Hacker News Reader

Comment by et2o | Hacker News Reader

I don’t fully understand the appeal from the manufacturers’ side for in-home batteries and solar. We don’t expect houses to have their own coal powerplants or nuclear generators; why is renewable energy different?

Single family housing is becoming a smaller segment of the market as time goes on; those who rent apartments or own condominiums have little say in how their electricity is delivered as well.

View on HN

I feel like you’re comparing Apple’s to Oranges, it’s much more reasonable to have a solar panel mounted on a house than most other power sources mainly because it’s passive, it doesn’t have any emissions as far as I know, it doesn’t make any noise, they’re not obtrusive other than being ugly to look at. Solar installed directly on a house also means you’re not using any extra land like you would a solar farm, and if you have solar panels installed then you will need a battery to store that power unless you’re feeding to a grid to store off site.

And I think one of the lesser discussed benefits of solar is it decentralizes the power grid so a hypothetical attack on infrastructure would be much harder to pull off.

Heck even a small wind turbine could probably be integrated into most homes with no major problems, but that’s just my opinion.

Yeah, my roof is free real estate as far as solar power is concerned and I would absolutely consider installing panels on my roof, if I owned. I wouldn't consider putting in a micro-coal or micro-NG power plant, if such things existed.

People install solar panels when the levelized cost of electricity is cheaper than buying from the utility. This is about the cost of fueling the vehicle.

Energy presents a new market to sell goods and services into, they don't want 3rd parties to control the ecosystem after the vehicle sale. There's a battle for home energy ecosystem control playing out today. See Enphase's full product offering for an example.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com