Oddbin
Can confirm. Have become a total energy nerd. Want more solar. Want heat pump. Watch how much we spend and how much we make every day. Tell everyone about it and have no shame. It’s a hell of a drug.
I just started watching this again this morning. It’s a huge slab of nostalgia for sure, the music is cracking and some of the art styling and designs are ace but I’m not sure if it’s actually any good. It’s hard to separate the nostalgia from the critical thinking.
We don’t have time to perfect and mature the tech though. That was 40 years ago. Now it’s whatever fucking works that isn’t fossil fuels and burning of them. It’s a damn sight safer than an ICE which is actually carrying extremely combustible liquids in it too. It’s not perfect but it’s better and this kind of " we have to hold off" is effectively supporting the status quo which is fuckig everything up as it is.
Good news. I installed 14 last year and expected if all went well to have them paid off in 12-14 years. Going by the last 10 months it will be less than 6. That’s from a combination of savings (1/3 of the energy bill) and also selling the excess to the grid (£164 worth so far) and all of Ttat’s at 55-ish degrees North too on a not ideal roof. Anywhere south of me should absolutely have them covering their roofs, there really isn’t a good reason not to.
Next up is top up insulation and replace the boiler with a heat pump. Possibly a second battery.
Entirely valid and I agree that continual growth is right at the heart of most of our problems. I guess most of my frustration comes from the fact we’ve had at least 40 years of warning, 20 more years of proper, severe warning and promises for action and now that we’re seeing day in, day out that all the warnings were right, we’re still not moving with any real purpose. I genuinely thought that COVID would show us what we need to do and how we could do it but nope, slipped right back into business as usual.
That wasn’t always a thing. This is a new and rapidly evolving area with issues that will be solved. Hell, battery chemistry is changing rapidly already. ICE cars have been death traps for most of their life and are still at higher risk of going in flames and just as violently, case in point the car carrier that went on fire that everyone just knew was an EV, wasn’t. It was a shitty old ice. Luton Airport too. Everyone knew that was a. EV. Was a shitty old diesel and that car park suffered serious structural damage because of it. In addition the AA claim that the majority of ICE fire are because of the 12v battery. None of this is new it’s just different.