Shingle Your Roof With Solar Panels

There’s big money in green. What just a few years ago was the province of tree huggers and hippies is now the playground of none other than Dow Chemical. The company is testing its new product — the remarkable solar shingle.

Imagine your house shingled with solar panels. Imagine your house acting like a mini power station. Like what you see? Now imagine Dow Chemical raking in $5 billion by 2015 and maybe as much as $11 billion by 2020. Say goodbye to your peace pipe because this, according to ICIS, is the present and future reality of green.

ICIS quotes Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow Solar Solutions, opining on her company’s chance to change history: “We’re opening up a brand new market that does not exist today. Solar panels have many restrictions and are just not affordable to be used in any meaningful way, but we believe our product will change that paradigm.”

This Earth-shattering (or is that sun-shattering?) new product, introduced yesterday, is known as the DOW POWERHOUSE Solar Shingle (Why all caps? I don't know). The idea is that these will share rooftops with standard asphalt shingles. They will cost an average of 10 percent less than the solar panels that are bolted onto the tops of buildings; a U.S. homeowner could anticipate shelling out $27,000 for the Dow system, several thousand less than traditional home-based solar panel systems. But, of course, a lot more than for regular shingles.

Image courtesy of Marco Bellucci, via Flickr