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Comment by arrakark | Hacker News Reader

If they don't give a watt per square meter value I'm not interested

Found it.

"Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient. Doing that could be a challenge."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/05/26/harvest-en...

A device the size of a "consumer" refrigerator? Having a device like that in the garage or exterior wall of the house doesn't seem that bad to me. Tesla Powerwalls aren't too much smaller.

Having an appliance that generated even half that, 12kwh per day, would be fantastic. The issue, of course, would be cost. It would need to pay itself off within a feasible period of time.

sure, but it has to start somewhere. as a society dealing with scams and what not, i'm still not convinced that solar will pay itself off in a human life time. so it's not like this new thing is unique. even the Tesla Powerwalls + Solar is not convincing that it's paying back, but there's just something that screams "worth it anyways" about these systems. part of the issue is that in many areas, you are not allowed to cut the cord to public utilities even if you are self-sufficient, so you're never truly free of expenses.

> i'm still not convinced that solar will pay itself off in a human life time

What do you mean by that? The payoff, even factoring opportunity cost, is around 10-12 years or less in my country.

maybe I'm jaded and put off by all of the scammy/predatory lending that's prevalent in the US around solar. there's also the seemingly back and forth between ability to earn money from unused powered produced and shared with the grid. are there rebates or not, but depends on the particular time you're purchasing. things like being transferable or not also come into play. lots of things make it a complicated equation compared to buying a house/car/similar.

A report done in New Zealand in 2018 by arranging quotes for houses around the country found many quoted systems had 20+ yr paybacks.

https://i.stuff.co.nz/business/107335911/solar-power-systems...

But on the other hand if a house is ideally suited for solar, the payback will easily be 10 years.

There was a different article reporting on this that mentioned they would have to stack many layers into a block "about the size of a refrigerator" to make kilowatt. I will try to find it.

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