Unless a building is crowd-funded by the future tenants with the promise of no electrical costs, and also the future tenants expect to live like 100 more years, I can't see how this could happen, short of the eradication of private property and the government constructing these things.
> you replace bricks every couple hundred years, but solar panels every 10–20, right?
Old panels perhaps, but modern solar panels come with performance warranties that guarantee they will be producing >85% of their initial output after 30 yrs.
> 2000W solar panel is like $300 or something and it's half the size of a door
2000W solar panels generally don't exist, so I assume that's a typo for 200W? Modern utility scale panels top out at ~700W with dimensions of 2.4 m x 1.3 m, however rooftop panels for commercial buildings are in the 500W range and ~ 2 x 1 m (so yeah about a door). International wholesale prices for these from Tier 1 manufacturers are now < $0.10 USD / W (although from what I understand more expensive in the USA).
like it's cheap, easy and environmentally friendly to do such installations... just search for the end-of-life management and chemicals used at their production. we have thousands of ways of doing better urbanism or feeling less "barbaric and primitive" than making skyscrapers (which seriously, are built for who?) producing energy
Earnest question - why isn't this solved by the fact that batteries exist? Are you saying that there is some technical/physical problem at-scale with storing _that much_ energy, or that there is some logistical problem with distributing and managing the batteries (ensuring the right ones are discharging at the right times), or that they are simply too expensive or specialist for us to build quickly enough right now, or...?
You make a claim about reworking our economy,
> The power is cheap enough that it's worth reworking our entire economy around it.
Can you substantiate this? Would it be fair to describe it as a utopian claim?
In the case of water heating (and water based space heating also) it's already here in terms of technology and availability. Heat pump storage water heaters are now widely available. The problem is that they can only be phased in as fast as existing gas water heaters reach EOL.
Domestic water heating comprises almost 18% of household energy use in the United States.
I have no problem with aesthetics like *punk. But when these aesthetics influence public policy we end up with dysfunction, like countries that have lots of electric vehicles being powered by new coal power plants. The original post said our era will be looked down on for not covering buildings with solar panels. I don’t think that is correct.
I mean they had things like slavery and gladiator fights, I’m really not very sympathetic to them in general, I think they were quite cruel. But dumb? Nah.
Solar panels are currently very expensive as building material. We could be exploiting passive solar more effectively I think, though.