Name: How This Roofing Company Is Taking On Tesla’s Solar Roof
Uploaded: 2022-01-14T21:55:59.000Z
Duration: 14 min 50 s
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What we're really looking for here is how do we have a solar roof that is better than a normal roof?

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Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Solar Roof to much fanfare in 2016, but the concept of solar shingles that blend in seamlessly has been around for

Its reasons for lack of market traction tend to be based on the fact that it's more expensive than just a solar panel on a

Solar shingles were first patented back in the 1970s, and long-forgotten companies like AstroPower and PowerLight experimented with it in the 2000s.

In the last decade, larger organizations like Dow Chemical Company and BP Solar have tried it too.

All of my involvement with these products right now is getting calls from either the manufacturers or the homeowners that have these products on the

roof that aren't working, and they say, "Can you, can you fix it or remove it?"

Cinnamon, who founded Silicon Valley-based solar installer Cinnamon Energy Systems, has dealt specifically with AstroPower, Dow and BP products.

But Tesla has had a rocky road too, as costs have soared and complications with the tech persist.

Now, GAF Energy is getting into the game.

It's a subsidiary of Standard Industries, a global industrial manufacturing business that's been around since the 1800s.

We are the world's largest manufacturer of roofing and waterproofing.

GAF Energy just released a shingle called Timberline Solar, which won the Best of Innovation award for Smart Cities at CES.

It's clear where the solar shingles end and the regular roof begins.

But it's the first product of its kind that can be nailed on just like a regular shingle, which GAF Energy says will make it far more accessible.

A Tesla roof can take weeks, literally weeks, to install.

This is a product that goes up in a day by a roofing crew using the same tools a roofing crew is used to using.

I think that's the game changer that we are bringing to the market, that the product is really designed from a roofing perspective.

Like similar products before, it's aimed at residential customers who want to go solar, but don't like the traditional rack mounted aesthetic.

Many experts though, say the superior aesthetics will always come at a cost.

One, these roof tiles are always going to be more expensive simply because there's more parts to manufacture and more parts to assemble on

the roof. Second, they're always going to be less efficient because things that are on the roof run hot, so you're going to get less output per square

foot. And they're always going to be less reliable, because reliability is proportional to the number of wiring connections in the electronics.

But GAF Energy hopes to prove the critics wrong.

CNBC got an early look inside its new San Jose R&D and manufacturing facility to see if it will be the one to finally bring a functional and

affordable solar shingle roof to the market.

Higher costs, alongside reduced efficiency and reliability, have led to the downfall of many solar shingle companies of the past.

Unfortunately, pioneers get a lot of arrows in their back and sometimes those errors are fatal.

BP Solar withdrew the product from the market and got hit with a lot of lawsuits.

And Dow Powerhouse also stopped manufacturing maybe about six or seven years ago,

Even when the shingles were backed by big companies, Cinnamon says that the solar cells degraded quickly.

And because the product's wiring and connectors were inaccessibly located behind the shingles, this made it very difficult to troubleshoot problems

The maintenance and the operation of the product just didn't meet the expectations.

In other words, they were supposed to last for 25 years, and maybe they only lasted for two or three years or five years before they degraded or

Today, shingles comprise just a minuscule portion of the broader solar market.

Maybe one percent would be an optimistic estimate in the overall residential market.

Cinnamon says that when it comes to Tesla, it's too early to tell how it will fare.

There's already been plenty of stumbles though, and the Tesla Solar Roof has undergone at least three different iterations.

While the shingles started off quite small, about 14 inches by nine inches, now they're about 45 inches long and between 15 and 17 inches wide,

according to company marketing materials, likely making them simpler to install and more reliable.

But the product remains extremely costly.

Last April, Tesla hiked prices dramatically for Solar Roof customers who had already signed contracts, calling the added costs "adjustments for

individual roof complexity." One customer, whose price shot up from $72,000 to $146,000, became the lead plaintiff in a

suit against Tesla. The company later said that it would reverse the increases.

We did find that we basically made some significant mistakes in assessing the difficulty of certain roofs.

But the complexity of roofs varies dramatically.

GAF Energy says its shingles are designed for easier installation.

The company already offers an integrated solar roof product, where the panels are a part of the roof itself, and says that it has installed over

3,000 of these since the product's launch in 2017.

Already, we've installed more solar roofs than Tesla and the next largest competitor.

So we're already the leader by far in integrated solar roofs.

GAF Energy debuted its solar shingles on January 3rd, 2022.

They're 64 by 17 inches, nearly 20 inches longer than Tesla's shingle.

Each GAF shingle has a max power output of 45 watts, whereas Tesla's latest shingles are 71.7 watts, a 22 percent power increase over

The size of the shingles is right now because it's the optimum between the cost and the ability to align them on the roof.

Of course we can do smaller panels, as small as a single cell, just the cost of that.

The electronic components for GAF's shingles are housed in front, in a wire channel that runs along the left hand side of each shingle.

The expectation is that this will make them easier to service than shingles with wiring connections buried underneath.

Currently, GAF Energy does not offer an energy storage product, though the system can be paired with existing battery storage systems from other

What really sets GAF Energy apart, it says, is its deep connection to the roofing sector.

David Winter, the Co-CEO of parent company Standard Industries, says that one out of every four residential roofs in the U.S.

comes from GAF. And that means the company has a major leg up when it comes to finding new solar customers.

The natural moment to actually put solar on a roof is that moment when you're already about to replace your roof.

It makes literally no sense to put like brand new PV on an old roof that's well into its warranty.

So we're the people that are sitting at the proverbial kitchen table with the homeowner at that moment that they need to replace their roof, where we

That keeps GAF Energy's sales and marketing costs for their solar products far below the industry average.

And that's actually critically important, because according to Wood Mackenzie, customer acquisition costs normally represent about 23 percent

of the total cost of a residential solar system.

In fact, the single largest constituent cost of solar today is finding customers.

Even with solar shingle's checkered history, GAF Energy believes that it can convince customers to not only go solar, but to get shingles too,

without costly sales and marketing campaigns.

Again, we're part of the world's largest roofing manufacturer.

We have access to materials that typical solar companies don't have access to.

Just as the market size for roofing is larger than the market size for solar, we have a lot more people that can actually install this.

No one has ever specifically try to make a solar product that a roofer can install.

And we've done it, and our product goes on with just a nail gun.

It goes on twice as fast as typical solar.

Additionally, GAF Energy touts the fact that it assembles and partially manufactures its shingles at its facility in San Jose.

While the company still imports its PV cells from Thailand, it believes that having some manufacturing located in the U.S.

What that allows us to do is take improvements in our product from the lab and get them instantiated in the product very, very quickly.

If you think about the alternative, or in fact the current model, if you innovate in your product, you then have to fly a team from the United

States to typically Southeast Asia to try to execute the changes on the product line.

And what you see is changes to your product take quarters and years, literally.

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How This Roofing Company Is Taking On Tesla’s Solar Roof

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