10 thoughts on “Greenfail”

  1. But home generators are loud and not as efficient because they run on gasoline, unless of course you connect to a natural gas line, then it runs… Oh.

  2. How about a flywheel? For stationary use, mass is not an issue and its recycle is enormous.

    Musk isn’t perfect, but you have to give him credit for what he has gotten right.

  3. Weird that the product existed at all when it is good for only 500 cycles while the slightly smaller (and comparably priced) remaining product is good for 5000 cycles. Maybe it was simply an older product?

  4. Maybe they were recycling old components? I don’t know.

    I think for applications like this some sort of aluminum-air battery would work well. When it’s out of energy you just swap it out with a forklift. Might work better for cars.

    1. I’d prefer hybrid cars equipped with inverters. You have an engine and generator there already, so the marginal cost is small.

      Electric cars w. inverters would also work.

  5. All this focus on residential solar and storage is silly. It’s an artifact of the system by which consumers are charged for grid access. Add a more realistic system (where consumers pay simply for having the grid attached, then on a per-kWh scale after that) and you will see solar and storage moving to where they belong: out on the grid, in larger units, where economies of scale make them much cheaper.

    Utility-scale solar has a capital cost less than half that of residential solar, per unit of peak power output.

    1. Domestic solar is an example of the green religion. They’ve been sold The Great Shift to decentralized energy production (combined with “efficiency”, aka poverty) along with the decentralization of food and, with the advent of 3d printers, everything else. You’ll often hear it described by analogy to how cells phones allowed the developing world to “leapfrog” the need for telephone infrastructure. That’s why Elon’s all about the satellite Internet, it’s the next leapfrog. We used to hear the same argument for space solar power, and we’ll probably start hearing it again.

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