Elon Musk may be the Pied Piper, but Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is intent on throwing cold water all over him:
According to Musk as quoted in Electrek,
He said that the glass developed by Tesla for the solar roof tiles weigh “a third, a quarter and sometimes even a fifth” of other current concrete and ceramic roof solutions. Musk calculated that because of the weight and fragility of the current products, logistic costs and breakage are important parts of the total cost.
But that is not true of asphalt shingles, which are lighter, not fragile and easy to ship.
Now TreeHugger is no fan of asphalt shingles. They are, as I have noted before, the the cheapest and ugliest building enclosing material ever invented. But they are normal. What Elon Musk is selling is not normal or regular, but a comparable for a very high end niche product that is used for a tiny fraction of roofs on houses of very rich people, that costs between ten and twenty times the price of a normal, regular roof.
They are a normal and regular roof like a Tesla is normal and regular car.
Or, in other words, Elon didn’t do his homework.
