Tesla Solar Roofs: Cheaper, Infinity Warranty, Plus Solar Power

bhattmaan

Published

8 years ago

7 minute read

Let’s jump right in, Canadian’s can pre-order here: https://www.tesla.com/en_CA/solar

Tesla released today all the information to order its new solar roof tiles products – starting with the smooth black glass tiles and the textured glass tiles, as reported earlier today.

Of course, the most important information that people were waiting for is price. CEO Elon Musk first hinted that it would be cheaper than a regular roof after accounting for energy savings, and later said that Tesla’s solar roof could cost less than a regular roof – even before energy production.

Tesla pretty much delivered on both depending on how you look at it.

The company says that the “typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85USD per square foot for a Solar Roof.”

What is important to understand is that not all tiles on the roof would be solar tiles. It depends on the energy needs of the household and shading coming from structural items such as dormers. For the house pictured above, all the tiles are from Tesla, but only some of them have solar cells in them that can generate electricity – though it’s not visible from street view.

The $21.85 per square foot price point was calculated for a roof where 35 percent of the tiles are solar (solar tiles cost more per square foot than non-solar tiles). During a conference call with journalists today, Musk said that in some cases, depending on the roofs, customers will be able to have up to 70% solar tiles, but in most cases, it will be about 40%.

They released a calculator directly on their website, which any homeowner in the US can use to get an estimate based on data from Google’s Sunroof project. Here’s an example for a home in Maryland with both 70% solar coverage and 40% solar coverage:

Ultimately, Tesla sees that most customers will essentially be paid to have a new roof, when accounting for energy generation and the solar incentive.

They are including an installed 14kWh Powerwall 2 in the quotes. It can be removed, but Tesla believes that most people will want to have the home battery pack for backup energy in case of an outage.

Tesla broke down the cost of both its solar tiles and non-solar tiles against traditional roof solutions.

The company estimates that its non-solar tiles are cheaper than regular tiles and its solar tiles are cheaper than anything else, but only when accounting for energy generation (actual cost of solar tiles is $42USD/sq-ft):

The value of Tesla’s solar roof is closely linked to its durability and its ability to generate electricity over decades.

Musk previously discussed the possibility of making the warranty last for the lifetime of the house on which it is installed and they actually did it:

“Made with tempered glass, Solar Roof tiles are more than three times stronger than standard roofing tiles. That’s why we offer the best warranty in the industry – the lifetime of your house, or infinity, whichever comes first.”

That’s for the tiles themselves. The solar power generation is guaranteed for 30 years, which is on the higher end in the solar panel industry:

During a conference call with journalists, Musk and Peter Rive reiterated their confidence in the new product’s durability, which ultimately, of course, is reflected in the warranty.

They put these through every test imaginable, including shooting a large ball of hail:

The first two tiles, smooth and textured, are going into production this summer. They decided to go with those tiles first because they received the highest number of inquiries.

A $1,000 USD deposit is required when ordering a system online now. Homeowners outside of the US can also order, but they should not expect installation until next year. Musk said that he expects strong demand and for the company to be production constrained on the tiles.

Tesla says that it will manage the entire “Solar Roof experience—from the removal of your existing roof through design, permitting, installation, operations and maintenance of the new Solar Roof.” The company estimates that the installation should take roughly the same time to install as a tile roof installation, which is typically 5-7 days.

They recently updated their mobile app in order to prepare for the integration of the solar products and the Powerwall.

Musk concluded the press call by saying: “When you think of a sustainable energy future, you want roofs to be beautiful and generate energy from the sun. That energy can then charge Powerwalls and electric vehicles. That’s the future we want.”

Tesla solar roof products are perfect for homeowners who want solar and need a new roof relatively soon, but a regular solar panel installation is still a good solution for people who don’t need a new roof. Solar and energy storage prices are highly dependent on your market (electricity cost, gov incentives, etc.) and your property. We suggest to get quotes from more than one installer to make sure you get the best energy solution for your place. UnderstandSolar is a great free service to link you to top-rated solar installers in your region for personalized solar estimates for free.

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Tesla Solar Roofs: Cheaper, Infinity Warranty, Plus Solar Power

Addictions

Can addiction be predicted—and prevented?

Published on July 11, 2025

Todayville

By Alexandra Keeler

These four personality traits are predictive of addiction. A new program is using this knowledge to prevent addiction from ever developing

In classrooms across Canada, addiction prevention is getting personal.

Instead of warning students about the dangers of drugs, a program called PreVenture teaches students about themselves — and it’s working.

Developed by Canadian clinical psychologist Patricia Conrod, PreVenture helps young people recognize how traits like risk-taking or negative thinking shape their reactions to stress.

“When you intervene around these traits and help people learn new cognitive behavioural strategies to manage these traits, you are able to reduce their substance use,” said Conrod, who is also a professor at the Université de Montréal.

By tailoring addiction prevention strategies to individual personality profiles, the program is changing how we think about addiction — from something we react to, to something we might stop before it starts.

And now, scientists say the potential for early intervention is going even deeper — down to our genes.

Personality and addiction

PreVenture is a personality-targeted prevention program that helps young people understand and manage traits linked to a higher propensity for future substance use.

The program focuses on four core traits — anxiety sensitivity, sensation seeking, impulsivity and hopelessness — that shape how individuals experience the world and respond to stress, social situations and emotional challenges.

“They don’t only predict who’s at risk,” said Conrod in an interview with Canadian Affairs. “They predict what you’re at risk for with quite a lot of specificity.”

Anxiety sensitivity shows up in people who feel overwhelmed by physical symptoms like a racing heart or dizziness. People with this trait may ultimately turn to alcohol, benzodiazepines such as Xanax, or opioids to calm their bodies.

Sensation seeking is characterized by a desire for excitement and novel experiences. This trait is associated with a higher likelihood of being drawn to substances like cannabis, MDMA, psilocybin or other hallucinogens.

“[Cannabis] alters their perceptual experiences, and so makes things feel more novel,” said Conrod.

Sensation seeking is also associated with binge drinking or use of stimulants such as cocaine.

The trait of impulsivity involves difficulty controlling urges and delaying gratification. This trait is associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in risky behaviours and an increased risk of addiction to a broad range of substances.

“Young people with attentional problems and a core difficulty with response inhibition have a hard time putting a stop on a behaviour once they’ve initiated it,” said Conrod.

Finally, the trait of hopelessness is tied to a pessimistic, self-critical mindset. People with this trait often expect rejection or assume others are hostile, so they may use alcohol or opioids to dull emotional pain.

“We call it negative attributional style,” said Conrod. “They have come to believe that the world is against them, and they need to protect themselves.”

These traits also cluster into two broader categories — internalizing and externalizing.

Anxiety sensitivity and hopelessness direct distress inward, while sensation seeking and impulsivity are characterized by outward disinhibition.

“These traits change your perception,” said Conrod. “You see the world differently through these traits.”

Conrod also notes that these traits appear across cultures, making targeted addiction prevention broadly applicable.

Personality-based prevention

Unlike most one-size-fits-all drug prevention programs, PreVenture tailors its prevention strategies for each individual trait category to reduce substance use risk.

The program uses a brief personality assessment tool to identify students’ dominant traits. It then delivers cognitive-behavioural strategies to help users manage stress, emotions and risky behaviours associated with them.

Recreation of the personality assessment tool based on the substance use risk profile scale — a scale measuring traits linked to reinforcement-specific substance use profiles. | Alexandra Keeler

Students learn to recognize how their dominant trait influences their thoughts and reactions — and how to shift those patterns in healthier directions.

“We’re trying to raise awareness to young people about how these traits are influencing their automatic thinking,” said Conrod. “You’re having them be a little more critical of their thoughts.”

Hopelessness is addressed by teaching strategies to challenge depressive thoughts; those high in sensation seeking explore safer ways to satisfy their need for stimulation; anxiety sensitivity is managed through calming techniques; and impulsivity is reduced by practicing pausing before acting.

Crucially, the program emphasizes the strengths of each trait as well.

“We try to present [traits] in a more positive way, not just a negative way,” said Sherry Stewart, a clinical psychologist at Dalhousie University who collaborates with Conrod.

“Your personality gets you into trouble — certainly, we discuss that — but also, what are the strengths of your personality?”

While a main goal of the program is preventing substance use disorders, the program barely discusses substances.

“You don’t really have to talk about substances very much,” said Conrod. “You talk more about how you’re managing the trait, and it has this direct impact on someone’s motivation to use, as well as how severely they experience mental health symptoms.”

The workshops make it clear, however, that while substances may offer temporary relief, they often worsen the very symptoms participants are trying to manage.

The genetic angle

Catherine Brownstein, a Harvard Medical School professor and geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital, says genetic factors also help explain why some people are more vulnerable to addiction.

“A lot of personality is genetic,” she said in an interview with Canadian Affairs.

Her research has identified 47 locations in human DNA that affect brain development and shape personality traits.

While substance use risk cannot yet be detected genetically, certain gene variants — like SHANK3, NRXN1 and CRY1 — are linked to psychiatric disorders that often co-occur with substance use, including ADHD and schizophrenia.

Brownstein also says genetic variations influence pain perception.

Some variants increase pain sensitivity, while others eliminate it altogether. One such gene, SCN9A, may make individuals more likely to seek opioids for relief.

“If you’re in pain all the time, you want it to stop, and opioids are effective,” said Brownstein.

While we cannot yet predict addiction risk from genetics alone, Brownstein says she thinks genetic screening combined with psychological profiling could one day personalize prevention even further.

Expansion and challenges

Conrod’s personality-targeted intervention program, PreVenture, has proven highly effective.

A five-year study published in January found that students who participated in PreVenture workshops were 23 to 80 per cent less likely to develop substance use disorders by Grade 11.

Stewart says that the concept of PreVenture began with adults with substance use disorders, but research suggests earlier intervention can alter life trajectories. That insight has driven PreVenture’s expansion to younger age groups.

Conrod’s team delivers PreVenture to middle and high school students, UniVenture to university students and OpiVenture to adults in treatment for opioid dependence.

PreVenture has been implemented in schools across the U.S. and Canada, including in B.C., Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador. Five Canadian universities are participating in the UniVenture study.

However, currently, Canada’s flagship youth prevention strategy is based on the Icelandic Prevention Model — a 1990s framework that aims to reduce youth substance use by focusing on environmental factors such as family, school and peer influence.

While the Icelandic Prevention Model has shown success in Iceland, it has serious limitations. It lacks a mental health component, does not specifically address opioid use and has demonstrated mixed results by gender.

Despite strong evidence for personality-targeted prevention, programs like PreVenture remain underused.

Conrod says education systems often default to less effective, generic methods like one-off guest speakers. She also cites staffing shortages and burnout in schools, along with insufficient mental health services, as major barriers to implementing a new program.

Still, momentum is building.

B.C. has aligned their prevention services with the PreVenture model. And organizations such as the youth wellness networks Foundry B.C. and Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario are offering the program and expanding its reach.

Conrod believes the power of the program lies in helping young people feel seen and understood.

“It’s really important that a young person is provided with the space and focus to recognize what’s unique about [their] particular trait,” she said.

“Recognize that there are other people in the world that also think this way [and tell them] you’re not going crazy.”

This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.

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Break The Needle provides news and analysis on addiction and crime in Canada.

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Crime

Sweeping Boston Indictment Points to Vast Chinese Narco-Smuggling and Illegal Alien Labor Plot via Mexican Border

Published on July 11, 2025

Todayville

Sam Cooper

Case details a pipeline from China through Mexico, trapping trafficked illegal migrants as indentured workers in a sweeping drug network.

In a sweeping indictment that tears into an underworld of Chinese narco infiltration of North American cities — including the smuggling of impoverished Chinese nationals across the Mexican border to work as drug debt slaves in illegal drug houses — seven Chinese nationals living in Massachusetts stand accused of running a sprawling, multimillion-dollar marijuana trafficking and money laundering network across New England.

The backdrop of the human smuggling allegations stretches back to 2020, as an unprecedented wave of illegal Chinese migrants surged across the U.S. border with Mexico — a surge that peaked in 2024 under the Biden administration before the White House reversed course. This explosive migration trend became a flashpoint in heated U.S. election debates, fueling concerns over border security and transnational organized crime.

Six of the accused, including alleged ringleader Jianxiong Chen of Braintree, were arrested this week in coordinated FBI raids across Massachusetts. The border exploitation schemes match exactly with decades-long human smuggling and Chinese Triad criminal pipelines into America reported by The Bureau last summer, based on leaked intelligence documents filed by a Canadian immigration official in 1993. A seventh suspect in the new U.S. indictment, Yanrong Zhu, remains a fugitive and is believed to be moving between Greenfield, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.

The case paints a striking portrait of China-based criminal organizations operating behind the quiet facades of upscale American suburban properties. Prosecutors allege the defendants owned or partnered with a network of sophisticated indoor grow houses hidden inside single-family residences in Massachusetts, Maine, and beyond, producing kilogram-scale shipments of marijuana. According to court documents, the marijuana was sold in bulk to distributors across the Northeast, and the profits — amounting to millions — were funneled into luxury real estate, cars, jewelry, and further expansion of their illicit operations.

“During a search of [ringleader Chen’s] home in October 2024, over $270,000 in cash was allegedly recovered from the house and from a Porsche in the driveway,” the indictment alleges, “as well as several Chinese passports and other identification documents inside a safe.”

According to the indictment, Chen’s cell phone data confirmed his personal role in orchestrating smuggling logistics and controlling workers. Additional searches of homes where co-defendants lived yielded over 109 kilograms of marijuana, nearly $200,000 in cash, and luxury items including a $65,000 gold Rolex with the price tag still attached.

A photo from the indictment, humorously but damningly, shows alleged ring member Hongbin Wu, 35, wearing a green “money laundering” T-shirt printed with an image of a hot iron pressing U.S. dollar bills on an ironing board — a snapshot that encapsulates the brazenness of the alleged scheme.

Key to FBI allegations of stunning sophistication tying together Chinese narcos along the U.S. East Coast with bases in mainland China is a document allegedly shared among the conspirators.

“The grow house operators maintained contact with each other through a list of marijuana cultivators and distributors from or with ties to China in the region called the ‘East Coast Contact List,’” the indictment alleges.

Investigators say the conspiracy reveals a human smuggling component directly tied to China’s underground migration and debt bondage networks, mirroring exactly the historic intelligence from Canadian and U.S. Homeland Security documents reported by The Bureau last summer.

The alleged leader, 39-year-old Jianxiong Chen, is charged with paying to smuggle Chinese nationals across the Mexican border, then forcing them to work in grow houses while withholding their passports until they repaid enormous smuggling debts.

“Data extracted from Chen’s cell phone allegedly revealed that he helped smuggle Chinese nationals into the United States — putting the aliens to work at one of the grow houses he controlled,” U.S. filings say.

“This case pulls back the curtain on a sprawling criminal enterprise that exploited our immigration system and our communities for personal gain,” said U.S. Attorney Leah Foley. “These defendants allegedly turned quiet homes across the Northeast into hubs for a criminal enterprise — building a multi-million-dollar black-market operation off the backs of an illegal workforce and using our neighborhoods as cover.”

The arrests come amid a surge of Chinese migrants entering the U.S. through Mexico, part of a pattern previously exposed in Canadian diplomatic and intelligence reporting. In 1993, a confidential Canadian government study, “Passports of Convenience,” warned that Chinese government officials, in collusion with Triads and corrupt Latin American partners, were driving a multi-billion-dollar human smuggling business. That report predicted that tens of thousands of migrants from coastal Fujian province would flood North America, empowered by Beijing’s tacit support and organized crime’s global reach.

It also warned that mass migration from China in the 1990s came during a time of political upheaval, a trend that has apparently re-emerged while President Xi Jinping’s economic and political guidance has been increasingly questioned among mainland citizens, particularly since the Covid-19 pandemic crisis and lockdowns inside China.

The 1993 report, obtained and analyzed exclusively by The Bureau, described how the Triads — particularly those connected with Chinese Communist networks in Fujian — would leverage human smuggling to extend their influence into American cities. The migrants, often saddled with debts of $50,000 or more, became trapped in forced labor, prostitution, or drug networks, coerced to repay their passage fees.

“Alien smuggling is closely linked to narcotics smuggling; many of the persons smuggled in have to resort to prostitution or drug dealing to pay the smugglers,” the 1993 Canadian immigration report says.

Citing legal filings in one U.S. Homeland Security case, it says a Triad member who reportedly smuggled 150 Fujianese migrants into New York stated that if fees aren’t paid “the victims are often tortured until the money is paid.”

Supporting these early warnings, a 1995 U.S. Department of Justice report echoed the Canadian findings, stating that “up to 100,000 Chinese aliens are smuggled into the United States each year,” with 85 percent originating from Fujian. The DOJ report also cited allegations of “negotiations between the Sun Yee On Triad and the Mainland Chinese Government,” suggesting that smuggling and criminal infiltration were tolerated — if not orchestrated — to extend China’s economic and political influence abroad.

That report added American investigators and immigration officials concluded it was nearly impossible to counter waves of illegal immigration from China with deportation orders, and the government should focus on “the larger menace working its way into U.S. cities: Chinese transnational criminal organizations.”

“To combat the growing threat of Asian organized crime in the West,” it says, “law enforcement officials must tackle this new global problem through an understanding of the Triad system and the nature of its threat to Western countries.”

In New England, the Braintree indictment shows how those old predictions have not only materialized but scaled up.

These networks operate by embedding Chinese nationals into illicit industries in North America, from black-market cannabis cultivation to high-end money laundering. Once inside, they channel profits back through complex underground banking channels that tie the North American drug economy to China’s export-driven cash flows and, ultimately, to powerful actors in Beijing.

In recent years, Maine has emerged as a strategic hotspot for illicit Chinese-controlled marijuana operations. As The Bureau has reported, the state’s vast rural areas, lax local oversight, and proximity to East Coast urban markets have made it a favored location for covert grow houses.