Wow! For my house that price is a bit higher than a tile roof. Subtract out the value of the solar panels and we would be down to a bit more than a metal roof cost. That’s close to my price point.
But why spend thousands on a battery instead of selling the power back to the utility?
You do. Any power generated after the battery is charged is sold back to the utility.
And selling power back to the utility companies may be a thing of the past.
Some NH state rep wants to disallow Home Solar owners or Home wind turbine owners of selling the excess power back into the grid. They say it would hurt the economy. How that idiot got elected I’ll never understand
We pay right at 11 cents per kW-hr or $2100 per year in energy cost.
The install cost was $20K with subsidies for an 8kW peak system (or 5863 delivered) that would cover 100% of my needs (their calculations, mine are a bit less - 80%) with a grid-tie system. Just taken as a simple 0% ROI with no other considerations, yes, its a 10 year payback. But it isn’t that simple.
Considering a 2% rise in electric costs per year (they’ve actually gone down) and a 0.25% loss factor per year over a 25 year panel life. The cost of money, say 4%, (i.e. loss in the value of a mutual fund earnings) is $20K additional over that 25 years. So it costs me $40K to save $39.5K.
Gettin’ close, but no cigar.
Add enough Power Panels to run my AC at night and you are adding $15K to the costs. A net-net grid tie system beats that hand down.
That political idiot is listening to the utilities that don’t like personally owned solar. They tried it in my state, too. Get voted down.
My state’s net-net system pays 3.2 cents per kW-hr and sells it to you at 11 cents. You don’t want a system bigger than your average need just because of that cost disparity. The “settle up” is at the end of each year, not day to day.
As for charging up your electric car, the grid-tie system is the only thing that makes any sense since 12kW-hr of car battery recharging at night needs about 25kW of storage for lots of battery, charging loss and DC-AC conversion loss technical reasons.
Eventually we will get to cost parity here in sunny places but we aren’t there yet.
In my location in East central Indiana the electric company is offering good incentives to take energy conservation measures. For example. for each 4 foot florescent tube that is replaced with an LED tube, the incentive is $6 a tube. I replaced 108 florescent tubes–27 fixtures with four tubes per fixture at the church I attend. I bought the LED tubes for $6.99 apiece. For a little more than $100, we have fixtures that give more light and use half the energy. I spent quite a bit of time removing the ballast coils and rewiring the fixtures, but I won’t have to replace any more ballast coils and the LED tubes are good for 25,000 hours. The power company has all other kinds of incentives to save energy. I wonder if this is a way to make the cost of electrical power usage cheap enough so that businesses won’t find it feasible to go to solar power.
One of the reasons power companies incentivize efficiency upgrades is cost avoidance. Growing areas need bigger power stations at HUGE costs. If everyone decreases their energy use by increasing efficiency that cost is avoided so they can afford to pay for LED’s, 19 SEER AC units energy efficient appliances.
The thing to remember is that right now, this roof is the Model S for houses. People aren’t buying the Model S because they’re worried about the price of fueling their car, and they won’t buy the roof because they’re worried about their electric bills.
They’re buying it because they like the technology - some people with lots of money actually do care about the environment and how we generate our power. As the tech matures, new roofs that are price structured more like the Model 3 is will come along, at which point it will start appealing to a much larger swath of the population.
One thing common with all new technology is that it tends to be expensive right away, and people tend to dismiss it because the ROI isn’t good enough. But eventually it becomes cheap enough for everyone to have - I’m sure some old farmer dismissed the refrigerator when it first came out because no one would pay that much for something that does the same thing as an ice house does, and you get the ice from the lake for free every winter! 
@shadowfax Good point. I remember back in the late 1950s, one of my high school classmates bought a four transistor pocket radio and paid $50 for it (equivalent of $700 in today’s money). In the early 1970s, I bought the equivalent four transistor radio for $3.95. It came with a powerful warranty–if a problem developed in the radio, all I had to do was ship it to the service center and it would be repaired and returned to me for only a $5 shipping and handling fee. I remember my wife drooling over a flat screen television when they first became available. The price was $5000. Now, an equivalent sized flat screen TV can be purchased at Walmart for less than $300.
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That’s because of the R&D.
While most things go up in price…technology devices goes down. It’s been that way for decades.
Computers (even decades before the PC computer prices dropped year after year).TV’s - when flat screen TV’s first came out the starting price was over $10,000. Now you can get a much larger and superior quality for 1/10th of that.
Solar is another technology that’s dropped over the years.
Yep. I have an aerospace engineer friend who was on her university’s Solar Car team more than 20 years ago. She told me how much they spent per solar cell for the car. I don’t remember the exact number but it was absolutely jaw dropping. I do remember doing the math and discovering that covering the car in solar panels would buy you a very nice house in an affluent area.
That’s why I get slightly irked when brand new tech comes out and people trash it for being too expensive. Yes, it is. New is for rich people, which is why most of us were still manually cranking our windows in the early 80’s. Eventually the luxury stuff filters down to the rest of us, which is why all of us have power windows now. 
This roof isn’t for most of us now, but in 30 years roofs like it are going to be very common on houses, and they will be charging electric cars which will be very common on the road.
There was an article in the Buffalo News and it also was a story on the noon news on WIVB, channel 4 Buffalo the same day. I am not sure which one mentioned it was going to cost less than a “regular” roof.
The numbers show me why Solar City dropped their initial plan to bear the upfont costs and lease their system to you and you could pay for it with your “savings”
Thanks for the link for the propane refrigerators, I was basing my belief they they were no longer made when they disappeared from the cabins in Allegany State Park in the 60s or 70s. When I inquires at the park administration office I was told they could not get them anymore. They were Servel brand, maybe they just stopper makin those.
Also Allegany is spelled correctly, That is the way it is spelled in NY and MD even though spellcheck disagrees.
I was pretty sure they were around - so I did the search. I have a friend of mine that retired a couple of years ago and he owns half an island off the coast of Maine and is completely off the grid. Generates his own electricity with Solar and Wind. Runs as much on propane as he can (which includes a refrigerator and freezer).
Has Satellite TV and internet. Close enough to shore to get good Cell phone coverage.
Nice 3200 sq/ft log cabin worth about $5 million.
Dual-fuel refrigerators are very common in the RV scene. They’ll run on electricity, and when they detect that the electricity is shut off, they switch to propane.
On Tesla’s website there’s a price list. It’s $21.85 per sq/ft. I put a new roof on my house a couple years ago at a cost of just under $20,000. Based on the Tesla Roof calculator it’ll cost me over $74,000. That’s a huge difference. Maybe when taking in the electricity cost savings over a 30 year period it’s cheaper, but the upfront cost is outrageous.
I’ll be 95 in 30 years and my children will be changing my diapers. I don’t care about a system that is affordable then.
We looked at a solar power system for our roof last year. We would buy electricity from the solar company and sell what we don’t use. We both work and would sell the excess electricity to the local utility. Since we aren’t home during the day, rarely use the AC, and have gas heat, the solar electricity would almost all be sold to the utility. Like @MikeInNH, we pay about $0.11 per KWH. The utility figures out what they want to pay for my electricity and pay me once per year in March. When I asked them, they said the last payout was $0.08 per KWH. We decided that given our age, it didn’t make sense for us.
Not to be overly biting, but as I am wont to tell my mother when she complains about all the features on her car that she does not want, the world is not designing products specifically for you.
I won’t be on the space tourism flights either, but that doesn’t mean I’m not excited to see them happen.
All I’m saying is that it isn’t for me. Others may want it, and that’s fine. Recall my last sentence.
While solar may become more affordable, I don’t think it is the same as computer technology. Computers have gotten more powerful because we learned how to divide the same expensive chip of silicon into smaller and smaller transistors allowing more and more complex circuits to be put on that same chip of silicon.
However, the ability to supply more amps to a power circuit is a different situation. It pretty much means you have to use a bigger chip of silicon and while we may find ways to produce semiconductor grade silicon more economically in the future, I don’t foresee the explosion we saw with digital technology.
How much more powerful are today’s electric motors and transformers than the ones we had in the 1950’s? How much cheaper are they?
Sometimes technology reaches a plateau and it takes some kind of a breakthrough to make the technology significantly better. The disk brakes of tomorrow will likely be only slightly better than the disk brakes of today.
When it comes to solar and wind power, the big and largely unresolved problem is how to economically stockpile the energy we harvest. Until that is resolved, we will always need conventional plants ready to go online should the wind stop blowing or the sun stop shining.
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We just got a 250million rate increase over 4 yrs from our elec co. Due to upgrading infrastructure like wires/poles. It’s hardware replacement time says the spokesman. Take away all govt paid subsidies (TAX) payer paid and solar sales would crash. Ironic, your taxes pay for your solar panel.