Comment by metalman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metalman | Hacker News Reader

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I live off grid, right on the 45'th parallel, and experience 4 full seasons. The solar array and battery bank I have is built from self sourced miss matched panels, and used batteries, it provides power for my house and a significant portion of my business (welding power is from an engine driven welder). In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off. My up time is better than the grid. The simple fact is that solar plus batteries is a complete solution for 90% + of the worlds population. One of my side projects was to remove the alternator from the "truckasaurus" and mount solar pv as the only electrical power for starting, lights, etc. It was marginal, but I ran it that way as my only vehicle ,year round, for years. Relevant?, yes! as my experience has shown me where the margin realy is, and there has been a great deal of technological improvements and cost reductions since I built my system.

I have my quite positive experience with solar too. But "90% population" claim is unrealistic.

For starters, solar needs batteries to be truly effective. Batteries need rare-earth metals which is a narrow bottleneck. It's fine to buy 4 batteris for yourself but procuring a million will raise prices and probably break backs of many projects. A trillion, and you probably igniting wars for resources.

Also we can't multiply a homesteader's optimum a million times and expect it to be close to what a million people industrial city really needs.

At a large enough scale everything gets different.

Battery chemistries for grid storage are moving toward commodity elements and rapidly reducing reliance on rare earths. Sodium and Iron/Air batteries can take over fairly easily.

Yet the US government just asked for $200 billion to materialize out of thin air to support a needless conflict. Even if it cost a trillion dollars, that is decades of long term energy independence.

»In 10 years it has not just amortised it's costs, it has made me money, and qualifies as a tax right off.«

Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.

Sounds like a fair system.

> Great, so basically the tax payer is subsidizing your energy consumption.

> Sounds like a fair system.

Yes, people voted for tax credits for solar/renewables. It is a fair system. You know what isn't a fair system? Fossil fuel externalities causing childhood asthma and rising sea levels requiring rebuilding coastal infrastructure globally.

Tax payer is funding a lot of resilience stuff. At least in places where resilience exists at all. GP is where emergency services will charge their radios once their generator fuel runs out. Or whoever the local community improvises as substitute to emergency services, if there aren't any. As a tax payer who doesn't have the opportunity to do anything like that I really don't mind subsidizing.

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