A Closer Look At Tesla’s Solar Roof Tiles (Videos)
Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
Arash Malek gives us a great close up shot of Tesla’s Solar Roof while at a Tesla Service Center in El Cerrito, CA. Tesla’s Solar Roof is a unique roofing invention that fuses a roof with solar panel glass in a beautiful and artistic way that provides a cost-competitive alternative to power for your home.
Video by Arash Malek
Arash zooms into where you can see the detail of the Solar Roof tiles, and they really don’t look like glass at all but painted wood. The Solar Roof tiles are three times stronger than normal roofing tiles — something Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, demonstrated on Halloween by dropping a pumpkin from the roof onto a sample of Solar tiles on the ground.
#solarglass in the glass!! 🤯🤯@elonmusk @Tesla 🙌🏽🙌🏽 pic.twitter.com/IqcNEN9igW
— Arash Malek (@MinimalDuck) December 14, 2019
“I thought it was fake at first,” Arash Malek, founder of Scentwedge, tells me, “because it was so thin and looked about as thick as a glass plate. But then, when you look closer you can see the solar array. It has a cool connection mechanism and a nice textured glass on top. Also, you can’t see the solar cells from an angle.”
Video by Arash Malek
I asked Arash another question: Besides the Solar Roof tile itself, what else is unique that Tesla has and other companies can use to improve their own products? He answered, “I don’t think anyone else has a tile like this. It will replace solar panels and it’s just the whole roof, so you get two in one.”
Arash provides a great look at the Tesla Solar Roof tiles for those of us who haven’t really seen it in person or have really just glanced at a couple photos or videos online. To me, it looks like some type of wooden pieces that have been painted then glazed over with a shiny glaze that one would use to protect paintings. I often used hairspray on my finished paintings — to get that shiny affect.
The Tesla Solar Roof is indeed a work of art — one that will be useful and help us transition to using better and sustainable energy. It’s a triple win that also adds a few jobs to the US economy.
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy
