Tesla’s solar roof is now available to order

Announced last fall, Tesla’s solar roof tiles that look nothing like regular solar panels have been hotly anticipated. Not to be confused with the company’s own solar panels, the solar tiles function simultaneously as roofing and a power utility, and come in four styles: Texture glass, Smooth glass, Tuscan, and Slate. And as of today, the textured and smooth glass varieties are officially available to order online (the latter two are expected to arrive in 2018.)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk teased the launch of the product in a tweet in late March and again this morning. By this afternoon, the Solar Roof portion of the company’s website has been refreshed with much more detailed product specs, as well as what many have been eager to know: pricing.

To that end, the website begins the ordering process with a tool that uses Google Project Sunroof data to help you calculate how much a solar roof system would cost depending on the location and size of your home and the percentage of solar coverage desired. It also tells you how much value such a system would generate in energy and factors in tax credits and the cost of a complementary Tesla Powerwall to reveal net savings.

A Tesla solar roof system will comprise a mix of active, energy-generating tiles (which comes in at $42 per square foot) and inactive tiles ($11 per square foot), depending on specific needs of the project. According to Electrek, the company claims its inactive tiles are cheaper than regular roof tiles, while its active solar tiles are cheaper than the competition when energy generation is accounted for.

“The pricing is better than I expected, better than everyone expected,” said Hugh Bromley, a solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, in light of these numbers.

In a followup tweet, Musk stated that the solar roof will be available to “almost any country,” and will be deployed in the U.S. this year and overseas next year. A $1,000 deposit is required to order online.