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Tesla Will Sell Solar Panels, Powerwalls At Home Depot (bloomberg.com)
Tesla is bringing photovaltaic panels and Powerwall batteries to U.S. retail giant Home Depot. According to Bloomberg, "The tech pioneer is beginning to roll out Tesla-branded selling spaces at 800 of the retailer's locations. The areas, which will be outfitted during the first half of this year, are staffed by Tesla employees and can demonstrate its solar panels and Powerwall battery." From the report: Lowe's -- the second-largest U.S. home-improvement chain, after Home Depot -- has also been in discussions with Tesla about selling its solar products, said people familiar with the situation. At some point, Home Depot may also offer Tesla's much-anticipated solar roof, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. [The products] will be highlighted in high-profile displays, which are 12 feet tall and 7 feet wide. Some locations will be fitted with visual demonstrations that show how the products work.
OK but can you at least learn to spell "atheist" correctly?
Mostly random stuff.
The solar roofing products are more interesting to me because they're not a "retrofit" tacked onto a house that was never designed for said product. When you're building a home you have to put a roof on either way, so with a well-designed solar roofing product (similar installation labour and design constraints), it's pretty much a no-brainer to go with it. While the solar shingles won't beat asphalt on price, they're reportedly priced similar to clay tiles and the like - and they should have tile-like lifespans, if not better.
Combined with a Powerwall it gives you A) timeshifting (beneficial if you have time-of-use power rates), a grid-tied inverter (incl. selling back to the grid), and a home battery backup (simple grid-tied inverters go down when the grid goes down and you use your solar; with a battery backup and secondary signal to drive the grid-tied inverter, however, you can get full power in the day and keep a limited subset of your appliances on at night until the grid comes back up.
I'm in a place where there's no sun all winter and grid power is both cheap and clean, and the house I'm building is underground anyway... so it's not for me. But most people aren't in my situation.
It's time for Operation Crazy Plan.
If Tesla is making the panels in USA, it will benefit by the tariff on low cost panels from China. But I don't know where Tesla makes its panels.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"Tesla’s Solar Roof, which is just now hitting the market, is about $52,000 for an average home."
I'm not sure where the affordability (i.e., volume market viability) threshold is for this type of solar roof, but I imagine that it's less than $52,000, probably way less.
will be highlighted in high-profile displays, which are 12 feet tall and 7 feet wide
high profile
At any rate it will be nice to actually see what the product looks like up close and touchable - they will have the actual product, or at least a small version of it, on display and not a poster, won't they?
Yeah, 52 grand is pretty expensive. And by investing in your house you are making your property taxes go up, so you will pay again. Elon Musk had this comment: "The economics are not yet compelling where housing and utility costs are low and property taxes are high."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sleasca/2017/05/16/tesla-solar-roof-cost/2/
Tesla is arguing that the roof defrays its own cost by generating electricity; and if you live in a sunny area and put in enough solar cells, the roof will pay for itself (and actually return a profit eventually). But with time value of money it's not a good investment at current prices.
So, right now, this is a roof for rich people who don't mind dropping a chunk of money that will take a long time to pay back. If you are building a mansion that will cost over a million bucks, why not throw a Tesla roof on it? It would be less than a 5% increase in cost, the roof is durable and looks nice, and you can feel that you are helping combat climate change. And if your neighborhood loses power, you can still have lights on in your house.
For people like me, and you I'm guessing, this is just too pricey right now.
Remember how Tesla's first car was a toy for rich people. Baby steps. If this roof product does well, they can ramp up production volume and bring costs down.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I believe what happened was that SolarCity found they were spending more on salesmen's salaries than they were getting back in profit, so they stopped doing it.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Why the fuck are we allowing ACs?
A simple solution would be to drop ACs to -1 right from the gitgo, and then moderators (like me currently), would then have to decide if they are worth taking our of the trash. In General, I am forced to waste too many points on so much trash here.
And when I am not moderating, the last thing I want to do is deal with ANY AC unless they had something intelligent to say. I would even like to be able to set a level for ACs vs all named. For named, let me view them at 0. For ACs, 2.
Sad.
Its value is in new construction hence why they are getting an end aisle demo in the home improvement stores. In comparison to a brand new roof on a brand new house, the price is comparable to standard construction. It's not cost-effective in a retrofit because it replaces the decking, underlayments and several other features of a conventional roofing system which you'd have to remove and throw away on a retrofit. Those system changes are what bring its cost into line with conventional roofing systems. Though not as cheap as asphalt it's cheaper than clay or concrete tile and near the price of a metal roof and it's got similar durability to cement tile or clay.
It's a competitive product if you are building a new house and want solar, it saves the cost of all the racking and other costs in a solar installation by placing the solar cells under the roof while being essentially cost competitive with a conventional roofing system. This combined system ends up being signficantly cheaper than a conventional roof and external solar panels because the racking and heavy protection systems on a conventional panel aren't needed.