SolarCity and Tesla Motor’s Solar Roofs

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Elon Musk is a person that I look up to. This because of his many achievements and successful projects in areas of my interest, such as Space Exploration, Sustainable Energy and Electric Vehicles.

Since he began working in these areas he has created several companies (some of them he already sold), and in this post I would like to focus on two of them, TESLA Motors (american electric car brand) and SolarCity (company that produces solar panels for many different uses).

Little time ago, Elon Musk announced, on behalf of SolarCity and Tesla Motors a project called “Solar roof”.

This project is presented as part of a solution to the increasing Carbon Dioxide levels in our atmosphere. A solution that Elon Musk has been trying to make possible by means of his companies and that can be divided in three crucial parts:

  • Solar Roof
  • Storage
  • Transport

From these three parts, the last one (transport) has been being worked on since the creation of Tesla Motors. The idea behind it is simple, making electric cars as efficient and appealing to the public as possible. This would possibly start making the interest in more polluting cars decrease and, in an ideal scenario, make them not needed in our society.

The remaining two topics from the list above have been recently presented and explained to the public (presentation which can be found in the video below).

These two parts are very interconnected, the idea of a solar roof is replacing ordinary roof tiles (common in american homes) by roof tile’s shaped solar panels. Elon Musk, joined by the SolarCity, developed these solar panels with the objective of making them both efficient and cheap. The entrepreneur explained that assembling a roof made of these tiles is cheaper than assembling an ordinary roof and implementing the energy circuit needed to power a house that has no private energy sources. The fact that implementing such a energy producing system is cheaper than having what we call an
ordinary roof and energy system will, hopefully, attract more clients. Also, even tho in my opinion less importantly, this roof tiles are designed to be aesthetically pleasing.

The remaining part is the one that was created more recently, it consist on a system of storage and distribution of the energy produced by the solar panels. This way, as Elon Musk explains in the presentation, the house will be properly powered at night andtesla-powerwall-large-v2-opt in the periods where the solar panels don’t produce as
much energy. The batteries that will allow such thing were named “Powerwall” and they are massively produced by Tesla Motors. According to SolarCity’s CEO and to Elon Musk (both took presence on the presentation video shown above), this batteries can power up efficiently at least two rooms, each one.

The “solar roof” project is another one to add to the list of environmentally friendly projects this entrepeneur has presented to the public.

In my opinion, Elon Musk is someone who is actively contributing to a more sustainable and environmentally friendly future that we all will be a part of.

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