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Comment by Sparkyte | Hacker News Reader

I can tell you I am excited... but when can we realistically afford solar panels with high efficiency?

If a person came by my house and said, "Yo, I can do an installation!". Those panels are like running on a 10 year old or greater design and process.

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Right. With something like software, if you get 1% efficiency, you can update most existing devices and that has a huge impact. With this, I feel like it would be far better to focus instead on lowering manufacturing costs and developing technology to make it easier to produce, rather than more efficient.

Being able to deploy 50% more panels now is more important than being able to deploy solar panels that return 10% more electricity.

Indeed if solar panel roofs were cheaper than most roofs. People would be able to replace them with something far more sustainable than someone's side project.

I really like tesla's idea of solar roofs and how they implemented them. They need to be lightweight and cheap. Easy to replace.

Tesla's solar roofs are anything but cheap, they are priced as super luxury.

We need solar roofs to be cheap though.

That might be surprisingly soon, actually. The panels themselves are relatively cheap, and you're spending about half of the total cost on everything besides the panels. If switching to higher-efficiency panels allows you to install 5 panels instead of 6, the resulting savings in labor might already pay for a decent chunk of it.

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