After years of testing, Tesla finally began taking orders for its solar roof tiles. The tiles resemble common roofing material but feature photovoltaic cells underneath a transparent coating.
The company is accepting $1,000 deposits on the smooth black glass and textured glass roof tiles—two of the options it unveiled last fall.
Tesla projects the active tiles to cost $42 per square foot. The price is far below what industry experts were expecting, Bloomberg reports. That bodes well for whether or not the tiles will be a niche item for the wealthy or the widely-used product that Musk envisions.
Installations in the U.S. will begin in June, but orders outside the U.S. won’t be delivered until 2018.
Tesla’s solar roof is a keystone in founder Elon Musk’s vision for a clean energy community, fueled by electric cars and batteries. “These are really the three legs of the stool for a sustainable energy future,” Musk said. “Solar power going to a stationary battery pack so you have power at night, and then charging an electric vehicle… you can scale that to all the world’s demand.”
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