I use slightly less than that myself on average, but we have solar water heating (supplemented with gas), so that's a good savings (especially since it also heats the hot tub), and we replaced all our light bulbs with led bulbs when they became feasible last year. Now, we usually read between 400 and 1000 watts during the day (depending on how many lights I have on, and if the refrigerator is cycled on or not.) That's running a big screen TV, computer, and often ps4 almost all day, every day. We also have electric stove and oven...and I weld, adding somewhat to our total.

Yes, my battery bank is only useful for power outages. It's enough to keep the lights on and the fridge from thawing, but not much else. We get about 3-4 hours out of it if I don't notice the power went out, but can make it all night if we conserve. Our system is grid tied, and first powers the home, then tops off the batteries, then sells any excess to PG&E. To date, I've never drawn the batteries down to zero...but we do have a small generator to supplement it when the power's out for days. The average home would certainly need more, but a 10kwh battery should be plenty to make it through an average night without AC (we don't have AC here).

My current system could not produce that much, but close. I live in N California, one of the foggiest areas in the US. Because we have a renter, an electric hot tub, dishwasher, and electric washer and drier, we use slightly more than we generate at this point, but my system is upgradeable to 6500 watts of generation (I have less than 1/3 of that now) when panels get cheaper...and when I can find space for more.

My system is not flat to my roof, and I have 2 strings of 8 panels. With the solar water tubes, it takes up most of the south 1/2 of my roof (1200 sq ft home). I could maybe fit 4 more panels up there and still be able to walk around them to clean them, but any more and I'll need some mounting structure. I really want to add a small wind turbine to generate at night or when there's a storm...solar doesn't work in the dark.

In America, we still have some rebates for people adding solar to their homes, but they are drying up fast. 15-20 years ago, you could almost do it for free if you got every rebate available.

We used to have about 1-2 weeks of power outage where I live per year, and that was part of why we did they system. We hated having no power and losing food every year, and also hated paying the ever rising cost of electricity. Before adding our system, we had $4-500 a month electric bills, now we have <$100 in winter and sometimes a negative bill in summer...we pay our bill once a year now, lump sum at the end of 12 months.
On to your second post....
I often think...electric cars were popular and the norm in cities before Ford came along. It's still astonishing to me that it was basically dropped for a century as a technology (with minor exceptions). I'm glad someone had finally gone back to it and is trying to fix it's issues. If I could afford a Tesla, I would have one.

I also agree, people won't adopt the technology as long as they have to sacrifice lifestyle for it. I said the same thing, but I found that I don't change my lifestyle at all with my solar system, I just pay lower bills. I determined that buying a system would pay for itself in under 10 years, with the lifespan of a system being about 20 years, that's 10 years of free electricity! That all assumes electric rates didn't go up, and they certainly have gone up...but not for me. You just need to be sure you install enough panels to supply all your power, and you're there.

The battery thing is really mostly for non-grid tied systems, or emergencies. Most people don't use batteries at night, it's simpler and cheaper to just sell power to the grid during the day and buy it back at night if you can, using them as your battery. Perhaps this battery will change that, but with lead acid, it's hard to make them worth the cost.

Panels aren't that expensive, really. In many areas, with rebates, they can be near free. (some companies will even give them to you and split the power generated off your roof). It's a myth that solar is expensive...when compared to non-solar. Mine are paid for by bill savings already (8 years + in) so I'm saving money with them now, and my lifestyle has not suffered in the least. I have lights on if its dark, I watch TV all day, and use the computer all day, have tons of electric devices I use, and soon will power a pond, etc. I often think that my life is a much better example of how you can be 'green' without much change than Gore's. He really doesn't seem to walk the walk, but he can sure talk the talk.

One more thought that I had:

Before Tesla, electric cars were niche marketed as adequate. In the sense that if you were a person very highly motivated to be "green", you could get one, drive around short distances, and in general enjoy a small subset of the versatility of an internal combustion gas guzzling car. You could get by, but in general life with an electric car was a step back from life with a gas car.

The reason Tesla is amazing is that it flipped that on its head. You're not sacrificing anything, you don't need an attitude of "I can use a bit less and take one for the team" for a Tesla to appeal to you. Everything I watch about the Model S says it is a fast, high-performance, fun to drive, luxurious car -- objectively BETTER than a similarly priced gas-powered car to most users (who can afford one, but that will include more and more people over time).


Same thing goes for home solar and other "green energy". Adoption rates are NEVER going to soar when solar is "adequate". And then only adequate if you make very big lifestyle changes like cutting back on heating and cooling, using low-draw appliances, etc. etc.

But as Tesla is doing to cars, maybe this can do to energy. Musk is saying NO, you don't have to cut back. You don't have to settle for less. You don't have to take one for the team. Install some (currently fairly expensive) solar panels and 1, 2, or however many of our power packs, and you can have a BETTER experience than being on the grid, paying high bills every month and dealing with the occasional outage, etc.

I guarantee that pitch will do more to push the adoption of green energy than 10 years of Al Gore living in a mansion and flying around constantly on a private jet to give $100,000 lectures explaining why everybody else needs to cut back or we're all going to melt...

Thank you very much for your answers -- here's a couple more questions maybe you can give thoughts on if you have time:

Quick googling says the average US home uses a bit under 12,000 kWh per year. Divide that by 365 and get ~33 kWh per day, divide that by 24 and get ~1.4 kW per hour (rounding up in all instances). Of course, that's going to be higher in the day and lower at night, but one of the points of the batteries is to help smooth out that usage curve and make it transparent to the homeowner / user.

Anyway, questions related to those figures:
*Do those numbers sound ballpark to your experience?

*You've got 1kWh of lead acid batteries. Ignoring the fact that night usage would tend to be lower than daytime, an "average home" draw of 1.4 kW per hour would give you about 40 minutes of off-the-grid power (without help from the solar). That would probably require lifestyle changes to deal with; it seems like an average home couldn't get through a night without fully draining the batteries. True?

A 10 kWh pack like shown in the video would give 7+ hours, not accounting for lower drain at night. Seems like an average US house might well be able to go a whole night with that kind of battery without any lifestyle adjustments (assuming solar can handle 100% of the load during daytime PLUS charge up the batteries).

* Could your existing solar cells handle daytime load and charging of 1 or 2 of these 10 kWh packs so that you could be comfortably 100% off-grid?

* How much area do your solar cells cover?


I'm been very impressed with Tesla as a car company, even though I've never driven or even seen one in person (only a very few super-rich people have imported Teslas to Thailand). I thought that electric cars were going to be impractical toys for really out-there tree huggers, but everything I read about the Model S and other Tesla cars tells me that they are the real deal, actually superior to internal combustion for MOST use cases.

Hopefully without sounding too much like Howard Hughes, I believe that baseline practicality will let economy of scale take over and make Tesla and other electrics the way of the future. And this makes me likewise optimistic that Musk can similarly revolutionize the future of energy in general. Pretty exciting stuff!

The info on the batteries is at the bottom of this page:
http://www.teslamotors.com/powerwall

There are different types of Lithium ion batteries, so I'm curious as to what combination of minerals Tesla is using. The temperature range they can operate in seems decent, from -20 to +43 degrees C, which is ok for most places. Shipping outside the US is probably going to be really expensive, as they weigh 100kg each, so add up to about another thousand dollars for that.

Overall though, looks like an amazing solution - hook a couple of these up, and with some solar panels you can stop paying for grid power altogether.

That makes the gate even more surpufluos. Most cattle grids dont have fences or gates over them, and they keep the cattle inside and the roads gate-free. This gate is cool from an engineering standpoint, but I dont know what sort of animal its supposed to keep in(or out). an animal that would be light and agile and fearless enough to step on the grid without opening it(like a cat) could easily also traverse that fence. Animals heavy enough to open the gate wouldnt cross a gateless grid either..

Why a gate if there's a cattle grid?

The rack you see that the car drives over, the bridge itself that is - IS in fact a Cattle gate.

I will privledge you with learning about them here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_grid

A cattle grid – also known as a stock grid in British English; cattle guard in American English; vehicle pass, Texas gate, stock gap in the U.S. Southeast;[1] or a cattle stop in New Zealand English – is a type of obstacle used to prevent livestock, such as sheep, cattle, pigs, horses, or mules from passing along a road or railway which penetrates the fencing surrounding an enclosed piece of land. It consists of a depression in the road covered by a transverse grid of bars or tubes, normally made of metal and firmly fixed to the ground on either side of the depression, such that the gaps between them are wide enough for animals' legs to fall through, but sufficiently narrow not to impede a wheeled vehicle or human foot. This provides an effective barrier to animals without impeding wheeled vehicles, as the animals are reluctant to walk on the grates.

@RedSky

Selling assets and, to a certain degree, the reduction of public employment is an unreasonable demand. There's too much controversy about the effects it has, with me being clearly biased to one side.

Privatisation of essential services (healthcare, public transport, electricity, water) is being opposed or even undone in significant parts of Europe, since it generally came with worse service at much higher costs and no accountability whatsoever. Therefore I see it as very reasonable for Syriza to stop the privatisation of their electricity grid and their railroad. There are, of course, unessentials that might be handed over to the private sector, but like Varoufakis said, not in the shape of a fire sale within a crisis. That'll only profit the usual scavengers, not the people.

Similarly, public employment. There's good public employment (essential services, administration) and "bad" public employment. Troika demands included the firing of cleaning personnel, who were replaced by a significantly more expensive private service. And a Greek court decision ruled the firing as flat out illegal. For Syriza to not hire them back would not only have been unreasonable financially as well as socially, it would have been a violation of a court order. Same for thousands of others who were fired illegally, according to a ruling by the Greek Supreme Court.

Troika demands are all too often against Greek or even European law, and while the previous governments were fine with being criminals, Syriza might actually be inclined to uphold the law.


On the issue of reforms, I would argue that the previous governments did bugger all to establish working institutions. Famously, the posts of department heads of the tax collection agency were auctioned for money, even under the last government. Everything is in shambles, with no intent of changing anything that would have undermined the nepotic rules of the five families. Syriza's program has been very clear about the changes they plan to institute, so if it really was the intent of the troika to see meaningful reform the way it is being advocated to their folks at home, they would be in support of Syriza.

Interventions by the troika have crashed the health care system, the educational system and the pension system. Public pension funds were practically wiped out during the first haircut in 2012, creating a hole of about 20 billion Euros in the next five years.

I would like to address the issue of taxation specifically. Luxembourg adopted as a business model to be an enabler of tax evasion, even worse than Switzerland. In charge at that time was none other than Jean-Claude Juncker, who was just elected President of the European Commission. He's directly involved in tax evasion on a scale of hundreds of billions of Euros every year. How is the troika to have any credibility in this matter with him in charge?

Similarly, German politicians are particularly vocal about corruption and bribery in Greece. Well, who are the biggest sources of bribery in Greece? German corporations. Just last week there was another report of a major German arms manufacturer who paid outrageous bribes to officials in Greece. As much as I support the fight against corruption and bribery, some humility would suit them well.


As for the GDP growth in Greece: I think it's a fluke. The deflation skewers the numbers to a point where I can't take them seriously until the complete dataset is available. Might be growth, might not be. Definatly not enough to fight off a humanitarian crisis.

Surpluses. If everyone was a zealous as Germany, the deficit would in fact be considerably narrower, which is a good thing. Unfortunatly, it would have been a race to the bottom. Germany could only suppress wage growth, and subsequently domestic demand, so radically, because the other members of the Eurozone were eager to expand. They ran higher-than-average growth, which allowed Germany to undercut them without going into deflation. Nowadays, Germany still has below-target wage growth, so the only way for Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy to gain competetiveness against Germany is to go into deflation. That's where we are in Europe: half a continent in deflation. With all its side effects of mass unemployment (11%+ in Europe, after lots of trickery), falling demand, falling investment, etc. Not good. Keynes' idea of an International Clearing Union might work better, especially since we already use similar concepts within nations to balance regions.

Bond yields of Germany could not have spiked at the same time as those of the rest of the Eurozone. The legal requirements for pension funds, insurance funds, etc demand a high percentage of safe bonds, and when the peripheral countries were declared unsafe, they had nowhere to go but Germany. Also, a bet against France is quite a risk, but a bet against Germany is downright foolish. Still, supply of safe bonds is tight right now, given the cuts all over the place. French yields are at historic lows, German yield is negative. Even Italian and Spanish yields were in the green as soon as Draghi said the ECB would do whatever it takes.

The current spike in Greek yields strikes me as a bet that there will be a face-off between the troika and Greece, with very few positive outcomes for the Greek economy in the short run.

QE: 100% agreement. Fistful of cash to citizens would not have solved any of the core issues of the Eurozone (highly unequal ULCs, systemic tax evasion, tax competition/undercutting, no European institutions, etc), but it would have been infinitely better than anything they did. If they were to put it on the table right now as a means to combat deflation, I'd say go for it. Take the helicopters airborne, as long as it's bottom-up and not trickle-down. Though to reliably increase inflation there would have to be widescale increases in wages. Not going to happen. Maybe if Podemos wins in Spain later his year.

Same for the last paragraph. The ECB could have stuffed the EIB to the brim, which in return could have funded highly beneficial and much needed projects, like a proper European electricity grid. Won't happen though. Debt is bad, even monetised debt during a deflation used purely for investments.

I also find it interesting following how the perspective on this story is pitched in the media. It seems since the Republicans won the Senate, the slant has shifted to a more Republican viewpoint that it's executive over-reach.

The more logical conclusion is, it's a temporary stop-gap which could presumably just as easily be overturned by a potential Republican president next term and should be an incentive for actual long-lasting reform to be undertaken that supersedes it.

Instead, apparently the irony of a grid-locked legislative criticizing the executive branch for actually passing needed reform is actually lost on everyone.

"It will wreck our economy"

Sound familiar? Any AGW denier ever uttered that line and when asked "how", they have no clue?

Let me introduce you the institution behind it: Freedom Partners. Check who is behind that. Follow the money, who has most to lose. Then try to think a tactic that will keep you floating in dollars the longest. Yup, it is to teach all your followers to keep repeating the same catchphrase..

When even there has been a great communal investment in better technology infrastructure, the economy has had a tremendous boost. Railroad, electric grid, internet. Renewable energy is just a another on that line. Burning something, destroying it to get energy is finite resource. Renewables are basically infinite. Person who sells firewood is not going to like your electric heater even when it means half of the village will not die next winter. Company that sells oil will not like infinite energy source they are not in control of even if it means half of us die. They and their kids won't be affected but you will.

"It will wreck our economy"

If something, it will boost your economy. Greatly. It is already in motion in most EU countries, Germany is at 33%. Norway is at 99%. Where i live, in Finland, we are at 25% even when half of the year most of our hydro-electric is not functional. Have ANY of those countries seen any negative, economy destroying effects? No? They all have actually benefited from them? No way, bloody communists propaganda.. Lies lies, lallaalaaa, i believe in Koch.

"It will wreck our economy"

The people behind that line of words has been behind every major block in the way of creating green energy. The will raise the cost so high it is impossible, they will lobby until it's too complicated to change anything. THEY are wrecking your economy. THEY are stopping innovation. THEY are wrecking our whole mfcking planet and you are worried about your electric bill or not having two hot showers per day.

"I have nothing against green energy but i'm not going to do anything for it."

That is you.

Oh Bob. It's better to remain silent and let people think you an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it.
97% is not the same thing as 97. Also, the correct number is really closer to 99.9% of all published climatologists, if not higher. Those who know, know. Those who believe don't know jack.
There are many ways to differentiate human produced CO2 from naturally occurring CO2, and therefore prove the rise is due to man. This has been done repeatedly and conclusively. The simplest way is to simply look at the graph of the rise and compare it to our use of fossil fuels, they are exactly the same curve at exactly the same time, with exactly the same dips and bumps. It's certainly not the only method, but is a simple to understand one.
It's ridiculous to state that to live 'green' you must live as if in a 3rd world country. That is simply BS stated by unreasonable men without any knowledge (and usually with a financial incentive to be anti-green/pro-fossil fuel).
It's also ridiculously ignorant to state that being 'green' is not cost effective. As someone who has had a solar system for 7+ years, I can tell you it's paid for itself already (with an estimated 13 more years before needing serious upkeep), has kept me away from the 40-50% rate raises that have happened to others in that time, it heats my house, my shower, and my hot tub and keeps the lights, TV, washer/drier, dishwasher, and fridge on when the grid goes down. It's not at all the expensive, powerless, sacrifice forcing technology you seem to think it is. It saves money even in the short term, and significant amounts in the long term AND has many other benefits. You've been listening to the wrong people about this issue, people who either totally don't know what they're talking about or are bold faced liars. I speak from actual experience.
Cost effective 'green' technologies have existed for well over a decade. You are simply wrong about your estimations.

Lets not forget that currently the nation spends a great deal of money on simple yearly road repair, and that is only short term as most roads need to be entirely re-milled and replaced once or twice a decade.

I think this technology may well begin to seep into more liberal states, as others have said with parking lots (especially electric vehicle recharging stations) or perhaps with big and wealthy businesses like fast food chains. If the tiles can stay relatively undamaged over decades, eventually it would become very cost effective.

Yes melting snow would be improbable until perhaps there were enough roads connected to say the national grid. But everything else is not only probably but plausible.

I really hope this technology is implemented, slowly but surely. But I fear things like this won't become a viable alternative until the world is so tapped for oil and natural gas that there IS no alternative but to go with solar and wind technologies as a primary resource. Sadly America is woefully behind much of Europe. Some nations in Eur-Asia plan to be oil free within 100 years. The US will be mired in wars over the last scraps of the limited resources by then if something doesn't change.

These roads would be 1 part of the solution. Cheap stable energy storage connected to "the grid" is the other part. Even if all the roads generate energy in the daytime, it has to be stored somewhere. Lead acid batteries have a good density/cost ratio, but require a lot of maintenance. Pumping water uphill or pressurizing underground cavity are other options in use today.

The biggest problem I see is dirt. The roads get dirty, they are less efficient. How much energy do we spend cleaning them?

The snow melting thing is highly exaggerated. The panels might generate enough juice to keep black ice from forming, but would need to draw power from the grid to do any significant melting, let alone somehow dealing with several inches from a sizable storm.

I do see huge advantages to having roads made of these. The cost would no doubt be enormous, but the long-term advantages could make them a reasonable investment. I don't have any of the numbers to reference, but would guess that we could replace a sizable portion of the US roadways with a fraction of the military's annual budget.

Cheers DD-You were quite the cheek-pinchin' magnet back when...

And on an ironic and personal pet-peevish note, 'kiddy porn' at the end on YTubes grid of suggested links, since someone with special needs enjoys spewing libel in the form of accusatory pedophilia....

Oh yeah and BTW chicco, you keep calling me a felon on this site?? FYI, charged with a felony ain't the same as convicted now is it?? How bout you get yer cop stuff right, eh? False accusations get cops thrown in prison, and you know what happens to a cop in prison, right?? I've heard it ain't so good.