Solar Roof, Powerwall And Tesla Cars: Why Elon Musk’s Integrated Solar Package Is Revolutionary

After making waves with its highly attractive self-driving electric cars and solar storage batteries called Powerwall, Elon Musk’s Tesla is coming up with solar roof tiles.

Why tiles? Well, the idea is to power a standard home through solar tiles and store the extra energy in Powerwall which can later be used to charge Tesla’s car (and home during the night or cloudy weather when the sun is not up there). It’s an integrated package. Once you have these three Tesla products in place, you can get rid of your electricity connection and live happily ever after, without fretting about power cuts or cursing your politicians for state of power.

But, would you install a tiled rooftop if it doesn’t look good? Maybe not. Keeping this in mind, Tesla has taken great care about the aesthetic value of these tiles, which come in four distinct designs – Textured Glass, Slate Glass, Tuscan Glass and Smooth Glass – and one cannot tell them apart from normal tiles. The tiles are not just about good looks. According to Musk, they can achieve 98 per cent of the efficiency of regular solar panels. They are also more resilient, as Musk demonstrated the heavy impact from above, with the use of a kettlebell.

Musk didn’t reveal the cost of these tiles. Tesla won’t start rolling them out until next year. Even Powerwall2 (a major upgrade from its earlier version), the device for storing excess electricity, is shy of launch by a couple of months. This will cost consumers around $6,500. Tesla’s car models are also expensive. The tiles will be expensive too. So, it’s fair to say the target consumers for the company currently are those from the upper middle class. However, if one looks at recent trends, the costs will come down and in a decade or two (or even earlier if we are lucky) it will be affordable for the masses. Hopefully, more players will enter this fledgling market and bring down costs by increasing competition.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Before he can embark on his new solar rooftop venture and kickstart the ‘solar revolution’, Musk has to convince Tesla’s shareholders to approve SolarCity’s acquisition, which is worth $2.2 billion. SolarCity, which Musk conceptualised in 2006, is currently the biggest rooftop solar installer in the US.

When one talks of Elon Musk or Tesla and their products, it’s hard to resist the temptation of not comparing them with Apple and its founder Steve Jobs. Both Musk and Jobs are tech visionaries. Consciously or not, both succeeded (succeeding, in case of Musk) in creating a halo around their products. All Apple products – iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac – were conceptualised by Jobs. Without him, the company is struggling and is reduced to making small tweaks every year. The grand vision is gone.

In the case of Musk, he is yet to start delivering on his grand vision. Only once people start using the products that Musk is offering, they can be sure whether to drink the kool-aid of ‘solar revolution’. For now, one can only say that Musk’s ideas sure seems irresistible.