Comment by ravedev
5 years ago
But you could have a few 100w (or 200w) solar panels installed on the roof of your house which either charge your home battery or offload that to the grid. And just charge your car when you want.
It is true that you lose some energy every time you store or transfer it, but if we install solar panels on every roof (so we get excess energy from solar) and also find a way to store energy cheaply for a long time, that should be enough to completely switch from fossil fuels, (well, mostly)
Yeah I think I did some back of the napkin calculations that this would be feasible if we put solar panels on every roof. One challenge is that installation is still pretty expensive from a labor point of view because roofs are all unique to one degree or another (age, orientation, composition) and the parts and knowledge to DiY aren't yet commonly available at the local big box hardware store. Plus you have to interact and interconnect with the power company so its another layer of complexity and specialization. Adoption could be greatly accelerated if we had something that made installation of panels on houses a priority especially for lower income households in both the developed and developing world as they would in theory benefit the most from really cheap electricity or at least lower electrical bills. As it stands now it can pay for itself over time but typically on the scale of decades and there are a lot of middle men who will install them and then own the panels and try to profit off of the price differential.