Yikes that’s a lot of money. For most people buying solar, I think payback period is probably the biggest consideration.

What's the capacity though. Either way this seems extremely high unless we are talking in terms of like 100kw or something. For reference, I recently installed hybrid/net-metered system set up at my home in India; 7kw solar with a 20kWh battery for around $10K. The biggest cost is for the batteries though. The panels themselves have become extremely low price and the prices continue to fall.

It's interesting to see Tesla's solar business getting disrupted by Chinese manufacturers after EV.

It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up - and even people who were willing to spend $100K on a Solar Roof faced long delays if they were available at all in their market. Tesla's image has also shifted in the last decade, and having a Tesla parked in your driveway with a powerwall and solar roof doesn't carry quite the same image that it once did - which is important when you are relying on emotions to drive sales.

>It also doesn't help that they seemingly had issues scaling up

I think these two things were highly related. Same with the cost. They couldn’t figure out how to scale up, which kept prices high and volume low. Because of this, it really was a bespoke business. And while, it looks nice, that type of margin just is not going to provide the returns they promised investors.

I have a Tesla solar roof. I bought it knowing there were cheaper options for equivalent solar power because I liked the aesthetics.

What drove you to get solar panels ultimately and why did you go Tesla? Genuinely curious. I have a feeling you’ll say something i hadn’t considered.

1. I wanted solar & batteries as a buffer for grid outages

2. I wanted to be able to offset some of my energy usage with solar

3. I wanted my roof to look nice, and personally I think solar panels strapped onto a roof don't look very appealing.

4. At the time, Tesla was one of the few names in town for an integrated solar roof.

Saving money wasn't really part of the calculus, which worked out because as the article and parallel comments note, getting a Tesla solar roof is a pretty bad decision if one of your primary factors is cost or saving money on your electric bill.

* Diversification. These days stocks, bonds, real estate, crypto, and even precious metals are increasingly correlated [1]. Solar panels offer pretty consistent returns regardless of what is happening in the stock market.

* Backup power. I live in an area that is prone to natural disasters. Having a backup power source gives me a bit of peace of mind.

* Hedge against increasing energy prices. My solar panels have actually performed better than I expected due to electricity prices increasing faster than I expected.

* Clean energy. When I turn on my A/C in the summer I take some enjoyment from the fact that it's powered by the panels on my roof and not burning fossil fuels.

* Entertainment. I enjoy nerding out and learning about the tech, monitoring output, etc. A lot of people think solar panels are ugly but I actually like the way they look.

Yes the S&P 500 would have returned signficantly more than my solar panels. But I already have a lot invested in the S&P 500, solar panels were fairly inexpensive and don't make up a significant portion of my overall investments, and the psychological benefits outweigh whatever opportunity cost I have incurred.

There is also the option to finance them. You need to be careful with financing, as I think there are a lot of predatory offers out there. But if you are buying or building a house, for example, and can roll the cost of the panels into your mortgage, then that's going to reduce the up front cost and hence the opportunity cost.

But yeah when you get into the $100K range for a Tesla solar roof, then I think that starts to be a pretty substantial amount for most people that can be better spent elsewhere. Not to mention the delays, customer service issues, etc that people have experienced with Tesla - which can easily offset any peace of mind benefits.

[1] https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/14/h...

So, yes, I could probably get a higher return if I invested that capital elsewhere, but, apart from the diversification, I get benefits beyond the raw financial return.

Firstly, earlier this year, we had a cable coming into the house fail. By the time the electrician and city had done all they needed to do to sort it out, almost 4 days had passed. We would have been without power for that time. As it happens we ran completely on solar for that period - freezers stayed frozen, could run the laundry, etc. Some stuff was limited (no oven, no hot water) but the impact was minimal compared to what it might have been.

Secondly, during the day at least, I'm not really fussed about electricity usage. If lights are on, or AC is on or whatever. So there's less "hey, that light is costing money" etc. So we end up using more electricity, but the marginal cost (during the day) is 0. My next car is electric (already on order) and that can charge at home as well (during the day, I work from home) and so that just increases the return (utilization of available power goes up.)

From a financial point of view, for me, it's a no-brainer. Obviously ymmv - everyone's numbers are different. For me the payback is in the 5-6 year range (probably under 5 once the car comes online.)

Once you’re achieving 30-50% annual returns over 20-30 year horizons (PE, HFT, invite-only HF) , you stop caring about cost of capital for anything less than US$1 million.

But 10% VTI / VOO, sure, factor that 10% into your excel.

Cheaper installations generally win, especially when the homeowner receives a credit on the install for its projected or actual power generation (only federal credits tended to scale proportionally to the install cost.) This cost pressure has been hard for premium flat panel installers, which are in turn cheaper than Tesla was.

As acceptance of rooftop solar has grown, comfort with its aesthetics has also increased, reducing the need for solar that hides its nature.

That might just be another way of saying "niche."

I tend to think garages are an eyesore, and yet, basically everyone (including me) wants one included with their home.

40% of Australian households have rooftop solar. You get used to the look very quickly, and well-installed ones look perfectly fine.

Next best thing aesthetically are full-roof racks, where one face of the roof is 100% covered in panels. Nowadays you just have to select the right panel and you can make it tile the plane perfectly.

On the average suburban tract home in my corner of the USA, panels are no more ugly than the shingled roofs they sit atop.

On top of that there’s an inverter, and if you can’t use all the power immediately you’d need a battery too, which tends to increase the cost.

The biggest cost though is installation.

https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/housing/housing-grants...

You do make a good point about VAT on electricity bills also being a factor in the break even calculation. In Ireland it's 9% and that's a temporary cost of living measure and will revert to 13.5% in 2030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeowner_association

Not saying it is a huge factor but it is there.

Honestly, I don't agree with you though. Yes, there are ways for folk to signal virtue, and that happens, but I don't think solar power is one of those. Frankly the utility, and financial, returns are just too high.

Obviously ymmv with regard to returns, but I'm getting 16% on capital invested (a number that keeps climbing as electricity costs rise.) That's decent enough that virtue-signalling becomes a meaningless goal. I guess folk might _like_ that they're not burning fossils to get electricity (I do) but the financials dwarf that.

[1] https://mansionengineer.com/2018/08/10/elon-musk-tesla-and-t...

The simplest explanation is that they did all that and the market didn't want it. The economics of traditional panels outweighed the aesthetic advantages of tiles and they're pivoting. No conspiracy or fraud need be invoked.

Financially it was part of SolarCity bailout (Musk's cousin). It heavily heavily penalized Tesla shareholders and smelled of a family bailout. Solar Roof was announced so hastily in October 2016 justify the merger and stave off massive shareholder lawsuits. There was little effort in the roof development after bailout was a success, minus the bait-and-switch lawsuits.

There was genuine concept level development at some point, but it was developed into product after they knew it did not work to keep lawyers happy.

That's the problem though. Thinking your product will get by on looks when it's clearly outcompeted on performance, price, availability and longevity. That's not just optimism, it's delusion.

> Customer service complaints are pervasive and consistent. Tesla Energy has a 2.6 out of 5 rating on SolarReviews

From this to self-driving cars in 2 years to tunnels that will change public transport… maybe Musk should prototype and see what’s actually possible before telling the market. I mean come on - it’s borderline fraud in order to pump stocks - there’s got to be stockholders that are forming class actions as we speak

Musk just takes car centric society pipe dreams and sell it back to them.

Like OMG you transiting to work and can safely stay in your phone 99% of time. In other countries this called train or a bus. Solved in London with 1863 tech.

On the other hand, the suburbs don't have much that is even comparable to city taxis in price or availability today, so maybe if it existed that price point would indeed do just as well away from cities too.

Most US cities aren't dense at all. A lot of them were built with transportation in mind. London and European cities in general are so much older that their city centers have no real way to accommodate that.

So what do you do? You provide non car options. Technically they exist in US cities too, but especially on the west coast they're just not a viable alternative. Nobody who can choose will take a 2 hour public transit trip over a 20 minute drive. Heck, in a lot of cases biking might be faster than your transit option, albeit riskier

It obviously take decades not years, but again Tesla full self driving was promissed back in 2016 and something tells me it would be a big success if it will be deployed on scale in 2036.

Couldn't be more different in the big European cities, using a car there is (made) cumbersome.

I live in Portland. Traffic is often quite slow. And even then it is much faster than public transit unless your destination is just a few miles away and on the same line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=48166411&goto=item%3Fi...

Solarcity was clearly a great example of Elon's ,,no investor left behind'' philosophy: if he promotes a company and gets investors to invest in it, he is doing whatever he can to make sure that they at least don't lose their money (by merging it to a bigger company he controls), even if it wouldn't be the best financial decision.

So far this strategy has been working quite well for both him and the investors.

- Magnitude higher number of interconnections which impacts reliability and efficiency

- Uniform roof tile style

- Requires entire roof rebuild which is always more expensive than retrofit of panels on top

- Complex installation resulting in less installers available overall for the market

- Crossing of trades between roofing & electrical

A slightly better solution would have been to make the big traditional solar panels your actual roof panels but really retrofitting them on top of panels solves most of those issues above.

The market pitch is different tho, they are aimed at providing less effective solar for places where you have a hard need to keep the old look, old churches, monumental buildings and such.

The market shrank because standard panels and their mounting techniques got more aesthetically pleasing and cheaper.

On the other hand, Tesla's solar shingles are tiny compared to panels, more in the shape of actual shingle strips, means tons of connectors, wiring losses, dangerous shorts (these things carry 10s of amps) etc. and probably a nightmare to troubleshoot.

I would not get these for any reason other than aesthetics.

IMHO a pergola or carport is going to be better. You lose solar efficiency but gain the benefit of something that provides shade. Especially as solar panels have become an economical roofing option if you don't care about perfect waterproofing.

Multiple tiles also need to be connected in series to get reasonable efficiency, so you get plenty of failure points where one bad connection can cause a significant part of your solar roof to become useless. And you won't be able to easily fix it.

You can obviously fix all these issues, but it makes tiles too expensive.

Essentially, you are adding another zero to the cost to have hidden solar. A 20k solar install becomes a 200k+ solar roof install.

Even if the final result is great, the economics shrink the possible customer base. Basic solar has gotten so cheap that people aren't worrying if the investment increases the value of the house itself. But very few people are willing to pay 10x for a thing that will never pay itself back in energy or home value. It's like putting a pool in your house - a few buyers will want it, but a lot will run from it because they don't know what to do with it.

So as a result, the target market ends up being super rich dudes in gated communities - the same kind of people buying custom 100k hifi systems and home cinema rooms. It becomes an upsell for people with unlimited budgets.

It's just not a mass market product when the competition is 10x cheaper and dropping daily.

https://nabendynamo.de/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/20210426_1...

While not quite panel-sized, it's much larger tiles and there's not another roof underneath. Probably makes most sense with a new roof, though. The problem is that when a roof lasts 50--80 years, that's not a very big market just for new roofs.

Thanks for sharing.

Apologies, my google-fu is weak; I couldn't find more details. It's SON's building? I couldn't find that roof top at that address (using Google Maps).

Here's as far as I got: https://gemini.google.com/share/bef19f2b145c

The article from which I've linked the image is here (in German, though): https://nabendynamo.de/unser-neues-produktionsgebaeude-steht...

The roof is from Sunstyle, as detailed in the article: https://www.sunstyle.com/

Gemini seems to have read that article, taken a few details, embellished a few more, and not answered your question.

Flush with the rest of the roof seems like a mistake. What if you need/want to replace them with a different sized panel?

The big problem is that because there is no real ventilation, the panels get hotter and don't produce as much power.

What you put under them also has an effect on how waterproof your roof is long term, plus when you need to replace them finding ones that are the right size are also a pain.

Also see https://roofit.solar/ used in a few houses… mainly self build a or architect designed

If you experience any failure, like a falling tree limb, you're now _required_ to replace panels to restore the integrity of your home.

It's far simpler to be able to just restore a roof, which any builder can do, and then come back and restore the panel layer again later.

These things carry a lot of current though, so I would certainly not trust anyone without proper tools and training to put them on a roof.

The main issue was that normal large panels got a lot cheaper way faster than expected and custom sized ones like that end up costing too much by comparison.

In Australia where North is “optimal”, even South facing panels produce only 20-30% less and East/West about 15%. It does vary a bit by latitude but it’s not at all pointless to install them in other orientations in many places. I have not done the math to see how much of the world this extends to, but it applies to a fairly large chunk of Australia. Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/panels/direction/

Tesla’s system also had non solar tiles so you could just skip the panels in whichever parts you wanted.

Roof construction is quite different here to the US though. We never have the plywood layer, it’s either ceramic tile or Colorbond steel directly onto usually wooden sometimes steel beams.

Quote from the article:

In Sydney, south-facing panels typically produce around 30% less energy than north-facing ones. The steeper the roof, the less they’ll produce. They’ll also produce much more energy in summer than winter.

In the far north, the difference isn’t as great and in Townsville south-facing solar panels will only produce around 15% less energy overall than north-facing ones. Because Queenslanders generally use more electricity in summer than winter due to air conditioner demand, the fact that south-facing panels have considerably higher output in summer can improve self-consumption.

In Darwin, south-facing panels produce about 17% less electricity overall than north-facing ones, and, like in Townsville, they have considerably higher output in summer than winter.

This is mostly only cost-effective for remote properties where power cuts are common, but it works.

I forget who but it reminds me of electric cars with speakers to restore the engine noise. There is nothing beautiful about noise.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/08/heres-what-the-electric...

Their cars have build quality issues, self driving continues to be "just around the corner", their service centers are cheap, the solar roof is it's own nightmare, the pivot to robots is laughable, the robot taxis are a PR stunt that are amusing but in a cringey way...

And the promises over the years of automatic chargers, replaceable batteries, sensors, etc.

The company had a great idea early, had tons of goodwill, a growing manufacturing capacity, and squandered it chasing whatever Elon dreamt up.

Hmm actual solar panels are so cheap now could you use them as large shingles on a new build?

We'll see. But I have an outbuilding with a large two plane roof and the south facing plane has no penetrations and is pretty much unshaded. Our utility rates have pretty much doubled over the last three years, and there's another ~30% increase scheduled over the next three years. Said roof is coming up on the end of its expected life, so it may be a good time to put on a new roof and put on solar at the same time.

Could someone get better ROI doing a larger solar project somewhere else? Probably. But if it maths for me, I'm going to do the project on my roof, because I don't have anywhere else to do it (well I could do a ground install, but I'd lose aesthetically)

If it maths with that, great. If not, but it's close, we'll look again when we need to do the roof. Utility prices are rising, panel prices are dropping, it'll probably make sense eventually... Installer costs are going up too though.

I have a system this size and it's fairly rare for me to make less over the day than I use (we have pretty sunny winters where I live and at -27 degrees latitude am not super far from the equator). In summer I tend to produce at least twice as much energy than the house draws.

The economics have skewed a bit as export tariffs have dropped (due to there being so much solar) but batteries have become so cheap and are now subsidised quite a bit too that most people aren't getting just solar systems anymore but now are doing solar+battery.

It would probably technically be a bit more efficient to do larger neighbourhood arrays and batteries, but if they're cheap enough it works fine to do individual homes.

The electricy is consumed in the houses and not on the empty land.

Parking lots become a win-win with electric cars. They also keep the cars cleen and sun protected.

Plus, most solar installs are grid connected so a significant portion of the electricity tends not to be consumed where it is produced. It’s not as if installing solar is an alternative to grid connections for most practical reasons.

E.g. Disconnecting your energy supplier or a power outage will still result in no power usage, despite solar panels generating power.

More expensive inverters and battery systems allow this, although this is far from the norm.

I'm aware of the arguments about how it can be that much cheaper when deployed at mass centralized scale rather than decentralized across a bunch of rooftops, however the way the electric markets are prices is based primarily on the cost to produce the marginal supply, which is usually gas.

So while the power company might flood a bunch of solar panels trying to capture the profit between cost to generate solar vs. cost to generate using gas, those profits haven't been lowering electric costs at residential rates. If anything those costs are still climbing.

It's actually not hard to get rooftop solar to pencil out in that situation, especially if you assume even moderate growth in future electricity rates or inflation. In my own tracker it would even be superior to paying down additional principle on my home mortgage!

Admittedly it would be less of a slam dunk if the net metering was less generous around here as you'd basically be required to add battery to the mix if you weren't already. But even that just prolongs the time to payoff, it still ends up having good ROI economically speaking.

Electricity generation in the event of a power outage was another consideration for me.

But yeah as a techy I also just enjoy having them.

You can't just blindly say "PVs save you money". It matters very much how much sunlight you get, the orientation of your roof, how much electricity costs, how much labor and installation costs, etc.

My location is far from ideal for solar. But with incentives - which are funded in my country via a per-kWh surcharge on everyone's electricity bills - it just barely makes financial sense to have solar panels on my roof.

It is really condescending to dismiss their choice as motivated by vanity rather than assuming that other people might have done their homework and made a rational decision. It might very well be that you have done your own homework and it doesn't make sense for your situation, but other people face different tradeoffs which make it worthwhile.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090

Off the top of my head the only thing that's really doable without replacing a depreciating asset are certain kinds of insulation upgrades. (And I guess potentially ceiling fan installs.)

On the other hand it can make sense based on arbitrage. In a lot of markets the cost of the system is unfairly subsidized. People on the losing side of that can lower their costs with roof top solar.

At one point after signing the contract, Tesla mailed him and notified that his previous signed contract was void and they sent him a new contract where the price had doubled to over $100k. They told he he had to sign the new contract in order for it to go forward.

This is classic Elon Musk tactic, which is to do whatever the fuck you want, laws be damned, and then try to bully your way through it. My friend didn't budge. They would call him or email him and kept harrassing him to sign the new contract and he said no. I don't remember there being a lot of news about this but I couldn't believe they had the gall to try this, although as I said, this is classic Elon Musk tactics.

Eventually I think other solar roof customers started to band together, and eventually Tesla caved and honored the original contract, as if they were doing him a favor. I'm not surprised that this technology is going to fail because it's too expensive and Musk's promise of dropping prices, surprise surprise!, never manifested.

The Australian market is largely adding trad PV panels to existing housing, but there are signs of greater uptake of integrated PV + weather proof + thermal insulation roofing panels by architects and hopefully will be seen more on new mass produced housing plans.

~ https://arena.gov.au/projects/integrated-pv-solar-roofing/

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/10/jeffrey-epst...

[2] https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-jeffrey-epstein-h...

[3] https://www.denverpost.com/2026/02/13/kimbal-musk-epstein-fi...

They actually had to develop it (with Tesla shareholders' money) after buying out the failing SolarCity.

I'm split on the datacenter-in-space stuff. I don't know whether I should disbelieve it because there is, obviously, no good way to evacuate heat in space, or because Musk talked about it, and he has an uncanny track record of not upholding his promises.

No they don't, they procure them from Taiwan Solar Energy Corp. They do not produce or manufacture their own cells, they're using off the shelf components.

Ouch. The whole point was that it was supposed to be cheaper.

I on the other hand, Maximus Virtus, am a net gain to humanity when I hack into tech products for visualizing my home’s data.

"FSD disengages just before the collision." The other video angle shows that the driver presses the brake, which disengages FSD. "Tesla consistently hides information from the court." There are two different cases separated by years. The police got all the information they needed in the first case. "FSD is 10x worse than the average driver." The uncertainty of the number due to insufficient statistics makes the comparison moot.

To be fair that's not a contradiction. If FSD is designed such that a user braking because FSD was about to plow into something, sure the user started driving at the last second, but that is Tesla making a design choice to artificially blame users for FSD being fundamentally unsafe.

All-in-all, the trick that can't fool anyone and that doesn't make any sense. If this claim was true, the only explanation would be that Tesla is evil for the sake of evil and to the detriment to itself. Evil and dumb.

On the other hand, pressing the brake is a common way of disengaging ADAS. Tesla is no better and no worse in this regard than other ADAS manufacturers.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/24025/electreks-editor-in-chie...

The article seemed fine to me.

It’s hard to trust “reporting” when it’s historically operated more like a tabloid.

But sometimes it's not. I'll do my own fact checking (because I don't trust them) - and find out that maybe there is something to the story. Not only that - none of the sources that I typically read are reporting on the issue. And then I'm forced to admit that I actually learned something from the NY Post. And usually I've learned something about my own biases and bias in my regular information sources, too.

My point is this: if you can't get past the source of an article and actually engage with the content - then that says more about your own bias and trustworthiness as a source of information than it does about Electrek.