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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a "green brag" without much substance. Great that this person is privileged enough to afford solar panels, I guess. Nothing to be learned here though: no wire diagrams, placement schematics, or BoM. Just someone telling everyone how green they are.

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The idea is the important part. The details (wiring schematics and so on) are not. The cost of solar is rapidly approaching where you’re prepaying for your energy for the rest of your life with a few thousand dollars. You can get solar panels for 10 cents/watt today, for example. That price will potentially continue to decline (historically, price has declined ~20% for every global doubling of PV manufacturing capacity).

churchill’s comment provides a similar example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41965228 (2.7 year payback in Nigeria, cheaper per kWh than utility rate of 12 cents/kWh)

The engineering of energy abundance and democratization of energy globally continues. That’s the story.

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/solar-panel-prices-...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices

https://www.pv-tech.org/solar-lcoe-continues-to-decrease-glo...

I think the details are actually important to the idea. Mainly this green brag doesn't seem to add up. The battery system is crucial.

While there's a bit about needing to replace it in 10-20 years coming out to a $83/month, this is essentially burying the $15,000 bill coming.

Also, unless their battery system is wildly over provisioned at the moment, you can't just add a bunch of new panels. Are they selling back to the grid? I don't think so, they mention grid independence wrt natural disaster. Do they have some sort of system to heat the water in the day only? Did they just take the name plate capacity of the system and multiply it by 40 years? who knows?

These "details" will make anyone buying into their big idea quite frustrated.

I also don't understand the part about chopping wood. Yes it's probably a idilic bit for the story, but that's almost one of the worst fuel sources. Dangerous, carcinogenic, and polluting.

edit: yes in the footnotes, burning wood. Getting rid of that would be the number one way to improve their impact on the earth and their community.

The solar panels are cheap. It's the multi-acre lot with a lake that's expensive.

I’ve mounted ~8kw of solar on a south facing roof in ~4 hours with two other people. You need not multi acre lots, only a surface that can see the sky mostly unobstructed, although if you’ve got the land and aren’t using it, ground mount solar is cheaper, faster, and safer to deploy.

(In the United States, the majority of housing units are single-family houses – about 82 million out of the total 129 million occupied units in 2021)

I agree about this article being vapid, but at least it does introduce the fact that PV doesn't degrade. A lot of people have been poisoned by oil industry propaganda that every PV panel needs to be trashed in 20 years.

Aside from propaganda, what if the roof only lasts 25 years?

And doesn’t mounting panels on top of a roof increase possibilities for leaks?

I really would like solar to work. But have seen too many crazy storms and even a minor tornado in the past 5 years to make me wonder about 20+ year longevity.

I would personally never mount panels on the roof in a context like this one, a house in the middle of nowhere. They should just be on a pole, mast, or frame. Anywhere but the roof.

Furthermore, maybe, at low latitudes you can just lay them on the ground and at high latitudes just mount them vertically and the snow will drop off. Skip complexity.

It doesn’t sound like it’s that expensive. Certainly less than most households pay for electricity, although I imagine they also use less than most people judging by their very tiny house. Probably some kind of financing available to reduce the initial capital outlay.

Unless you just mean they’re privileged in the sense that most Americans and Europeans are relatively well-off and secure by global standards, in which case sure, but what’s your point?

I wouldn’t say so honestly. In the pantheon of green bragging you can do much, much worse. I think these folks are more down the earth given they recognize their mortality and that what they’ve got here will outlive them, but in general they are gridless people and as such a bit outside of the benefits of bragging.

The shit shows unfolding elsewhere fall into hypocritical territory - concerned about climate change yet are regularly flying. For these folks here, I’m willing to be more charitable. Looking forward to seeing more photos of, hopefully, simpler life.

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