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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

When I ordered my Tesla S I also needed to get a 240V charger installed in my garage. Tesla sends you over to SolarCity for that and they can install it for you. This also gives them the perfect opportunity to offer you solar panels as well since they can show you, based on your electricity bill and the number of miles you are going to drive, how much it is going to save you.

Long story short, bought a Tesla S from Tesla, a outlet installation from SolarCity and now have also signed up for 8.8Kw solar panel system for my house.

The vertical integration of his investments is awesome. I just hope he somehow integrates in SpaceX ... maybe solar microwave power from orbit?

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I'm picking up my S tomorrow morning. When I reserved, I submitted the information for SolarCity to contact me, but they never did, even after I sent an e-mail to their sales address. I went ahead and got my local electrician to do the install for me.

I didn't know about the home Solar leases, that makes it more of a shame about the disconnect in customer service because I would have liked to investigate that option.

EDIT: Just tried to fill out their form for solar consultation and got an e-mail that they don't have service in my area. Maybe that was why they didn't get back to me.

Having tied sales is pretty bad.

Having tied sales that drops the ball for an essential component ('B') of service 'A' because they can't sell you component 'C' is terrible.

At a minimum Tesla should know where SolarCity has installers or SolarCity should pass you on to a competitor that does serve your area.

Elon pretty emphatically isn't a believer in orbital solar generation as a way to power planetary infrastructure.

More here: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/elon-musk-on-spa...

We're not naming the Dyson Sphere after him, then. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

I don't think he needs to worry about that, he's concerned with nuts, bolts and engineering not with science fiction.

You believe humans won't build one around this star?

No, we won't. The machines that make us extinct will, however.

Yes, I believe we will not. Materials science is a bitch, you can fantasize all you want but in the end if you can't build it it doesn't matter much.

We will come up with a solution that's little more elegant long before we have the means to build one of those.

Well, clearly not!

But I don't think his objection is using solar power for space-based infrastructure. Quite the contrary! (Dragon is solar-powered, but could fairly easily do everything except maybe long-duration Dragonlab missions on batteries if Elon really didn't like solar). I think the objection is to the complexities and transmission losses of beaming orbital solar power back to Earth.

Of course, if you start moving your energy-intensive industries out of the gravity well...

SpaceX could throw in kinetic bombardment to clear traffic ahead of you during jams.

"Kinetic bombardment" == throw shit from space. </jargon police>

I never quite understood how orbital kinetic bombardment was supposed to make sense.

I mean, say you have a satellite in orbit with a ton of nice depleted uranium or tungsten rods to skewer things with. Standard "spears from heaven" setup or whatever.

It can't just "drop" them, if it lets go they will just stay in orbit. No, it has to fire them 'backwards' fast enough for the rod to deorbit itself and then the satellite has to apply some orbit correcting thrust. In order to keep it accurate you basically need to construct a full reentry vehicle around the thing, both to guide it through the atmosphere and to just rocket it away from the satellite fast enough and accurate enough. Before you know it your DU spear becomes so complex that you may as well just make a proper MIRV system with real warheads out of it and be done with it. Get the most bang for your buck that way.

You're supposed to use the satelite to aim them and then shoot them from the ground and let them ballistically smash your target. It takes about twice as long but it's really sufficient to smash anything the size of a warship.

Seems like half the cars on the road are SUVs, so that should be big enough.

You don't use spears. You use rocks. And you drop them in so that they impact on the spot you want in the first place, rather than adjusting their route multiple times.

You may find the book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Robert Heinlein to be interesting. The main weapon in the battle between the Earth and Moon was shipping containers full of rock. These were launched by catapult to specific targets. Throwing rocks in a high tech fashion.

This is like what some people say about investing, you need money to make money.

To be green and to save money you need money to buy an electric car, charger and solar panels to save money and be green.

Except for a practically limitless number of other ways to save money while being more environmentally friendly. For example, buying flour in bulk and making your own bread regularly, or repairing holes in clothes rather than buying new, or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

Minor point but there's a reason that lots more people don't make their own. Read and a lot of it comes down to time. If 15 mins to 3 hours to make bread is worth less to you than the 2-3$ for a loaf of bread then good for you; otherwise it doesn't make much sense.

And it you get a breadmaking machine then I would argue that it's likely to be less environmentally friendly: a small oven is less efficient than a large one; plus the resources to make an electronic item vs centralised distribution.

I really don't see how making your own bread can be argued to be both environmentally friendly and cheaper, but am happy to be enlightened

When I was coming up with quick examples earlier, I was thinking more of packaging than energy costs, and most store-bought bread is wrapped in non-recyclable plastic. I do wish we had the tools and information to make better calculations of these kinds of trade-offs. I could also contend that the quality of fresh homemade bread beats the crap out of what $2 gets you at Safeway.

But the point I'm most interested in discussing is the idea of maximizing the economic value of your time. In some cases this can be a useful heuristic, but the trick is knowing where and where not to apply it. If you were to apply that line of reasoning to every moment of your life, I doubt that the results would be satisfactory. Personally I'm more of a Gross National Happiness type. Of course, you're welcome to prove me wrong too :)

Just in terms of power efficiency, I doubt baking your own bread is a win (I earned my spending money in high school baking bread from scratch). It takes maybe fifteen minutes (aside from waiting) to make bread dough and shape it into loaves when you're experienced, so time isn't such a big factor.

Making your own bread can be much tastier than store bought loaves. Especially if you catch your own sourdough, and the alternative is buying British bread.

I'm certainly not against baking your own bread, I just doubt it's beneficial to the environment. A good naighborhood bakery is probably an all round win.

Environmentally, baking your own bread might still beat eating meat.

And if the energy to heat your oven comes from a clean source, you are good.

But it would still be more efficient to bake more bread at once using clean energy.

>or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

In most American places, it's illegal to build sufficiently dense housing to make it plausible for most people to live within walking or biking distance of their place of work (see Matt Yglesias's book The Rent is Too Damn High for more on this subject). While I agree with your point about not living 40 miles from your workplace, it's simply not possible in most of the U.S. for most people to commute by a means other than cars.

So what you're saying is that people choose to live in locations with elected representatives that carry out their will, and yet, it has nothing to do with choice?

Perhaps road funding should only be paid out of gas and car taxes, and the federal government should stop subsidizing people's choices with other people's money, and then perhaps more people would choose to live closer to work.

I.e. you advocate the following?: make road funding as local an affair as possible. Even interstate highways should never go above the level of a few states collaborating.

Can you believe that in Germany you even get a tax rebate for living further away from work?

Rather, the residents of cities should recognize the wider consequences of the policies that they chose, and vote accordingly.

This is only true for certain values of most, and even if it is, has nothing to do with the point that it is possible to arrange one's life so that a car isn't necessary. I won't deny that there are many potential obstacles to the sort of widespread societal change you seem to have assumed I was advocating. Mostly I just wanted to make the point that there are plenty of cheaper ways to be "more green" (than an unknown baseline of green-ness) than buying a Tesla vehicle & installing solar panels at one's home. We all get to make choices with positive or negative consequences for the environment, and not all of them are choices about what or which thing to buy.

If only America was a democracy, then these laws could be changed.

> or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

That's pretty funny since recently here in south eastern Canada we're being reamed up the ass by our current federal government for lack of jobs.

The government is demanding people find work even if it is an hour away which would be roughly 100km (62 miles).

Using leisure time to being more environmentally friendly and living more healthy.

Peddling to work takes longer. But I get exercise. The cave man diet takes quite a bit of effort. But it tastes damned good, is quality time with friends and family, keeps my money in the local economy (farmers markets vs big box grocers) and improves my health.

It just depends what a person chooses to optimize in their lives. When I was working more, it was not feasible to do the cave man diet or home remodeling.

> Peddling to work takes longer.

For me it's actually faster. Due to heavy traffic at rush hours.

A Tesla Model S and solar power is a great combo. Congrats!

How do you like your Model S so far? Does it meet your expectations?

It is like driving around the original iPhone. Most of the awesome features of the car could be in any car, Tesla was just the first ones to really do it. As for driving performance it has been amazing. Much faster and more comfortable than my old 911. My biggest commute though is just from Los Altos to SF. One day I forgot to plug it in and it was no big deal but decided I didn't want that to happen again so I wrote an app for it using their undocumented API for the car that notifies me if I forget.

https://github.com/spullara/teslalogger

That's kind of scary. The original iPhone was a pretty awful phone by any objective measure (speaking as someone who has owned one of every model and seen them improve steadily over the years.)

Hindsight is 20/20. My first impression, upon beholding an iPhone in summer 2007, was that it had been dropped to us from the heavens by some benevolent, spacefaring race.

That was my first impression, too. My second impression was wow, this thing isn't a very good phone.

Note that Model S is not a first-generation car. It came after the Roadster. So it's more like an iPhone 3GS, which was a very solid phone.

Neither was the 286, the 486, or the Nvidia GTX 280 if you are always going to look at tech like that. It was amazing and a huge advancement when it was produced. You can't look back and say "oh that sucks" 5-6 years later.

I don't know about the Nvidia example, but both the 286 and 486 were damn nice boxes in their day, if you could afford them. The 286 was much better than the XTs, especially once the clock speeds ramped up. And the 486DX was a big win over having to pair a 386DX with a slow, expensive Weitek or 80387 chip.

I paid $4000 for a 486 system in January 1990. It had a massive 40MB hard drive, and awesome Hercules card graphics.

How is the original iPhone different? It was a nice damn phone back in 2007, a huge step up from the smartphones of the time.

It was a revolutionary device, but it had poor ergonomics, terrible acoustics, lackluster RF performance, tons of bugs, and numerous omitted features that were already standard in run-of-the-mill feature phones. And although it wasn't the hardware's fault, its exclusive carrier was universally acknowledged to be the worst in the US. Using the original iPhone to make calls was like using a shortwave radio from the 1920s -- a lot of unlikely things had to work just right before you could get through.

All of these things got better, of course, and at an impressive rate. Tesla seems to be on the same path, thankfully.

486s were fantastic machines on Day One in all respects except price. I don't know where s/he got the idea they weren't. The original IBM AT I didn't have direct experience with.

How did it have "poor ergonomics"? "Tons" of bugs? Can you name a few? Omitted features..like a keyboard? So it was "only" available on a top 2 carrier? I'd ont remember calling being substantial worse than other phones at the time. I still get occasional drops. I think you missed this one pretty badly.

I think my biggest ergonomic complaint was the earpiece speaker aperture. If I didn't hold it within about 0.001 degree of the sweet spot, I couldn't hear what the caller was saying. (I could go off on a rant about how there was a very good reason why telephones fed a small sample of the caller's voice back to the earpiece as a sidetone for 100 years, but it would apply to all cell phones, not just the iPhone.)

I was (and am) fine with no physical keyboard, but omitting a GPS chip was just plain goofy, considering how nice the Maps application was. Others were complaining about the first iPhone's lack of cut and paste functionality relative to some other phones, the inability to replace the battery or add external storage, the inability to use third-party applications, and the substandard camera.

Bug-wise, if you could get Safari to avoid crashing back to the desktop for more than 30 seconds at a time, you were way ahead of me.

All of this stuff got better in the next generation. It was Apple's dedication to fixing the phone's shortcomings that really made me a dedicated iPhone user.

Hindsight bias. These didn't become complains until many months after launch. What phones had GPS, cut & paste (?) or a Maps application at the time? Except for BB and maybe Bada, the other "smart" phones only offered primitive low-res Java apps. The Nokia N series was the only one with decent cameras, everyone else had VGA 640x480 toys.

I also bought a 1st gen iPod touch on the week it was released and never had any serious issues with Safari other than browser compatibility.

Anything looks terrible when you look back from the future a sufficient ways ahead. Holes in the ground with ice cut from frozen lakes was a pretty awful refrigerator, but it was a hell of a lot better than the alternatives available at the time.

I meant advanced, but mostly a collection technology and software that any car company might have put together but the incumbents didn't do it. Like the 17" central console screen, a screen for a dashboard, internet access, google maps and navigation, etc.

Too bad I can't downvote you. The first iPhone was awesome comparing to the 2nd best, namely, Nokia with its Symbian OS. I had both at the time. God, the iPhone was light years ahead.

OK, I will stop digressing. This is not a thread about iPhone.

Yes, because it's very frustrating when Someone is Wrong on the Internet and you're impotent to do anything about it. I know the feeling. :)

So help me reach 500 karma so I can downvote the heck out of it. :)

Done!

Undone.

unundone.

It's funny how often objective measures are irrelevant in The Real World.

You did not actually expect a 911 to be comfortable, did you? Also, I'll happily take it :)

Oh, the 911 is comfortable enough to be your commuting car but it is 13 years old so it doesn't have all the niceties. I guess I would compare the Tesla to the current Panamera.

The Panamera and the 911 are entirely different beasts. Plenty of people do not consider the Panamera and the Cayenne to be true to Porsches legacy.

I know which I'd rather have.

If it weren't for the maintenance costs and the fuel consumption I'd happily trade my golf for a 911. I'm pretty sure we'd also have the first Porsche with a towing hook for the trailer full of stuff we normally carry along ;)

Can you share some info about the solar panel system? I assume it must be about 60m^2 of panels?

Are you paying for it outright or on a plan where you pay based on electricity generated?

I'm prepaying the 20 year lease. Looks like that is pretty close to the best option if you can afford the upfront cost. About around 60m^2 — 35 TRINA SOLAR # TSM-245PC05 panels. Basically they guarantee a certain output and pay you if they miss.

> signed up for 8.8Kw solar panel system for my house

How much power does it generate in a day? Will be enough to fully charge a Telsa?

You wouldn't charge the car directly from the panels. Sell the solar electricity to utility during the day and get a plan for off-peak power (which are often 1/2 or 2/3 of normal rates) to charge your car while you sleep.

(Thats not saying you couldn't charge the car through your solar panels in a pressing case of zombie apocalypse. Inverters for home solar installations output the same AC power as a normal power outlet)

However, without a grid feed to synchronize to, your grid-tied inverters will be useless. You'd need battery backup and a second set of DC inverters to accomplish the off-grid scenario you're referring to.

That depends on the inverters. Plenty of inverters can operate in 'island mode' for off-grid applications.

You will have to have a lock-out installed that needs to be engaged before island mode will work if you are normally grid-tied. To avoid you hurting people or trying to power the nation in case of a black-out.

On a good clear mid-summer day that solar panel can probably generate approximately the right amount of electricity to fully charge your Tesla (assuming you got the 40kWh battery pack for it.)

I've got the 85 Kwh battery pack. The car uses about 300-400 Wh per mile.

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