HVAC Questions -- electric bill is abnormally high.

Elon is their savior as much as their executioner. Most gods of death are also gods of life. They won't go away, but they will change.

Energy companies have been seeking large scale battery storage for decades, Elon's handing them out grid scale storage systems like dollar bills at a strip club. batteries a huge thing for grid stability, which is the key problem with renewables.

The big pain in the ass for energy companies about renewables is that they are inconsistent. if the wind doesn't blow, and the sun doesn't shine, there has to be a generator somewhere that can be spun up to make up that difference. Entire solar neighborhoods can go in and out of cloud cover over a period of under a minute, and without battery storage it becomes a heroic effort to keep the grid balanced with the power sources that can be controlled. Other weird stuff can happen too because the grid was built with the idea of being centralized. Nobody ever anticipated your little cul-de-sac was ever going to be a power station, and if you connect enough solar roofs to that line without upgrading anything, eventually a transformer at the end of your block is going to explode.

With enough grid scale storage, we can replace not only peak load generation plants (usually natural gas turbines. power generation accounts for like... 30% of america's gas usage) but also the base load coal, oil and nuclear plants that just chug along at a steady state all the time.

The grid will never go away though. Being 100% off grid requires a much larger solar and battery array.

There will never be a solar roadway. It is impractical. Asphalt is cheap and durable, and we complain bitterly about the cost to maintain our roads with it. Solar panels are expensive and fragile, and there is no clear material that is sufficiently strong to handle the punishment of a highway. Not only that, the material would not stay clear for long as cars deposited rubber down onto the road. The math has been done, the laws of physics prevent solar roads from ever being a good idea, no matter how you improve the efficiency of the panels.

Solar panels go on top of things, not underneath things. Put them on an overhead gantry straddling the highway. Cars stuck in traffic don't get baked by the sun, solar panels don't get all their light blocked by automobiles.

/r/HomeImprovement Thread Parent