Solar Shingles & The Future of Residential Energy Independence
This is a recorded interview (Contractor Radio) between host Jim Johnson and Peter Reese (CTO, Relief Energy) about residential solar shingles and their role in energy independence. Reese gives personal background (former teacher, utility and nuclear experience), explains why rooftop solar shingles are attractive (aesthetics, rapid deployability vs. large centralized plants), and argues residential adoption at scale could add significant capacity (claims: ~5 million roofs replaced per year; ~1 million good sites; ~1M homes ≈ 10 GW). He contrasts past thin-film shingle attempts with current mono‑silicon approaches (~20% typical panel efficiency) and describes Relief Energy’s innovations: a photoactive, highly refractive recyclable backplate that enables bifacial gains and red‑shifts UV to usable wavelengths, use of N-type heterojunction cells (claimed ~25% base efficiency), and an installer-friendly design that remains at 0 V until the electrician commissions it. Relief Energy claims its upcoming product has “72, 73% nominal” (as stated) and, with bifacial gain, behaves like an ~80‑watt shingle — presented as ~30–40% more power than legacy 52–55 W shingles. Discussion also covers lifecycle/environmental tradeoffs, battery chemistries (Li‑ion, LiFe, sodium‑ion), deployment speed vs. other generation (gas turbines ~5-year lead time, nuclear multi-decade), and IP/production considerations (patents on backplate and wiring; other details kept as trade secrets).
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And just that whole idea of, you know, eking an existence out of this wonderful, bounteous earth with your bare hands and having to navigate that world. This is the frontier of the new age, the energy frontier. I spent some time in Africa. When the wealthy and big business need electricity, the poor and the middle class, they shut off the substations. And I don't want to see our country doing that. But frankly, unless we provide pathways for the most affordable and quickest to build energy. But we're kind of headed down that path. This is why I'm so passionate about residential, particularly solar shingles.
The way the country and the world in general is moving in with technology right now, it's creating a need for an immense amount of power. You've seen some of their big AI type farm server plants. They're building one in Austin. It's supposed to be massive. How does that affect our need for energy? What's that going to do to, like, your traditional energy sources? Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Contractor Radio. I am your host, Jim Johnson, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro, where we help people achieve their goals without sacrificing the things that matter most. Our whole goal with our show is to inform you, educate you, give you some knowledge and hopefully some understanding so that you can make wise decisions in your business and prevent a lot of those stumbling blocks and obstacles that come along. One of the things I'm super passionate about, and you could probably go back a few shows ago, and you'll know that I'm pretty passionate about solar and what that looks like when it comes to being a roofer. Not necessarily a solar installer, but how does a roofer get involved in the solar game and add that to his repertoire that he offers out there to homeowners? And I'm not a big fan of like, rack and panel systems and things like that. I really honed in on the roofing shingle itself. And many of you have probably heard of, like, Tesla as a solar shingle and those type of things. GAF has a product, CertainTeed has a product. But each one of those, to be honest with you, I'm not exactly enamored with. And I don't know if they cover enough surface area, generate enough power. They're super expensive in certain cases. And then just the hurdle of a contractor learning the solar world. And that works in reverse, too. Solar guys learning the roofing world is a difficult transition for both. I've seen a lot of them have some difficulties with that. So a couple of weeks ago, I got an email about a new product that's coming out from some folks that I was associated with and in that solar world and solar shingle world. And I'm super excited because we got a brainiac on with us today. This guy knows anything and everything about all the various solar shingles, how they work, the electricity, the design and. And really the all encompassing aspect of this idea of solar shingles being incorporated into our roofing world. So I'm super excited to bring on our special guest today, Peter Reese from Relief Energy, CTO mastermind. Unbelievable savant when it comes to solar. Welcome to the show, Peter. Good to have you on board, man.
Thanks for having me, Jim.
I got to meet you a couple years ago. We hung out. I could tell you knew what you were talking about. And as we have these peaks and valleys and our road down the entrepreneurial world, I got to know you through that experience. And I'm excited to talk to you today with what's changed about solar shingles. What are some of the things that are going on? So before we go any further, what brought you into this world and why are you passionate about it and what are you hoping to do with it?
Yeah, you know, it comes to a certain point in our life where we. I mean, I'm always learning. I love learning. It's one of my top five strengths, if you will, is a learner. But at a certain point, I found myself teaching more than learning. I was a high school teacher and I thought, you know what? Almost 20 years ago, I made the transition from high school teacher into energy in the environment, particularly solar. And then I worked for XL Energy and transmission and nuclear for a while. And for most of those 20 years, I'm like, I need to learn more. I need to learn more. Just voraciously learning. And then at a certain point I'm like, I'm pretty much unemployable because I know more. I actually feel that, okay, at a certain point I know more than. I mean, not, not to brag, but when you do something for 20 years, you're like, okay, I actually do know something about this at some point. So my, really, my motivation for, you know, I. I've watched a couple of your podcasts, Jim, and you're asking, why do you exist? And I thought about that and I just want to really leave the world a better place. You know, not the whole world. Right. I don't have that reach, but just every individual I talk with, I want them to feel like the world is a slightly better place now than it was before our conversation. That's really all we can do, right, is what we have in front of us be present in there with people. So. And I grew up on a dairy farm. You know, my dad did organic dairy before there was really organic. An organic dairy industry. Yeah.
Isn't that what he. Wait.
Yeah, well, he. In the 80s, right. Dating myself a little bit. He was able to manage a 200 acre, 30 cow, 30 head cow farm. Put us kids through private school and college and just really manage things really well. He'd be the first one to acknowledge that you couldn't do that today anymore. You need to be have like 5,000 cows to do anything with it. So it's a shame, but that's, I would say that's my inspiration. He, he turns 90 in three days. He's still with us. My mom passed, but I would say that's, you know, just making the world a better place, doing the right thing, even though it's difficult and enjoying the outdoors. We grew up in Red Wing, Minnesota. Beautiful country, rolling hills, just a few miles from the Mississippi River. Just awesome. And it's just, you know, in my lifetime, I hate to be a downer, but in my lifetime we've lost 73% of our wildlife from this beautiful planet that we've been gifted.
I'm absolutely on board with. I feel like we have a responsibility to leave the world a better place than what we came into it. I'm not sure we're achieving that. This is why I'm passionate about alternative energy sources, taking care of our planet, being responsible, having morals and ethics and character in the business that you're in, doing right by other human beings. I think some of that may be being lost in this idea of gathering and gaining and all that other stuff that so many are focused on and, and it's a bit of a frustration for me, to be honest with you. So that's really one of the big reasons I wanted to have you on here also. I lived about 30 minutes from Red Wing, Minnesota for 18 years near River Falls, Spring Valley. I know how cold it is there. I know about dairy farms and all that good stuff. That is a hard life. There's no way in the world I'd ever want to do that. He was like, hard work. I got a lot of respect for your dad. And happy birthday to him too, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
So with it comes to why solar shingles? Why that? Like there's other things you actually mentioned, like nuclear energy and so why solar shingles and not some of the Other things that are out there.
Yes. I worked at the utility for almost seven years. XL is a pretty good company. It's a good utility, but it's kind of the definition of the status quo. They need to be right. We need reliability, we need affordable energy. Xcel's got a over a hundred year history of providing electricity for, I don't know, nine states or something like that. But they're not designed to be entrepreneurial or groundbreaking. They're kind of designed to be behind the curve, right? Which is. That's what we want. They used to call them widows and orphan stocks. So really not a match for me in my personality. I wanted to get into solar, but when I was there from 2011 to 2017, solar was kind of more of a marketing thing. For Excel, I did transmission, $2 billion transmission, build out the CapEx 2020 projects that I was running supply chain and managing contracts for that. And nuclear, I did that for three years. I absolutely love nuclear. It's statistically per megawatt hour of energy, the safest power out there. It's also carbon free, the cleanest. Right. And it's very cheap and affordable when it's working well.
It's got its own baggage though, right? Like it's.
I mean, when you hear it, we're not here to talk about nuclear, but when you hear the word Chernobyl or Fukushima or Three Mile Island.
Yeah, I started with Three Mile Island.
You know, those words come with baggage because when things go bad with nuclear, they go really bad really fast. And you know, so that's not why I left nuclear. I left nuclear. I left the utility largely because I wanted to do solar. Solar is frankly the only energy that you can put on your roof. You're not going to put a nuclear plant on your roof. No matter what anyone says. You're not going to. I mean, you're not going to put a coal plant or a gas plant. You know, you're just not going to do that. You know, maybe have a diesel generator, but that's not something you're going to run with 247 solar with batteries, you can actually run 24,7. It gets expensive when you add those batteries. But I've always been about, you know, growing up on the farm, about independence and security. My mom was a huge fan of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House on the Prairie books and just that whole idea of, know, eking an existence out of this wonderful bounteous earth with your bare hands and having to navigate that world like PA and Ma Ingalls did something, you know, I'm like, you know, this is the frontier of the new age, the energy frontier. So, yeah, solar panels, exciting. Love them. But it's been a little bit of a saturated space and I would say half of the deals that we would have made when I was installing solar panels were, you know, an esthetic concern. Right. Well, we just don't like the boxy look. And yeah, we bought our house because of the way it looks. If we put boxy solar panels on it, it's my whole electricians. Right, Electricians drilling holes in the roofs. Is that where you want your electricians spending their time?
No, I don't like holes through my roof if I can avoid them. It's been my whole thing, like I've always wanted to have a self sustaining home. The expense of it isn't so much about do I equal out on my electric bill or any of that kind of stuff. It's more like, can I take what God has given us and produce the amount of energy that we need to run our home with while still being something that has value down the road when I go and try to sell it? And those solar panels on the house, they're ugly as hell. Any realtor you talk to hates them. They actually tell the new homeowner to go make them pay for having that removed. You see a lot of that out there. And so when you can actually integrate it into the roof system, make it watertight, it just has a better aesthetic look and it's also better for your resale value. So there's a lot of naysayers out there about solar too. Like the idea of the waste it creates and stuff like that whenever you're making solar panels. What's your opinion on that, Eric?
I could talk statistics and numbers a little bit. Yes. If you're using coal to make your solar panels, you need a good source of energy to refine what is sand and heat the oxygen out of there. And then you get your silicon metallic grade ingots. It's hard for solar to do that. So a lot of it is made with coal. But the energy that's produced by a solar panel over its lifetime, which is 30, 40, 50 years, is about five, six times the energy that is expended with the coal to make that. So that's one of the statistics. Yes, any energy we make does produce waste, but with solar you're producing less waste. And yes, yes, we do need to, you know, especially if we're going to make solar what they call dispatchable, meaning we can control when and how much to release. We need batteries for that. There is a environmental cost to mining the lithium and other elements, particularly lithium. However, you know, just a thought experiment, right, if we were to replace all the fossil fuels with renewables, it would require a lot of mining, but that's about 1,250th of how much coal we mine every year. So I think people, you know, there's millions and billions and trillions, right? Each one of those is a thousandth of the next. So.
And what you're doing right now is, you know, if I'm a roofing contractor, you're giving me selling points like why a homeowner might choose this as a solution. Those are tough questions you get asked all the time about, you know, this is a, as a viable option. So, yep, the way the country and the world in general is moving with technology right now, it's creating a need for an immense amount of power. You've seen some of the big AI type farm server plants they're building. One in Austin is supposed to be massive. How does that affect our need for energy? What's that going to do to like, your traditional energy sources? It's going to draw heavily on them. And so how does that affect the normal average homeowner? And can it even produce what's going to be necessary? Especially in the world of AI, there's so much going on there is drawing energy. I don't think people really understand that side of what AI is doing.
Yeah, I'm not real experienced with AI, but I walked into just a very small like crypto mining farm one time and the heat that was put off by those servers required, you know, not just the power to run those servers, but also the air conditioning and the cooling and all that. Those need to run, you know, 24 7, 365, requiring a tremendous amount of electricity. I don't have the numbers about how much electricity with that they need and how much we're going to need right now. But the truth is that solar, particularly solar, is really the only electricity source that can be frankly installed in days. Whereas everything else, gas turbines are the next quickest that you can install. And the lead time on gas turbines right now about five years. Right. The makers of those, ge, Siemens whatnot, they're booked for five years. Nuclear, I love nuclear. But the last nuclear plant we built in this country in Georgia, $30 billion, it took 24 years from start to finish. That's not happening in the time that we need. I spent some time in Africa and The truth is, when the wealthy and big business need electricity, the poor and the middle class don't have it. They shut off the substations to their developments. And I don't want to see our country doing that. But frankly, unless we provide pathways for the most affordable and quickest to build energy, we're kind of headed down that path. And this is why I'm so passionate about residential, particularly solar shingles. Because there's 5 million homes in the US that need new roofs every year. At least half of those homeowners have thought about seriously putting solar on their house. And about a million of those sites are really good locations for it. No company really makes a solar shingle that a roofer can actually install. Tesla's expensive GAF is expensive. And, you know, but if we could do a million homes a year, that's like 10 gigawatts, like 10 nuclear plants worth of electricity. Put a little batteries on there. What we can do is very possible. We just need to be allowed to do it.
Yeah, that's a little bit of what I'm attempting to do here. I'm putting solar shingles on my own home here this fall. They're actually sitting outside my driveway right now.
However, I can help Jim. Yeah, I, I, for the world, for the public, I will help you however you need to get those on there.
We'll get that figured out for sure. I just had some details to get put together. One is the electrician aspect of things. Like, hey, what do I have to do? And do I have to connect to the grid and all that other stuff? Everything I'm finding out is I don't have to do any of that. I only have to connect to the grid. If I want to make money off of my electricity, which mine is not. That's not the goal. I want to be self contained. And if somebody decides to shut off my power or the grid isn't working, I want to be able to still do what I want to do. And so that's my end goal with this thing. The, the solar shingles have had a varying degree of amount of power that they can generate. And there's number of watts per shingle and stuff like that. How does relief. Because that's, and relief is not like L, I, E, F. It's L, E, A, F. I love that. I thought that was a great name, by the way. How does that compare to maybe older technology and some of that stuff that's going on out there today?
Yeah. So when solar shingles first came around, Dow Powerhouse is Probably the first of the attempts at mass marketing solar shingles were a thin film, a number of different know, gallium arsenide. The efficiency, you know, the conversion of the sunlight hitting the photovoltaic element was pretty low compared to what is now, you know, mono silicon. And really, you know, China about 10, 15 years ago decided they were going to be the world leader and they threw billions and billions of dollars at the monocrystalline. So other promising technologies, particularly thin film technologies, really just couldn't compete with that type of state support for one particular technology. So a lot of the US frankly lost our lead in solar about 15 years ago when China threw all that money at the mono silicon. What I'm saying is just about all solar shingles out there now are the same technology as solar panels. They're just in a different frame, right? So they essentially have the same efficiency. You know, the conversion is about 20%, you know, the light hitting the roof. And just, you know, before someone says, well, 20% is not that great, well compare that to 0% of your asphalt roof. And now all that sunlight is now heat that your air conditioning needs to get rid of. So that's way of saying it is, you know, it's, you're turning that heat into electricity. Rather than a problem for your building, it's becoming a solution.
It actually blew my mind when we flew a drone over that with a FLIR camera that it was cooler where the solar shingles were for the house. So it was actually absorbing that heat, not dissipating it into the home and converting it into power. And most of the shingles I've seen are somewhere around like 55 watts, something like that, 52, 55 that a single shingle can produce. And whichever design, the same amount of surface area generates about 55 watts. What has happened with relief in that arena?
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that. So solar shingles up until now have been, you know, really one sided, right? They sit on the roof. One of the developments of the past five years in the solar world in general is the advent of bifacial panels with utility scale. You now, most of them have trackers where they track the sun from east to west. You get some bifacial gain. When, especially like in Minnesota, when you have snow on the ground, there's a reflection of that energy to the backside of the panel. So you can get, you know, 10, 15, 20, even 30% like bifacial gain. So you have a 400 watt panel that can start to act like even a 500 watt panel. So pretty exciting. So we've taken that and we have made a backplate that is photoactive. We use a highly refractive compounds within the backplate itself, which can be 100% recyclable recycled plastic, by the way. So not only are we saving, you know, not only are we keeping asphalt out of the landfills, but we're also keeping plastic out of the landfills too. I could go deep down that path. But back to the original question is. So now, now we've got our cells made of N type heterojunction cells, which is still mono silicon, wired differently and they allow more light to pass through the cells. Now they hit that foot photoactive backplate and we're actually what's called red shifting the, you know, 3 to 5% of the ultraviolet light that is unusable. We're actually red shifting it to, you know, from 100 nanometers to 500 nanometers, which is usable. So now we're getting 25 with the heterojunction 25% efficiencies and, and we're getting some bifacial gain up to 30% efficiencies or more in some conditions.
So for that same 55 watt space, what are we generating with this new technology?
So our upcoming product is going to be 72, 73% nominal. But with the bifacial gain, we see it acting like an 80 watt cell, 80 watt shingle. So we're talking 30, 40% more. By just thinking about how light acts.
Differently, we're getting kind of nerdy and I like getting dirty. I'm that guy. But I want to talk about the practical.
Yep.
On my home we did the whole check it out, we'll see what sun hits it and how much could we offset with my house and because I have tree cover and stuff like that, it was about 78, 80% that we could offset my electrical. So I'm not net positive. I'm not at 100%. There's still going to be this 20 to 25% that I would pay because that is what they could generate. But at 7280 somewhere in there, I might be able to fully offset. Is that an accurate. Like could more homes find full offset because you're generating more power in the same surface area?
I mean. Yes, yes. The odd thing is that when people find that their electricity is quote unquote free, they actually start to use more.
So that, no, that won't be me.
But then people will think about, okay, maybe I'll get an electric vehicle Because I'm generating my own fuel. Right. And electric vehicles use a lot of electricity. Right. So tell me about it.
We have one, we bought a Mustang, Ford Mustang Mach GT electric.
I just drove one. They seem like great cars.
Unbelievable. It's so fast. Get the gt. It's worth the extra money. Lightning fast. But we tracked how much more was it costing us per month having an electric vehicle plugged in, because it's plugged in at the house. We put in a, you know, we put in a receptacle and everything. It was about 17 more per month.
Okay.
Now we're spending a lot more than that in gas. And I can get.
Right.
Plus I don't have belts to replace, hoses to replace, engine to malfunction, any of that kind of stuff. Like the maintenance on it in my vehicle. I pulled in the gas station one day to get some gas. My wife was with me. She goes, it's like the first time I've been to a gas station in six months. I don't even remember what this is like. But it's those types of things that make me even want more. To have some of my own power supply so that I can be as self contained as possible. And I don't want to be like Mr. Worry Wart. But I like to be prepared too. If things go weird, I'd like to be able to not be so weird. The battery technology affords you the opportunity to bank some of that energy so that if you do have an outage, you can use that bank. Has there been any changes in battery technology that have made them more efficient, more powerful, less expensive, anything like that?
So the gold standard for efficiency and lightweight is still the lithium ion battery. If you want a lot of energy in a lightweight small package, which if you're driving a car, that's probably what you want. There's a lot of other technology out there that's only slightly less efficient. There's a lithium iron technology, which Tesla is now putting in some cars, I believe that's much more stable. So I think maybe everyone has seen lithium batteries exploding in people's pockets or fires.
Yeah, they tell you that thing whenever you get on a plane, every time you got any lithium batteries in there.
I mean, the truth is that it's actually much rarer than gasoline burning. Imagine that. But it still gets press. And if you know it's, it's legitimately a concern when you have tons and tons of lithium battery packs in utility battery farms. Right? So, yes, so there's lithium iron, which is a very you know, if you don't need to move it around, it's, it's heavier, it's not quite as efficient, but it's less expensive. Right. Iron is more available on the earth's crust than the other elements. And like lithium ion, there's also sodium ion, which is much more environmentally. And that's frankly what we're exploring for the use in our technology. Actually, I have a. I thought I'd show this. This is.
Yeah, I was about to ask you about that.
Yeah. So depending on the market.
So one thing, if you guys are listening to the podcast right now, you have no idea what he's doing, but we want to talk about the electrical technology. Go ahead and show it and tell everybody what it's working with in your hands and go watch the podcast on YouTube.
One of the biggest difficulties of being a solar roofer right now is that they're not really designed for roofers. There's a lot of pieces that electricians need to manage and they don't necessarily like being on the roof to do it. So we've designed a product, the roofer, and put through the roof into the decking and then it's at 0 volts until the electrician really comes along and plugs it in and turns it on. Right. That's what electrician does.
So does he have a 5 minute job now instead of a 12 hour sit out there while you install shingles and do nothing?
Right. I mean, they still need to wire up the point of interconnection, but they don't need to spend hours and hours on the roof wiring up. You know, rapid shutdown and mid circuit interrupters and running conduit and bending conduit. We've that part of it much simpler.
I'm going to ask a very obvious question. You have a patent on that thing, right?
Yes. Okay. Yeah, we, you know, if you start getting into the weeds on patent technology, there's a little bit of a, you know, because a patent, you really need to make things public, right. So that people have a chance to weigh in and say, no, I made a, you know, I, I have a patent on that and really litigate that. So, but we, so we did patent that, right? We did patent that. We patented the photoactive nature of our back plate and some of the wiring. The things that people will look at and say, oh, that's cool, that's what we patented.
I'm going to go make my own.
Yeah. There's some trade secrets, like the exact, exact way the elect the electrical and the batteries work within that enclosure the exact way, like the flex circuit within the shingle itself, the exact mix of the resin that goes into the backplate. Those were keeping trade secrets. People aren't going to be able to see that what it is, and it's going to take a tremendous amount of effort for them to be able to reverse engineer that.
