This looks slick, but there's actually a reason that rooftop solar panels are installed with a gap between the panels and the roof. Panel power output drops noticeably on hot days as panel temperature rises. The air gap creates a siphon effect, pulling air past the panels and cooling them.
I seriously doubt that they've spent 10 years in the industry and would read this comment and go "Wait, what?? Oh shit! We fucked up! Turns out nobody working here had any relevant expertise at all, and we were just guessing how this worked and how to design it! If only we'd talked to anyone who knew had even basic knowledge about solar panels before creating a factory to produce them!"
A more valid wording for this comment would be "I wonder how they altered the design to accommodate for the siphon effect the gap generated," instead of implying they have no idea what they're doing.
> A more valid wording for this comment would be "I wonder how they altered the design to accommodate for the siphon effect the gap generated," instead of implying they have no idea what they're doing.
If you want a rewording that's closer to my original meaning, it'd be more like "I bet these were made with a cold climate, like that in the northern USA, in mind. They'd lose 10-20% efficiency in summer where I live."
Edit: Although that may not be a terrible thing, if they're overprovisioned compared with the inverter's maximum output so as to keep the inverter at full power for a larger proportion of the time. Depending on climate, you could probably balance out losses due to summer heat with losses due to reduced winter daylight, at least to a degree, giving more reliable year-round power.
At the end of the day - does it matter? People expect X output at $X price. If this meets that desire, they're fine. A lot of people would probably be just fine losing
some power on hot days to not have something ugly on the roof of their house. For some things aesthetics DO matter - the roof of a house is one of them for most people. Cars tend to be another one as Elon is well aware of.
But stuff like this happens all the time. Especially when designers have more say than engineers. Just look at the previous iPhone antenna issues or the samsung batteries.
It just blows my mind that someone can create a successful space program from scratch and still people think "but he'll probably get tripped up by this tiny thing that even I noticed! Just waiting for company to go belly up."
> It just blows my mind that someone can create a successful space program from scratch and still people think "but he'll probably get tripped up by this tiny thing that even I noticed! Just waiting for company to go belly up."
(a) Elon isn't all of SpaceX, there is a whole managerial and engineering infrastructure there, which is primarily motivated by scientific, not aesthetic, needs. So, they choose the best design based on their calculations.
These solar panels are clearly designed for looks, an important business consideration, so the idea that they may have knowingly traded off on the engineering/science side is a real possibility. That is a real decision people can make and none of the parents claimed the company was doomed. It may even be a decision that makes business sense and results in more sales. Many decisions about how houses are built are based on aesthetics and not engineering concerns, which is why they don't look like warehouses.
(b) even in engineering-based organizations, misaligned incentives can silence science-based concerns. NASA, an organization that also successfully created a space program and had some of the best engineers in the world, ignored repeated warnings from an engineer about a tiny thing that would have prevented the Challenger disaster.
You may also recall that Tesla had immense problems making car door handles that actually work reliably (and the same with the doors themselves), largely because they prioritized fancy aesthetics over sound engineering. If they've taken the same approach with their solar panels, this would be completely unsuprising.
They prioritized fancy aesthetics over simplicity, not over sound engineering. Unless you believe sound engineering is just never doing hard things.
The doors were new, they were complicated, they took time. I don't think they revealed any fundamental engineering weaknesses of the company, just a reminder that anything new is hard.
Your choice of analogy is revealing: these were problems at Ford, as near as I can tell. (The first sounds like the Pinto.) Show me Tesla-scale problems at BMW or Audi, and I might take Musk's hilarious claim that he'll bankrupt those companies a little more seriously.
You remind me of how Americans talk about how the US is the best country in the world, and then compare themselves to Nicuragua or Afghanistan or Somalia or thereabouts. Sure, you can beat the astonishingly dysfunctional, but how do you compare against your real peers?
(Disclaimer: Musk knows what he's doing in space, to say the least, even though his car company is astonishingly dysfunctional. I hope he has the sense to keep SpaceX and Tesla independent!)
Without agreeing or not with your overall statement, I want to point out that this new type of panels have not been invented by Musk nor by his companies. It was invented by another company, that they then acquired.
If a space program that has been operating for 60+ years can trip up seemingly inane details, I gather Space X may be at risk of over-looking pertinent details, from time to time.
Bear in mind that "rocket science" is proverbial for a reason. Are you familiar with the THAAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_High_Altitude_Area_De...)? What convinced me that it wasn't just corporate welfare was the part where one of the tests failed because the target rocket exploded in flight, so the THAAD rocket couldn't even be launched.
In general, SpaceX seems to be much more competent and much better-run than Tesla. My guess from thousands of miles away is that Musk is just temperamentally better suited to space than to cars. Space exploration is in its infancy, still a bleeding-edge field where every product is more or less a one-off, while car manufacturing is mostly about logistics, quality control, and the effective management of routine in general. I get the impression that SpaceX is the most efficient of all companies and agencies involved in space, even though Tesla is a strikingly inept car manufacturer; I just hope Tesla doesn't drag SpaceX down with it into bankruptcy...
Tesla presented the best in class Powerwall for an unbelievable cheap price. Everybody said at that time: impossible. Elon said: "We have this number of orders." Actually, you never heard of any significant deliveries. Instead: "We have this new Powerwall 2". Already, the first version of Powerwall 2 is already dropped before deliveries happened. There is only marketing of single prototype large scale installations.
The same with the solar shingle. Everybody tells: too expansive because of the expansive installation requirements because of the connectors. A (few) single panels are easier to install. But still Elon claimed the solar shingle will be cheaper than regular before energy payback.
This Tesla press release at the time of the Powerwall 2 says quite clearly that 300 MWh of the first version had been deployed, or 46,000 units of the first Powerwall.
Are you accusing the company of lying? Do you have any source to your accusations here? Kind of seems like you're making some claims to fit your pre-existing agenda without researching it at all.
— According to your PR Tesla installed until October 2016 300 MW.
(38,000 + 25,000) by 7kW = 441MW (I know a rough calculation)
That means, the pre-orders where received in 1 week. All the pre-orders fulfilled means, they never sold anything in addition to those first movers _AND_ they did not sold/installed any Powerpack.
But as they installed also some large scale Powerpacks, that means they did not even fulfilled their pre-orders (or a significant amount got cancelled) _and_ they did not sold any Powerwall besides the pre-orders.
Just a nice reminder, do your own research and double check numbers. Don't believe in PR only.
> Actually, you never heard of any significant deliveries.
> There is only marketing of single prototype large scale installations.
Really? Whoops:
November 2016: "Last month, Tesla confirmed that it delivered 300 MWh of batteries since launching Tesla Energy in May 2015. In the past 2 months alone, over 100 MWh of new Powerpack projects have been announced."
And
"Only a few weeks after announcing one of the biggest energy storage projects ever, Tesla Energy won again a massive energy storage contract. The automaker’s energy division will supply ‘Powerpacks’ to its energy storage deployment partner, Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS), for a major new project: a 7 MW / 34 MWh network of battery systems to support water treatment facilities of Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD)."
"Tesla’s battery supply contract with Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) is quickly proving to be accelerating the deployment of energy storage capacity. After announcing a major 34 MWh contract to deploy Powerpacks at water treatment facilities in California last month, AMS confirmed today that it will install new Powerpacks at buildings owned by Invesco."
And of course the Australia deal that is likely to happen
And
"Previous projects include a 12 MWh with Cal State University, another one for several office buildings in Irvine, and more recently, a 1 MW Powerpack system inside Morgan Stanley’s San Francisco skyscraper."
It's pretty obvious they're scaling the business extremely quickly compared to the history of how extraordinarily slow energy storage technology has moved.
"Panasonic's existing panels have low temperature coefficient, so their performance doesn't drop off as much with heat. If they also add in Tesla's Silevo technology which has even lower temperature coefficient, most of the hit for thermals would be negated as compared to standard panels."
I'm sure this is throughly tested, in any case. Panels like these have been in use for a while in Japan.
I've seen panels very much like these in Japan. They've been around for a couple of years. It may very well be the ones from Panasonic, but a quick glance at the Panasonic Japanese web page is inconclusive.
But in any case, the concept is already tested in the field. And in case you are wondering, it get's very hot where I live in the summer (40C is not unheard of). It would be interesting to see what they are doing to ensure airflow.
So basically, Musk-oil infused off the shelf products? This could be the "rounded corners" of energy, cue the Samsung jokes.
There have been different levels of awareness for the visual quality of photovoltaic installations before, this one does not strike me as a particularly large jump. Maybe the baseline standard in the US is particularly low so this is relevant? Or do these aesthetics skirt a common HOA threshold?
But in the end it does not matter much. Even if it's all just hype, if the hype leads to installations that would not have happened otherwise it must be a net positive.
Power output drops even more when a hurricane catches that gap and rips the panel off the roof, probably taking a chunk of the roof or at least leaving bolt holes.
Power output never happens if the panels are never installed, perhaps due to any ugly gap.
Really the panels need to be the roofing material. This doesn't mean they need to look like traditional roofing. They just need to span the entire roof, edge to edge without gaps.
Solar power is catching on. Along with it, other things are changing. Selling back to grid only gets you credit towards your power bill which you need to use up in 6-12 months or you lose it (someone who recently got solar told me this is how it works for him).
I would like to see ways for customers to sell power among themselves (if possible) in this case. If I generate some extra power and someone needs it to charge their car, i'd rather sell it to him. Instead of the shady power company. But maybe it doesn't work like this.
Ignoring the time limit you mention, I fail to see the difference? Electricity isn't tangible. In the case of AC, they're just wiggling the electrons in your appliances back and forth. Any promise that your power goes to your neighbour, via the grid, would be a lie.
In financial terms, letting anyone sell electricity to the "shady power company" at the same price they buy it at is only possible as a government-mandated subsidy paid by all customers, intended to promote clean energy. It effectively makes the grid your free, unlimited, zero-loss battery.
If you want to sell it to your neighbour at the same price they and you pay to have the grid wiggle your electrons, there's no difference. If you want, for unfathomable reason, to set a different price, you can just walk over and hand them some money whenever you feel like it. But currently, there are no circumstances under which it would make sense to not sell as much as you can to the power company: if you're producing at costs above grid prices (still likely in most locations), your neighbour could always get his power cheaper from the grid. If you're producing below grid prices, selling as much as possible at the subsidised rates is your best choice.
"they're just wiggling the electrons in your appliances back and forth"
Sorry for highjacking your comment, but are there any physicists here who can comment on whether this is accurate? More in particular, does electricity have mass? Is 'current' electrons moving across a wire, or wiggling without 'moving'?
I've asked this years ago on the physics stack exchange, but I never got an answer I actually understood. The context for my question was a legal paper I was reading whose core argument relied on 'current' having mass, or rather, the consumption of electrical energy requiring the transfer of mass, however small. Note that there is an important precedent in my jurisdiction (the Netherlands) that sort of assumed this back in the 1930's, but in this particular argument (on ownership of virtual goods, like a sword in World of Warcraft), the issue of the mass was even more pertinent.
(note that I'm not interested in debating whether that matters re: ownerships of virtual goods; in my legal context it does. And yes I have a law degree. I'm just putting this in because I've asked several times in several places over the years, and there are always people who like to go 'XY problem!' and then make ridiculously wrong pseudo-legal arguments.)
The comment is accurate, and electricity should not be considered as having mass.
In a direct current (DC) setup, electrons will be moving continuously though the wires in a big loop. But the displacement of the electrons is not the electrical energy we are interested in.
It is instructive to think about alternating current (AC). In this case, electrons will be moving a bit forward, and then a bit back. So, basically wiggling more or less in place. There is still a lot of energy transferred.
A metaphor is a chain, like in a bicycle. You can use the chain to transfer energy, but it is not the chain links that are the energy. The movement is the energy. This is similar to electricity; it is not the electrons that move that is the electrical energy, instead the electrical energy is the movement itself.
(Due to Einstein's theory of relativity, we know that E=mc^2, which can be summarized as "all forms of energy are also mass". Considering this, all transfer of energy is transfer of mass. But it is miniscule. A small nuclear power plant could produce 4450 GWh in one year. The relativistic mass of this is 180g. All the energy produced in one full year of this plant has a total mass of 180g. So you should not consider electricity to be transfer of mass, even though it technically is :P )
(Also, since you asked for a physicist: I am not a physicist)
The "big loop" concept is fundamental: the power lines we use to move energy around are all closed loops, so, even with DC, the mass of electrons that flow in one direction is the same as the mass that flows in the opposite direction. There is no transfer of mass.
No worries, I'm using a loose definition of 'physicist' - anyone knowing about physics is fine :)
Thanks for your contribution; as I mentioned below, I've gotten some different answers, e.g. on http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2188/does-electri... where I asked the first time. Essentially, are you saying that with DC current, there is transfer of 'mass', but with AC, there isn't? In the case such as I've explained it elsewhere in this thread, this might mean that it matters how a computer is build to decide on whether the virtual sword can be stolen or not... (maybe, I haven't really looked hard at it in a few years, so I'm probably forgetting some details of it).
[Similar disclaimers about not being a physicist go here]
Something that's going to be a bit tricky here is that electrons are really, really slow when we're talking about electricity through a wire. The electrons will bounce around very quickly at random, but the average flow caused by a current is slow. Really, really slow.
> Therefore in this wire the electrons are flowing at the rate of −0.000023 m/s. At 60 Hz alternating current, this means that within half a cycle the electrons drift less than 0.2 μm. In other words, electrons flowing across the contact point in a switch will never actually leave the switch.
That kind of speed means that any messages sent over a copper wire are not going to be sending electrons all the way for that message. The electrons that 'carry' the message "I AM A VIRTUAL SWORD" will not go from my machine to yours as a rushing block. Instead all I'll be doing is tapping the end of a very long pole connecting our two properties, so you can read the message by the patterns of the end of the pole in your house moving ever-so-slightly.
So, I guess I am transferring mass, but nothing that comes from me goes to you.
This also assumes a very particular direction. There's nothing, as far as I'd understand, that requires me to be pushing electrons at you. I could be pulling on the pole slightly rather than pushing.
I'd love any corrections or additions to this, purely my lay understanding of the topic.
Even ignoring the speed of the electrons, this ignores that several steps of that route will almost certainly be done over fibre anyway, and at that point there is clearly no transfer or electrons from the "seller" to the "buyer". Although I have no idea whether or not this is relevant to the legal question at hand…
Water is another good analogy. When you turn on a tap/faucet, the water that comes out is the water that was just sitting there in that last few inches of pipe, it didn't come all the way from the city's dam in that time.
Also with waves in water; put a ball floating at the beach and it'll mostly stay put bobbing up and down. (It's only when the waves actually break that there is substantial movement of actual "bits" of water.)
Ah, I apologize, but I have to join the unhelpful choir ;)
It seems to me that the question of whether or not electricity has mass is a proxy for whether or not information is tangible. This is the same interpretation that "Greg Graviton" at stackexchange has. And it is hard to meaningfully answer by yes or no; information needs material in order to exist, but by itself it is not tangible. Both yes and no are misleading.
My advice, which is completely ignorant of how law is practiced, is to find another way to settle the original question of whether or not the coerced obtaining of the virtual sword could be named "stealing". When taking intuitive notions such as "is this a _thing_ or not?" to the fundamental levels, the questions often stop making sense, as it has in this case, because the intuition is dependent on another level of abstraction. At this point it is no longer constructive to attempt obtaining answers to the questions as posed, and maybe this is why you have struggled to find a good answer. That's probably not helpful to you, but it is my best attempt at resolving this question :)
(About DC: It is more accurate to say that there is an exchange of mass. The same count of electrons go down the wire as up the other wire. There is no net transfer of mass. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087221 )
This question, or variants of it, comes up on electronics.stackexchange a LOT. It's rather hard to explain in a compact way. You can either start with metaphors (which collapse under examination) or the maths (which most readers find impenetrable).
Current is measured in amperes, which have two definitions:
"a unit of electric current equal to a flow of one coulomb per second"
"that constant current which, if maintained in two straight parallel conductors of infinite length, of negligible circular cross section, and placed 1 meter apart in vacuum, would produce between these conductors a force equal to 2 x 10-7 newton per meter of length"
Right away one of those definitions mentions charge (coulombs) and the other one doesn't. This is actually a better approach because while charge is usually carried by electrons, this is not always the case. Charge in semiconductors may be carried by "holes". Charge in batteries is carried by ions. Capacitors are usually considered to have a "displacement current" flow between the plates that has no carrier at all.
HOWEVER! For the purposes of the question here, we can skip all that and focus on the electrons in your appliances. Specifically, we can see that there's a complete loop between them and the substation/pole transformer feeding your house. You have no direct connection to the HV lines.
Perhaps you could say "the power company causes a magnetic force which moves the electrons in their transformer back and forth, which by electrostatics pushes the full loop of electrons in their and your wiring back and forth, which does useful work in your house".
> the consumption of electrical energy requiring the transfer of mass, however small
Does precedent talk about transferring mass of electrons? Otherwise the transferred energy also has mass, via mass-energy equivalence.
> but in this particular argument (on ownership of virtual goods, like a sword in World of Warcraft), the issue of the mass was even more pertinent.
This on the other hand is on a bit more tenuous grounds. In theory you don't actually have to move energy (and thus mass) around to move information if you use physically reversible operations. But all practical computers use irreversible operations, which means information is sent by expending some energy, this is obvious in sending photons down a fiber or radio waves being able to power a lightbulb.
I think a decent analogy is a pneumatic air power distribution system. Air particles move randomly in the pipe, but if the air is flowing, they tend to pass through the customer in a given direction and get work done. Alternating current is akin to switching the direction of air pressure twice a day, from (say) 1.5 atm to 0.5 atm.
Well, when I asked before, people said that hydraulic or pneumatic systems are not apt analogies; because there is water, oil or water actually flowing. Now it's not the water that is the energy, it's the movement thereof, or the pressure. That's where the analogy starts to break down.
For reference, the first time I asked was here: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/2188/does-electri... (7 years ago - time does fly). There is a bunch of discussion there (also going into at what point a water analogy breaks down), and I'm not sure they agree with each other. I mean, another way of looking at it: you can encode n bits by charging (or not charging) capacitors. Does a series of capacitors encoding '0' have a lower mass than a series encoding '255'?
So yeah I don't really understand, still not after all those years. It's probably (in part) because I have not formulated one single yes/no question that is unambiguous or does not need any interpretation to be answered. Or maybe I'm just stupid.
There is also electrons actually flowing. As far as movement of mass goes, the pneumatic system analogy is a good one. It is not a mathematically identical system.
Look, you can just look at how this stuff works. Electrons move randomly, and when there's a current they move on average in a certain direction because the electric field leans that way. That's it. See my link I pasted above, it describes what happens when a current is flowing.
A capacitor encoding '0' will have the same number of electrons as when it encodes '1' because that's the way capacitors work. You can read about it at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor
First, note that that wouldn't change with electricity being massless; the argument in the paper I mentioned would.
Turns out it was in 1921, but either way: there was a dentist who blocked his electricity meter by putting a pen in it (it was one of those that turned to take the measurement). The question was: did this qualify as 'theft', because, according to Dutch penal code, theft requires the 'appropriation of any good'. The argument was that electricity is not a 'good' (Dutch civil law has a particular concept of a 'good', and being physical is one of the criteria. Note also that I'm not writing a paper here, and that I'm using loose translations for terms that are well-known concepts, so I'm probably making several technical mistakes here). The Supreme Court however decided that electricity was still a 'good' because it represented economic value (that was one line of reasoning, they didn't actually say 'electricity has mass, hence it's physical, hence it's a good'). The paper I mentioned then concluded from this that the Supreme Court had decided that electricity has mass (because it was considered a 'good', and 'goods' need to be physical - which is why e.g. what we now call intellectual property is not a 'good'. This has far-reaching consequences.)
So the paper went on to qualify virtual swords as goods, and then proceeded from there. There are more criteria for being a 'good', like something has to be uniquely identifiable; so the author couldn't make a straight analogy to the electricity case to make his case for virtual swords being 'goods'; I don't recall the details exactly but in the end, his qualification of virtual swords as 'goods' came down to electricity having mass. He said, essentially, that the 'sword' is the movement of electrons through systems, and that therefore it could be qualified as 'theft'. There was a separate argument about intellectual property as well of course, I don't recall either, but there was a reason that wasn't material in the precise question being asked. The whole point was of looking at the case of some people (physically) forcing a boy to transfer his virtual sword to them in some online game, and whether that constituted 'theft' or 'robbery' (which requires some aspects of the 'theft' aspect).
(Edit: also, the paper was written by an engineer who also had a law degree (maybe this paper was part of his degree, I forgot.) This is not some case of 'haha idiot lawyer'.)
> In financial terms, it's extremely generous to let anyone sell electricity to the "shady power company" at the same price they buy it at.
In some countries, it's even a better deal, because the "shady power company" has to buy it for more than they sell electricity for. (I don't know if it's still true, but it was the case in France)
If the time limit is 6 months as he say and you have excess panels to cover average winter needs, summer surpluses are lost
More importantly it was left unspecified if the discount given was dollar for dollar electricity. If it's less than that suddenly your ideal, infinite battery becomes less than perfect
But I agree selling to the neighboor is not gonna work - a feasible alternative would be to have the resources pooled for building a larger panels with a larger battery
I think the previous commentator's point is that distributing power between neighbors is a theoretical way to avoid the time limit imposed by the power company. Of course, with current infrastructure I assume the power company would still need to support this model by doing some simple math with everyone's meters in a neighborhood or region.
A scheme used here in Australia is to sign up your PV+battery to a virtual power plant, then sell electricity on the wholesale market when it is profitable to do so.
Tesla will be doing the same with their vehicles and Solar City's tech team: distributed virtual generators and demand. ISO operators will be able to issue price signals, and Tesla will be able to supply to or draw power from the grid (in accordance with their customer's wishes of course) in aggregate
It's probably why Tesla wants to sell people the power wall despite its own shortcomings. Why give that power back to the grid operators who are going to screw you over? Just get a battery storage solution that also charges your car and maybe covers some of the power consumption in the home? I think in the long term this is the only viable option or until the grid operators and other concerns outlaw usage of battery tech that stores power in advance of daily usage.
Solar power is catching on but it does not work on all roofs in all locations and I am curious if companies pushing home roof top installations are upfront with their numbers.
I know our local energy co-op lets you "invest" into a facility they have constructed where they are adding panels as demand increases. The logic here is, not outlay of funds by the home owners, maintenance needs are consolidated to one location, and it can be ideally situated.
Until panel installs become near maintenance free and service technicians are common where inspections are fast and cheap its not going to solve our problems.
I am hoping TESLA's previous announcement related to solar shingles and such plays out well. It needs to become cheap enough that even if your system is not ideally situated its cheap enough to be economical.
I'm sure you could, but you'd have to lay your own cable to your neighbor. If you want the power company to transmit the power and handle load balancing, you will end up paying for it.
A Powerwall helps with being able to store charge for yourself.
It'd be awesome to share power directly with neighbors, too. You could always install your own cable, right? Doesn't seem like the power company would even need to be involved.
I suppose that it's a good idea to take precautions against accidentally running multiple AC devices in the same room that might be connected to very different branches of the AC distribution network. An AC connection is not the internet, where you can safely make any independent topology change as long as you set up the right routing metrics.
Yep, they're so strict that the National Broadband Network was worried that simply powering distribution point units for Fibre-to-the-Curb internet would break those rules.
Same in California. The rule is that the cabling can't cross a street. So actually you could provide power to neighbors within in the block but not the next one.
We're not even allowed to run cable between two adjacent properties owned by the same company. (A former employer of mine got around this with a "temporary" 3-phase cable going between the two, but it was regarded as a bit dubious.)
In many places the streets form a grid, it's true. You would possibly have only a dozen homes that could be connected. In other places, the streets are arranged as a tree with cul-de-sacs as the leaves. An island of acreage could emerge in such developments where you could visit dozens of homes without crossing a street.
It's funny how power companies quickly moved away from the pay you cash for your power to credits to now fixed rates for life. Solar is a huge disruptor.
There's an interesting project called Solar Coin[0] attempting to do this. I'm not too sure how it relates to crypto-currency, though.
[0] https://solarcoin.org/en/front-page/
2kW when the faucet is running, about zero when it isn't. With a duty cycle of 1% (= running hot water for 15 minutes a day), that desktop could beat your geyser, even when running at 10% throughout the day.
When autocorrect refuses to cooperate I find that spacing things out between normal words then deleting the spacers usually works. Correction usually only occurs after typing punctuation, not for deletion.
When I was a child this is how I thought solar panels would look in the future. These look much nicer, and I imagine will help win over those who are very concerned about curb appeal.
Amazing how much press Tesla gets for solar panels. How about JK Solar, Canadian solar, JA Solar.. these companies ship GWs of solar panels. Today. Meanwhile their stock is worth tiny multiples.
Not sure about the products/companies you're listing, but cult of personality must have a lot to do with the extra press. People will click on links to stories about Tesla/Elon/SolarCity without the journalists having to do as much.
This seems like the final nail in the coffin for SolarCity's in-house solar manufacturing technology from Silveo, which as I recall was meant to be part of the justification for Tesla buying them. The tiles were already announced to be using Panasonic solar cells, and with their non-tile solar product switching to Panasonic-made panels too...
With a relatively attractive panel like this one, what case remains for the solar roof product? Particularly considering the fact that there is a positive social signal associated with visible solar on your house? I'm not sure I understand the trade-offs between the two. Isn't this the superior product?
The full title reads "Tesla unveils its new ‘sleek and low-profile’ exclusive solar panel made by Panasonic". From the sources it references, it also appears that Panasonic is manufacturing Tesla's batteries.
Does anyone know how much of this is Tesla's technology, and how much Panasonic's? If it's mostly the latter, what would stop Panasonic from providing the same technology to other parties?
>If it's mostly the latter, what would stop Panasonic from providing the same technology to other parties?
There's a big benefit for Panasonic supplying a company with hot products, like Tesla. But outside of whatever contractual obligations they have, there's nothing stopping them.
I implore you to look around at these industries from other sources. If you only read HackerNews, you'd think Tesla is the only company that can make a decent EV (even though motortrend said the Bolt performed nearly as well, had longer range and was $30k cheaper than the Model 60), that no one is close with self-driving and that Tesla are the only one providing this type of solar panel or battery storage solution. These are all hyper competitive, low margin spaces.
Tesla is doing some very cool things, but the unjustified hype is going to blow up in people's faces. Expectations are too high.
I browsed Tesla's recent 10-K filings [1,2] in the meantime. The lithium-battery cells, at least, are purchased from Panasonic by Tesla, which (I assume) implies that it's Panasonic's technology to manufacture and sell.
The Gigafactory 1 appears to be some sort of joint venture which is bankrolled by Tesla, but operated by Panasonic, where the batteries are produced. The Gigafactory 2 is similar, but produces PV cells and modules.
I don't understand your recent comment strings - your comments in the John Deere thread yesterday were equally confrontational without anything to really back it up.
Confidence in Tesla is high because people like the brand. Panasonic similarly works hand in hand with Tesla because they're confident the value of the Tesla brand. People will read that motortrend comparison and still buy a Tesla - because the bolt is ugly and looks like your lyft drivers car, and because they want a Tesla.
The idea that Tesla has unjustified hype is not a novel position to take and I don't know why it would serve as a good position to snipe at Tesla when it hasn't worked at all in the past. (see recent short sellers woes)
According to what I've heard from public sources, the machines and tech are Panasonic, but the factory lay-out and product design is Tesla.
I think you can think of Tesla as "Standard Lithium" - like Standard Oil in the past, they built a giant refinery (The GigaFactory) to give economies of scale and built many channels of distribution to sell it all + compliments: cars, battery packs, solar, etc.
At some point, it might make sense for Tesla to acquire the solar and battery business of Panasonic (could be a public exchange offer so both could benefit from the operation). It probably depends on the interest of Tesla's competitors into Panasonic products.
The pictures look great, but black or slate roofs are not so common in the USA so I'm not so excited. If you want the nice look a black roof parts that aren't covered with panels will probably make the attic way too hot. With less airflow the panels must be less efficient too.
I preferred the Tesla Solar Roof Shingles they announced last year https://www.tesla.com/solarroof. I any case its an exciting time and great to see people working to make them better looking.
They look a lot like Sunpower's all black panels. I wonder how efficient they are? In Sunpower's case, the all-black ones are lower wattage and less efficient then their traditional looking ones, but also cheaper.
Please don't be personally thorny with other users—the guidelines ask us to be civil. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14085771 and marked it off-topic.
