longer, has better insulation sighting effect, and where the cost of roof plus electricity is less than that of a normal roof? So yesterday, Elon Musk announced Solar Roofs. It's a new initiative with his other company Solar City where they produce these solar roof tiles to replace regular solar panels on your roof. and look at it.

It's fantastic I want it on my house. It looks absolutely brilliant. They're also called I'm Solar Shingles as well, but Tesla's going for the solar roof name and I'll let Ilan explain how this ties together with the power wall to which they also announced which I'm very seriously considering it in new power war to double the capacity for the same price. Anyway, that was great, which was the same announcement as this.

anyway. I'll let Ilan explain how that ties in with the power wall and the Tesla car. This is sort of the integrated future. You've got a electric car, a power wall, and solar, and a solar roof.

and the key is that it needs to be beautiful, affordable, and seamlessly integrated. And then if all those things are are true, why would you go any other direction? And certainly why would you go in any other direction. If Tesla has perfected these solar roof tiles instead of when you build a new house or you're renovating your house and you want a new roof, why put regular roof tiles on there terracotta or concrete or whatever when you can replace them with glass solar panels like this, in this case, take a look at the four different types they got. They actually look really fantastic.

Tuscan Glass Slate glass which is absolutely brilliant. textured glass tiles and smooth glass tiles. And they've really gone to town with the engineering on these things. - I'll let Ellen explained once again, this is fantastic.

All right. So that Batter House is also solar and that's a sort of a style above a French slate. which is one of the hardest things to to do is it's considered one of the best roofs you can possibly do as a conventional roof. So said well, if can we make a french slate roof that's so low that looks as good or better than a conventional French slate roof and we're able to do that as well.

That's done with hydrographic printing so each tile is unique so that it's the production process itself makes each tile especially unique is sort of special snowflake tile. But the nice thing is like no two roofs will be the same. So what the French sled hydrographic looks like and see that and here you can really see as the angle changes that you can see the solar cells. Here we put a film with micro louvers on it so that as as the angle changes it goes from transparent to opaque from the sun's vantage point which tends to be high angle, you can see that the sole of the solar cells, but as you change the angle to a shallow angle, it reverts to a sort of a RG color.

So we're just as a demonstration. Video show you what happens if you drop a drop, a big weight on a conventional roof tile and one of our glass tiles. So it looks like Teszler totally nailed the engineering behind solar roof tiles or solar shingles. and well, you'd expect that from Tesla.

They got some of the best engineering in the business, but is it all that it's cracked up to be? Well, let's take a bit more critical look at it. now. The first thing to realize is that there's nothing new here at all. You've been able to buy solar roof tiles for more than a decade now.

They call it solar shingles usually, but this is basically exactly the same thing that's been available for a long time and it hasn't taken off. In fact, there's been quite a few casualties in this market. Erequest off has done an excellent article here which I'll link in down below showcasing the companies in the Solar Shingles Solar Rooftop Market that have actually gone bust and it's the likes of Dow Chemical BP as well and a whole bunch of companies that just have not made it. And yes, there are a few that are still.

we're going in this market. you can actually still buy it, but this has been going on for a decade and hasn't been successful. so Tesla already have an uphill battle. There's a reason these companies haven't cracked the market, and it's not just pure engineering now.

First of all, we'll just take a look at the efficiency here and some power manufacture of high efficiency solar panels. They've just looked at the data between two of the competition or previous competition are dow and certainteed solar shingles, and it's anywhere from 60% to 70% in that order of the capacity of regular rooftop solar panels. And I really expect the Tesla ones to be any different. Really, it's going to be the same order and there's going to be a couple of reasons for the reduced efficiency.

One is that they've got to manufacture them differently because looks are important so they've got to install that film in there so that you can't see them from an angle so there's going to be some loss in that there just has to be. and also for the fact that they can't utilize the same larger square area that's one of the main driving factors and that's per square meter area so you need a greater rooftop hour space to get the same capacity compared to regular rooftop solar. But I Know this is not really a big deal, but I Just wanted to point it out because hey, you installing them on the whole roof, they'll compensate for that, the area would have been wasted anyway, etc. etc.

All those arguments and it should be noted here that Tesla have released absolutely no technical details of this solar roof at all over the power output. Whether or not the these test homes up those showing off were actually real and generating power, how they're interconnected which is a whole big can of worms. Basically all we got at the moment is pure marketing height. Global warming is becoming a serious a serious crisis and we need to do something about that.

So Elon actually opened his talk talking about Co2 levels and how we have to do something about it and that's fantastic. I Love it, you know, hats off that he's actually taking a holistic system approach to this thing with not only a solar panel production, but the electric cars and the energy storage. It's absolutely brilliant. So if you're trying to save the planet then I think it's important that we actually manufacture the most efficient systems possible.

the most bang per buck, the least polluting all that sort of stuff. So let's see if we can maybe find some numbers on how much energy is required input energy, manufacturing energy required to manufacture these solar rooftop tiles compared with regular solar panels and regular roofs. So as it turns out, I was able to find some data for up manufacturing. Regular ruse be at the concrete one or the terracotta roof tiles or sheet metal.

And let's take it a figure of around 250 mega joules per square meter. But this includes both the frame and the wooden frame and the plasterboard roof itself. So I found a figure for the embodied energy in plaster board. That's the energy it takes to basically manufacture the plaster board at about 6 mega joules per kilogram.

and I also found a figure how for one square meter is about 10 kilograms of plaster board. So that's 60 mega joules per square meter. So let's subtract that roughly from the 250 we got Before let's near even an out. Call it 200 mega joules per kilogram for a regular roof.

Now if we compare that to a toughened glass. service, toughened glass takes a lot more energy than regular glass. and I found a figure here at Fifteen point: nine mega joules per kilogram. I Found several other sources that seem to confirm around about that figure.

and if we do a calculation of how much glass per square meter, it's about 25 kilograms. Multiplied those, we're talking about 675 mega joules per square meter for 10 millimeter thick toughened glass. I'm not sure how thick the Tesla one is, but if it's not ten millimeters on my monkey's uncle. So if we compare the two roof technologies, the new Solar Roof tile toughened glass versus your normal sort of you know, terracotta roof tile, clay roof tile.

Um, it's about three times The energy to manufacture that that doesn't include the solar cells and I'm going to leave those out because the solar cells can be included on regular Uzl and they can be included in the solar roof tile as well, but just the roof material itself switching from clay to the toughened glass probably about three times. I mean I Know these figures are all depends where you get the energy from and all that. It's a complex calculation and you know whether you used you know coal-fired energy to do it or you use solar power to power your plant and it's and or the trucks and the mining. and it's a complicated thing.

but these figures are kind of. you know, ones that I found in the industry. so it's about three times more energy to manufacture these glass ones. And if you're interested in Ergy it takes to manufacture just the solar panels solar cells themselves where we can get data on that - just for fun.

Well, the US Department of Energy have done a paper on this and they reference a another paper here which is the Owl simmer and that's the name of the person who did the paper estimated it takes 120 kilowatt hours per square meter to make a frameless PV module. But as I said before, that's just pretty academic because there's let's just say that the solar cell our inclusion cost is the same for whether or not it's a rooftop, a traditional installed rooftop module system, or whether or not the solar cells are embedded inside these tiles doesn't really make a difference here. where it's more of the difference between the energy to manufacture the glass toughened glass versus the clay type tiles. I mean the key is really to make to make solar something desirable Where if you install a solar roof on your house I mean you're really proud of it.

You want you want to put it on the most prominent part of the house? You want to call your neighbors over and say check up, check out the suite roof and of course that's great And I agree that this is what people are gonna want. They want a good-looking roof. I mean Tesla make sexy products you know you want to look at my Tesla solar roof. Isn't it fantastic? So you're not just going to do the optimal parts of this thing.

you're going to cover your entire house. So naturally they've thought of this and although it really wasn't in his presentation because that was pitched it, you know, investors and the general public and things like that. No real nitty-gritty technical detail. If you have a look at their our press kit on their website, they of course have to manufacture two different types of panel here, both ones with the solar cell embedded for when you want to generate power and the ones that don't because they're used in shaded areas not optimal areas or whatever and the user cannot pick and choose which tiles they want.

In fact, every person who has a system like this installed the user wouldn't choose. Really? You know you'd have some assessment done on your house and aren't telling you where you can install your various tasks. so they all should look at least the same up from the ground level anyway. so it seems as though they sold that problem rather nicely.

Every like you just install all exactly the same panels all over your house, but you choose so on on Solar Great. And if you have a look at one of the tiles here, you can see our Ilan's fingers actually through. So it is that semi-transparent art glass like that. which of course, so he mentioned in the presentation that they could potentially be a better thermal insulators than previous ones.

But hey, is it going to let the light through heat up your roof? How do you cool your roof down to you? Are you allowed able to use existing, not worldly birds? for example. Those are little you know, heat-driven turbines that extract heat from the roof. How you're going to get that out? Can you use existing technologies To you know, cut into these things and and shape them and things like that when you're install it. So there's all sorts of installation issues and what happens when these things get hot? is it in, you know, is that going to kill the efficiency like it does with the regular panels? Because regular solar modules at least have the advantage of being lifted off the roof so they actually have some airflow underneath to help cool them down.

But the things are your roof. so it's a bit of a different ballgame there and you know there's absolutely don't have any numbers on this at all. So it's like yeah, you know, kind of like trust us we'll you know we've got the solution. But yeah, I think they might come a guts or in some areas when they actually start to you know, must use these things.

There's a lot of subtle details goes into roof manufacturing and keeping ruse cool and stuff like that. So yeah, it's just a huge unknown. and the other major issue is how do you install and interconnect these things as a large array? You could have a thousand of these things on your roof you can see here if we actually zoom into II Lanza Video Here you can see like two little I in interconnecting conductive tabs on there which look like it's there. Just the terminals for the solar panel.

and sure enough, our solar shingles are being traditionally installed in a similar way. They put them in a series. are configuration like this now I Know there's nothing new here. They've been doing this solar shingle in for you know, a decade now and Tesla Engineering is top notch.

I'm sure they're sorting this out. so just as a wild guess, they might have some sort of a series configuration like this. And once again, for our shaded stuff, you would have our diode protection in there as well. so they have to sort of like clip together somehow.

like this, you can't have like wiring between individual ones and be so messy so. but this is a lot of tiles. A lot of implementation inside a regular solar panel. these are just connected with.

You know, silver are wires. You know. They're super reliable, super efficient. So they've got quite a little uphill battle there in terms of our proving the reliability and longevity of this sort of a system.

And there's about a four to five million new roofs in the US over here. and I think 20 times that number worldwide. So you can imagine over time as people replace their roofs with solar roofs that the whole neighborhood would whatever everyone would have solar like, why wouldn't why went to you over time. Every every house would would become a solar house.

And yes, I agree. every house will become a solar house. and I want every house to become a solar house. My house is a solar house, but I Just wanted to point out one.

Hey, it's not a new idea. Many companies have tried this and failed and it really hasn't caught on. There are very good reasons for that. Whether Tesla can make a difference here, it remains to be seen.

they're less efficient per square meter than regular modules. They likely require more energy to produce, so they're not as sustainable. If you do, you know you're 5 million, 50 million roof tops. They require more complicated installation.

They may not be as reliable that we need to like. Dial down the hype here on these solar roofs. They're not the universal you know magic bullet that I think in the Tesla are hoping it will be especially to the shareholders and investors and everything else. But if anyone can make our solar roofs work, it's probably Tesla because hey, they've got Elon Musk They've got the brand, They've got the Tesla mystique behind it, They've got the systems integration, They've got the sexiness, the whole works, and it looks like they're engineering on these tiles is actually really well thought through.

And the classic argument will of course be that who cares if these things are less efficient? Who cares if they require more energy to produce? Who cares if they're more complicated installation or you know, whatever issues like that? Certainly it's about the mass market appeal and getting people interested in solar and excited about having a solar roof rather than just, oh, let's put solar panels on our roof. Look at this sexy new Tesla's solar roof system. I can integrate off my power wall in my Tesla car and everything else And granted, okay, that's fine it's going to get. Hopefully you know a fair few people are excited about it and the engineering side of me just can't help but think we need to use solar panels in the most efficient way possible with the least amount of manufacturing input, etc etc.

So I hope the numbers come through on this. I Still think existing roofing technology is going to be less energy intensive than these things, so the verdict is certainly well Trulli still out on these things and I just hope everyone dials back the hype just a little bit on this because well, yeah, let's just wait and see. But implementing this on a mass scale if it uses more energy and has more issues further down the track and reliability, sorts of things. Well that can turn into a big deal.

So hey good on Elan for doing this I Think it's fantastic. It looks like as far as solar tiles go, they have implemented this really well. I am quite impressed. But anyway I hope you enjoyed that, found it useful and if you want to comment Eevblog down below or youtube comments or whatever, go for it.

Catch you next time! Hi back in 2013 June to be precise I Had this solar array installed three kilowatt a solar power system on my home roof here. so a lot of people have been asking can I get the data from this and see how its are performed over that time and comment on that? So yeah, let's do it. Let's take a look at some of the figures I've gotten out of this thing because I have been logging all the data that comes out of.