Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by epistasis | Hacker News Reader

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This is nothing specific to the CyberTruck; 123 kWh is a lot of battery but a better use would be to add home solar and then you're completely self-sufficient in addition to saving tons of money.

Of course there are two issues that are completely solveable if we had reasonable governance:

1. Adopting an Australia-style solar installation regulation and permitting scheme, which is literally 1/5th tho cost of the US method, and pays their tradespeolpe higher salaries than US workers get

2. Allowing EVs to feed back into the grid. This is something that naysayers would never be useful because nobody would ever want to waste battery cycles on their home. Which of course has always been nonsense. Don't buy EVs without this basic capability, IMHO.

I’ve looked at solar so many times and I’d love to get it…I just can’t make the math work based on the quotes I always end up getting.

That's entirely due to the US scheme, where utilities have ensured that it won't make sense nearly everywhere. Which is then combined with the asinine permitting situation in the US, where every city and county does something on their own without any order or sense.

This combines to ensure that any solar installer will do lots of very expensive things: 1) have a large sales force to close the sale, which last I looked accounted for 30%-40% of the overall cost of solar in the US, 2) roll out trucks many different times during the planning and install, each costing lots of money, 3) never have to compete with a bunch of other hyper-competitive installers and find efficiencies like batching installs together in the same general area.

There are also massively high solar PV tariffs in the US, more than tripling the cost of the panels, but that's not even that big compared to the rest of the needless inefficiency in the system.

Got it, so stick to the cybertruck if you're in the US.

No, I wouldn't say that's the case unless you have free dollars that work for the cyber truck and not for solar panels.

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