How much land, time, and money, per citizen, would it take to put down enough solar cells to generate each person's basic electrical supply? Is it less than $5K?
It looks like solar can already power about a third of American household demand, and is on track to get to two thirds within five years [1]. (Commercial and utility is leading the acceleration, even into Q2 2026.)
That said, we're hitting 2030 with ~20% of American electricity coming from solar and wind versus 40 to 60% under the IRA baselines. We may wind up in a long-term spiral where our adversaries have not only more manufacturing capability and structurally lower labour costs, but structurally cheaper energy, too.
I looked into this living in Japan and tired of the electric bill after running AC 24/7 for three months when it's 35 degrees at 65% humidity.
$5500 in solar panels including a battery would be just enough to keep the AC on all summer, and that's being fairly high on the temperature, around 26.
So based on cost alone and not power draw, with the AC off you could comfortably power a fridge, PC, and water heater, I guess? But I'm talking out my ass here
I live in a 160m2 (1700 sqft) house in Northern Europe (54N). 10kWp of solar on my roof generates around 1/3 more than I consume over the year. Everything is electric, I don't have natural gas. I have a heat pump for heating and cooling (rarely gets above 30c here). If I had a battery April - September could all be local consumption (I pull around 5kWh from the grid each day).
The issue is winter: It gets down to -25c and there is very little sun (not that it would help due to snow on the panels). In January and February this year I generated a grand total of 5kWh :D
However my house is a new house, it's designed to modern building standards and has 30cm of PIR insulation in the walls and even more in the roof. There's just no way to properly renovate old buildings to be like that without basically rebuilding the whole thing. The actual cost of materials is not expensive though (for the west). In milder climates (UK I'm looking at you) there's really no reason all new houses cannot be net-zero.
Modern building standard constantly changes. Time will show, how good they are.
Meanwhile, we have, in Europe a lot of buildings from late 19, early 20th century that are perfectly habitable today and often are ruined by modern standards that not respect old standards. For example basement addition that prevents the apartments from “breathing” and causes them to become damp.
I have done a grid based setup at my house in India and it cost us close to 3k for a 5kw setup with 4 acs. Planning for a complete off grid solution once the efficient panels like hjt and sodium cells become common place. Right now we have acid batteries and they are not very comfortable to handle.
Converting Sun to electricity to power a water heater is suboptimal. The water can be heated directly by the Sun. If you can put a water tank above the solar panel, you don't even need a pump.
From a purely efficiency standpoint, yes, but practically, electricity->heat is a lot cheaper to install. Plumbing is messy, and bolting on a water circulation system to a roof is harder than delivering more joules over the wires.
Having gone through one ice-dam related roof leak in the past, I'm also not thrilled with the idea of superheated liquids hanging out casually above my bedroom while I sleep.
Electrical generation is largely separate from imported crude oil (what the article is about).
It takes a lot more than $5K to build a system that can replace a household's energy use. For 24 hour coverage you need substantial battery capacity, too.
To cover theoretical EV charging it gets even more expensive.
Prices continue to come down, but it still takes a lot to actually replace all of a household's energy usage with solar.
Our house is all-electric. We have a 60 panel, 24 kw array that would probably cover all of our needs if it weren't shaded in the afternoon, and we have a real winter here, so the heat pump runs hard, and we use a substantial amount of electricity. About 1250 square feet of panels in total. Equipment costs about $20k-$30k in the US, not including batteries or electrician install. The actual array was pretty easy to set up.
On the global market, you can get the equipment for much less, the same inverter is a fraction of the cost that the UL listed American company version costs, the panels are a good bit less. But in the US, this stuff gets marked up pretty hard.
If your main load is for summer A/C, with a mild winter, the generation and usage line up much better.
Yeah things are very frugal here (my wife is especially frugal) so without AC it's pretty much just PC, two fridges, water heater, knickknacks like toaster, foodprocessor, etc. Stove and grill is gas, and kerosene heaters for when it drops below 10c. We could easily get by with a grid well below 10k usd I'm guessing
Such a shame the US didn't switch at least some of the fleet to electric years ago when it had a chance. Total stupidity. Even to this day my local MAGA town balks at solar panels and just laughs at people who install them. Reality will smack them in the face sooner or later. Right now they are blaming the democratic governor because they only provided a tiny bill credit to citizens to help reduce rates but totally ignoring how the Republican promised nothing.
You are assuming the supply of diesel goes to 0. Instead there is a reduction, not elimination and as a result, demand destruction will happen in the US just as its been happening for months outside the US. (This is partially what allowed us to avoid a crisis in March)
Trucks will stop delivering trash (ex. China dollar store crap, lower margin non food items and a billion other nonessential items). Food prices go up, people will do without less desserts or fancy foods but enough deliveries continue with the fuel saved that no one starves.
Now imagine if we replaced only 10% of diesel trucks with electric. Hell just focus on the short haul trucks. That unburned diesel could have helped buffer the remaining fleet.
I doubt it will ever be cost effective for the foreseeable future. The AI companies have astonishing amounts of compute and they’re effectively dumping it on the market.
The comparison is about how many tokens you buy vs how much hardware you could buy with the same money. It's as saying "if you have rib eyes at Applebee's every day, how long until cooking your own rib eyes pays for itself".
If you don't consume many of tokens, it will likely never pay for itself. If you do, though, it will have trade-offs, but you'll probably save money in the end.
More than that, running hundreds of conversation streams at once is essentially the same cost as running a single conversation. And then you add on the secondary benefit of having the GPUs running nearly all the time rather than mostly idle...
Local inference makes sense for speciality needs, or very small models. But if your model is bug enough to span GPUs its excessively wasteful to hoard those GPUs for yourself without piggybacking hundreds of other conversations on top of all that memory bandwidth and matrix multiplies.
> But AI breaks that correlation, for the same reason it separates the two notions of proof. So, even genuine solutions would not satisfy us.
This is not moving the goalposts but recognizing that any specific goalpost is inadequate. If mathematics is a game, it is an infinite one.
This attitude is not reactionary. We reject both
It was pure Not X It’s Y for so long i naturally assumed it was AI written.
I sympathize but you're literally looking at something an hour old and demanding that the economic and political realities that produced it change entirely.
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