Solar roof tiles

[andygates]

Here's just the sort of home-generation idea that we need: solar roof tiles from SRS Energy.  They are supplied just like ordinary pantiles, and they are installed by roofers, just like ordinary pantiles - not by some expensive tech guy.  Details are a bit thin but they look just awesome to me.

This is the kind of thing which will make the passive home - a building that just consumes energy - an anachronism fairly soon. 

Comments

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

I once had this idea that I still think might not be as stupid as it sounds. Solar panels on tube trains. No, wait, hear me out.

London Underground has a problem with trains being too hot in the summer (and some of the other seasons). One of the issues with air conditioning is 'where does the hot air go once you get it out of the car'? Some of the deepest tunnels have trialed using the old sewers (or rather the water in them) to do a heat transfer with some success, so that takes care of them. Also, there's concern over the cost of fitting air conditioning and the power considerations.

Now, quite a lot of the underground is actually overground. I forget the exact proportion but I think it's north of 50%. If you could find a slim fitting air conditioning unit, couldn't you put them in the stock that runs on these partially overground lines and then power them from solar panels on the roof of the carriage. They must need to replace these every so often, so just fix them as part of the normal maintenance routines.

The hot air has somewhere to go (outside). It'll provide cooling at the points where the train is presumably getting heated up the most. The unit will just switch off when it goes underground because it won't have power. I have no idea how long the trains would stay cool(er) once they've gone underground, but is something better than nothing?

I expect this idea exposes the large gaps in my knowledge of the underground system, the expense of air conditioning systems, the mechanics of pretty much everything and various laws of physics.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

It's a nice idea though I've no idea how practical it may be.

What gets me excited about these roof tiles is their utter banality. This isn't weird hippy stuff, it's ordinary roof tiles for an ordinary roof. A quick swap of the mains electricity consumer unit to a modern buy-back one and Bob's your uncle.

I really do see this stuff as the loft insulation or indoor bog of the naughties. And (given a couple of years for the tech to mature and manufacturer licensing to be worked out) there is no reason at all that this stuff can't be mandated in new builds.

[despaer.livejournal.com]

Bring it on. I always favour solar over others as it is accessable anywhere and there is always a basic minimum amount of juice that you can generate with it. Now if we can just persuade the government to spend £19bn on getting these babies rolled out instead of wasting it on ID cards...

[simoneck.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. Fantastic idea.
It'll be interesting to see what turns up over then next few years.
Global warming has only really been mainstream and accepted for what, 5 years maybe 10. People are only just coming up with the sensible practical workable ideas (dumping iron in the ocean etc doesn't count) like the tiles.
I still think we need fusion working large scale, or the sort of changes that a democracy can't handle, to have a real impact. But my predicting the future powers are pretty poor.

[teahisme.livejournal.com]

Cold fusion seems a myth as of my last researching of it. I rather think anything else similarly related in the way of nuclear is the wrong way to go. Carbon degrades much more quickly than nuclear waste.

I'm totally excited about roof tiles like that. I really hope they become feasible. Yay for finding really cool things on the net Andy. :D

[despaer.livejournal.com]

I have just had a slightly longer trawl through the website and it would be noce if these people could actually say how much power their tiles will produce on, say, a cloudy day and a sunny day (even if it was LA based). They do provide some numbers but frankly it looks like they just invented them because they look good.

This is a major problem that the solar panel/tile industry needs to sort out, the business of the product getting sold like double glazing. Namely, you don't know how much you will pay until some horrible salesman has sat in your house for an evening, making price comparisons is almost impossible and you don't get given any hard data about expected power output under a variety of conditions.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

He's talking about hot fusion - which works, but not well enough for reliable power generation yet. Problem is, that "yet" has been around for at least twenty years - it's a problem which requires a lot of hard science and massive engineering to overcome, and without a Manhattan Project-scale effort, development is naturally slow.

*Purely* in terms of climate change, nuclear would be great. If there was enough of it, which is disputed.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

"the sort of changes a democracy can't handle"

Aye. And this is what depresses me. The closest I can think of in terms of a lifestyle-altering grass-roots change that has no immediate benefit to the people being asked to change is the Chinese "one child" policy. And that had to be imposed by a Communist centre.

Much of the world won't accept a statist imposition of rules, not yet (and by the time the evidence is great enough, the damage may be too great). A religion might do it: if emitting more carbon than you sequester becomes a new sin, with a reward in the afterlife for otherwise nurturing the Garden, and social opprobium for sinners, that might work. But I doubt it would take off.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

I concur. Some actual numbers would be nice!

[jonnycowbells.livejournal.com]

And Virgil led Dante from Limbo into the second circle, and as he did so there was laid wide a great plane populated of the middle classes, chasing supermarket plastic bags that they could never catch wafted on some unseen breeze.

"Behold those who recycled but never carbon-balanced their air travel."

I figure we're about 700 years too late.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

That's exactly why I'm embracing hedonism. If we're going to hell, we may as well get a tan.