In 2019, U-Solar Clean Energy Solutions Pvt. Ltd. installed India’s largest building integrated vertical solar PV system at a data center in Mumbai. The system, with a capacity of about 1 MW, has been installed by integrating solar panels on all four walls of the facility, covering over 5000 square feet of facade area.
Tesla was just granted a new series of patents that shed some light on the techniques it will use on its upcoming curved and flat solar roof tiles. These design techniques will presumably be employed as Tesla moves towards the first commercial version of these tiles, which are expected to move into mass production a bit later than the Tesla solar roof tiles that have just been installed on my roof.
When Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s Solar Roof tile system back in 2016, he boldly proclaimed that it would cost less than buying a roof and electricity. Since then, we have not seen any data to support his claim, until now.
Incorporating solar generation in commercial building materials may finally become a mainstream practice, with both solar windows and solar panels used to create net-zero buildings. Evolving regulations in leading jurisdictions like California and Germany are driving the building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) with adoption deadlines as early as next year.
A Tesla copycat? Certainly not — Exasun was in the solar roof tile business before Tesla. It also has what seems to be a cost-competitive, attractive, high-quality product on offer. I visited the company’s headquarters and factory in Amsterdam last year during a cleantech tour Remco van der Horst arranged for me when I was in town for rEVolution 2017.
Fastned is still the only EV charging network I know of that includes CHAdeMO, CCS, and Tesla (via adapter) charging options at all of its stations. This may seem unimportant, since Tesla has its own Supercharger network, but as Fastned co-founder Bart Lubbers pointed out in a recent interview with me, approximately half of the electric cars in the Netherlands are Teslas. As such, even with other options, many of Fastned’s customers are Tesla drivers.
Rooftop solar is great, but it’s not ideal for every home or business. Sometimes the roof faces the wrong way or has the wrong slant. Sometimes the roof is just too small and the owner wants to add more solar panels to cover more electricity usage. Swedish Solar of Orlando, Florida, has a solution.
A startup solar company has launched a Kickstarter campaign for what it’s calling “the Ferrari” of solar roofing. “This is clean energy for those with a little extra in the bank,” said Zach Taylor, Product Architect at Forward Labs in Troy, N.Y. “All of the big breakthroughs in technological innovation … [continued]
Solar shingles are now gaining increasing traction in the renewable energy landscape. They are architecturally distinctive, more so than traditional rooftop photovoltaic panels. Solar shingles provide an integrated building product providing both roofing security and solar electricity in one package. As PV Magazine’s Charles W. Thurston has stated, “The nascent field … [continued]
Elon Musk is proposing adding building-integrated solar roofs to his arsenal of sustainable home energy appliances. Instead of an “aftermarket” attachment to an existing roof, like a solar array is today, he suggests actually making the roofing material itself generate solar power. “It’s not something on the roof — it … [continued]
