A San Jose company is turning heads at the annual CES electronics show in Las Vegas this week with solar roofing shingles it says undercuts the price of what Tesla Inc. offers by half.
GAF Energy LLC, which last year moved production of its solar panels from South Korea to San Jose, won the Best of Innovation Award for Smart Cities at CES. The company is a subsidiary of industrial giant Standard Industries and a sister to GAF, one of the biggest roofing companies in the world.
GAF Energy's Timberline Solar shingles challenge the Solar Roof that Tesla introduced in 2016. They can be nailed to a roof, just like a regular shingle, which GAF Energy says makes them easier and less costly to install. They are also bigger, which the company says makes them easier to make and increases reliability.
"Solar roofs are the future of clean energy, and Timberline Solar is the game-changing innovation that will get us there," GAF Energy President Martin DeBono said in this week's product announcement.
The company believes its ties to a company that is already a major roofer will help it win business. GAF claims about a third of the asphalt shingle roofs in the United States.
"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 brand new PV on an old roof that’s well into its warranty,” David Winter, Co-CEO of Standard Industries, told CNBC.
While it assembles and partially manufactures the shingles in San Jose, GAF Energy imports its PV cells from Thailand.
"What that allows us to do is take improvements in our product from the lab and get them to instantiate in the product very, very quickly," DeBono told CNBC. "And what you see is changes to your product take quarters and years, literally, whereas here it takes hours and days."
When it took space at Optical Court in south San Jose last year, GAF Energy said it likes the location because it's near manufacturing facilities run by sister company GAF and because the region has plenty of workers trained in solar.
