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My roof is slate and nearly 100 years old. It'll last another 100 with minor maintenance so removing it would be negative ROI because of increased maintenance c
by technofiend 9y ago
My roof is slate and nearly 100 years old. It'll last another 100 with minor maintenance so removing it would be negative ROI because of increased maintenance costs vs what I have today.
Still, I'll gladly swap the asphalt roof on my garage when the early adopters drive the price down enough... As an early adopter of everything from CDs to minidiscs I think I'm sitting this one out for a while longer. I don't need the solar roof equivalent of $5 blank CD-R media or Jaz drives; one is a few cents each now and the other was a failure.
I could be wrong but it seems like the better payoff is in waiting a little longer, like 2-5 years.
- rwmj 9y agoAssuming your garage roof is flat, unfortunately it won't generate too much electricity. The panels need to be at right angles to the sun for some of the time (even better if they rotate), and except in some parts of the world near the equator the sun is never directly overhead.
- ben_w 9y agoThey don't needs to, they're just more cost-effective if they do. For now, anway — sufficiently cheap future photovoltaics could well be cheaper than the cost of adding a tilt (already cheaper than adding a sun tracker, which is why grid-scale solar plants don't track the sun)