SolarCity intends to separate themselves from other rooftop solar companies with their latest ingenuity, roofing shingles that are also solar panels.
The credit for this idea does not go exclusively to The Leader, Elon. The project is being spearheaded by his cousin, SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive who is a beast when it comes to obtaining solar investment capital.
With about 5 million new roof installations occurring annually in the United States, the solar shingles will be an opportunity for home owners to update their roof and begin generating power.
Elon and his cousin are helping home owners kill two birds with one stone.
On the topic of birds, a blogger who goes by @JeffCNYC wrote a Musk hit piece earlier this week. It starts by doing the duck quote wrong:
There’s an old adage: “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”
Fine, he did the duck quote wrong. Soon, however, he literally calls The Musk Empire (all praise and glory to Elon) a Ponzi scheme. Literally:
Using one investors money to pay off another – an Italian guy named Charles used to that. But it was even even worse considering another crucial fact. SpaceX has collected some hefty advances on some NASA contracts.
We are going to look past the grammatical errors because he’s a blogger, I’m a blogger, and bloggers maim the English language all the time, whilst killing journalism. But he is not mixing words. He wants everything the South African entrepreneur built to crash and burn.
I run into anti-Musk people all the time, mostly liberals, who are disgusted by any private attempt to achieve a grande scheme. They would rather prefer no change, the crazy they know. Complacent drones.
There is no better steward of our money than Elon Musk. Would you rather a government entity, with layer-upon-fat-fucking-layer of bureaucracy tackle vehicle autonomy, energy storage, and fucking solar shingles?
Sometimes businesses are bigger than their balance sheets and intelligent investors, playing the long game, know it. This is why TSLA shares maintain their lofty valuation.
This is why Elon Musk and his crew are making solar shingles while you are going “quack quack quack” with your dick in your hand.
Solar shingles will be a hit, just like the cowbell.
Good morning.
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Liberals are anti-Musk? Anti-solar power? Don’t know a single Liberal who is against Musk’s attempt to get the US away from fossil fuels. Conservatives yes. Maybe you misheard them with the Fox News channel juiced to full volume.
You need to get out more and talk to people
Anti-Musk isn’t a liberal thing, sorry.
Since you seem to be taking the stance that liberals don’t have a clue what other liberals think, I will offer more than my personal opinion.
DailyKos is probably the biggest liberal hangout (so big that I haven’t been a reader for years — too much time needed to find the gold nuggets in the gravel). Per Quantcast, Kos had over 30 million visits, however those are defined, in the previous month.
A quick search for “dailykos musk” provides a quick sampling of Musk-related posts on the site:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dailykos+musk
If you scan through them, you will see that they almost all look like they are positive mentions. Maybe all the liberals “need to get out more.”
PS: It really is okay to like Musk even if a lot of liberals do, too.
Solar shingles are a great idea. But, what is the cost and what about stopping thieves who discover you have gold on your roof ? Can they be locked down or something ?
In Detroit we put up rod-iron fences with spear tips on top.
LOL ! In Chicago all I do is dodge bullets.
I think the shingles format is a good idea, but there has to be a better way of harnessing (and storing) solar energy. Not that this is it, but something totally outside the box like the solar leaf is going to upend the industry one day http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0801/Scientists-flip-energy-equation-with-solar-leaf-that-converts-CO2-into-fuel
Energy storage in mankind’s biggest challenge. I am glad elon is working on it every damn day
Suntegra in New York state already installs solar shingle roofs. But they don’t have Musk’s DB Index score.
I’m baffled by the comment – fabulation is the word that comes to mind – that “liberals don’t like Musk.” I used to live in a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the dark heart of liberalness, and people in that building owned Musk cars, loved solar, and admired Musk innovation. Is there actual data behind that statement?
They don’t like his ambitious plans, at least not the middle-class ones in my hood. I will try and drum up some of their writings on the matter.
I will say, Musk as American entrepreneur and Musk as good investment are two different things. Love the entrepreneur, not so much as an investment.
I’m a big Musk fan but I don’t like the fact that he raised money in order to be able to meet the demand for the new car and then he took that money and promptly bailed out, soon to be bankrupt solar city. Then he says the gigafactory is a year ahead of schedule and on a summers friday after the bell, he says they’ll need more money to complete the gigafactory. I like the guy but I don’t like this kind of sneakiness and not forthrightness. The dude knows better.
Solar shingles have been around as an idea for at least 40 years, and I know that some were produced 25-30 years ago — back when nobody could afford rooftop solar and .
Commercial photovoltaic (PV) producers at the time were all trying hard to find ways to improve the economics of PV products, so that investors could see a path from low-volume, very expensive applications to eventual mainstream use. You had to be a little nutty back then to think that affordable residential rooftop PV would arrive in 20 years.
People had worked out curves of cost versus production experience that said affordable PV was doable, but the current rate of production was so low that movement along the curve was going to be pretty slow if PV couldn’t break into some higher volume markets along the way to affordable residential use.
The PV shingles were one of the concepts that producers investigated. The idea was that the cost of installing PV roofing would be less than the cost of installing roofing plus installing a PV system on top of the roofing. I don’t think it brought much of an advantage. The engineering was most favorable when using large sheets of thin-film PV for the roofing, but thin-film PV had low efficiencies and the roofing being replaced was dirt-cheap asphalt shingles.
Others have tried more recently, with better products, but still have trouble finding acceptance. There are problems both with finding builders who will do the initial installation and with developing products that won’t get destroyed by or cause a hazard for any subsequent rooftop work. The people going up on your roof to install a dish antenna, repair a leak, install a skylight, etc., aren’t going to be familiar with PV shingles.
Here’s a good, brief piece on the topic, with some excellent additions in the comments:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/A-Note-to-Elon-Musk-And-The-Brothers-Rive-on-The-Integrated-Solar-Roof