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It's the fundamental problem that needs solving in order to achieve what this announcement claims is the ultimate end goal of all this - a "net-zero carbon eco
by makomk 4y ago
It's the fundamental problem that needs solving in order to achieve what this announcement claims is the ultimate end goal of all this - a "net-zero carbon economy" for the country as a whole - and it has been the fundamental obstacle to achieving this for decades now. So long as this problem remains unsolved, no amount of supposedly zero energy homes will ever get the country as a whole to that goal because they're still reliant on selling excess energy to the remaining "non zero energy" parts of the country in the summer and buying energy back from fossil fuel plants in the winter.
- ajross 4y agoSo.. you're saying this specific technology can only get us 60-70%[1] of the way to the "ultimate end goal". Ergo... it shouldn't be deployed and we should whine about it on HN? No, that's silly. Build the panels. Build the solar. Fix the externalities, but absolutely pick the low hanging fruit. Every panel on a hippie's home means less total joules needed elsewhere. To be blunt: the kind of argumentation you engage in is absolutely toxic, and HN is awash in it. Engineers love to scream about perfect solutions, but real engineering is about tradeoffs. And folks here are absolutely terrible, just really, genuinely shit-tier, at discussing them rationally. [1] Depending on locale, obviously. In e.g. Arizona it's probably much closer to 80-90%