Most people limit themselves by their unwillingness to consider personal change. They won’t learn new things and they won’t change their behaviors even when they discover they’ve been wrong.
from Tom’s Twelve Laws
December 17, 2008
First Flight
On this day in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first sustained flights. How far we’ve come. I’ve been to the National Air and Space Museum and was thoroughly gobsmacked to see the Wright Flyer hanging gracefully over the Apollo 11 Command Module. What a juxtaposition. In only 66 years we went from this:
to this:
Ed Begley, Call Me
Greg Johanson has developed a way to install a solar panel into the top of a Prius. Not only does this make the car incredibly fuel efficient (a day of charging will get you 8 miles for free!), but this can make every Prius driver even more insufferably self-righteous.
I’d love to see this tech go really mainstream and work its way into every production car. Erin and I have already decided to solar-ize our next house. Imagine having enough solar and wind generating capacity to power your house and charge the cars for short trips. You’d cut out most of your energy and fuel bills altogether.
Here’s a quick calculation. According to my records, we spent somewhere around $4000 on electricity (11710 Kwh), gasoline, and natural gas (26.7 Mcf) this year. Yes, I keep track of the amounts. It’s a sickness, but it’s nice when I do these sorts of calculations.
If we spent somewhere around $50,000 on a really nice solar setup for the house, this could replace most of the electric and gas charges (and do a number on the gasoline if our cars were so equipped). Wait a second… fifty grand?!?! That’s crazy talk! Ah, but after taking advantage of tax benefits, that 50K system would run somewhere around 25k installed. At that rate, the entire system would pay for itself in less than 10 years (this is all very back-of-the-envelope calculatin’). The system cost could be rolled into the mortgage on the house. Okay, so more planning needs to be done (the monthly “cost” of the system via loan payments at 7% is $166 over 30 years), but this is a good example of how a good solar setup really pays in the long run. And we don’t really live at an Ed Begley level of conservation right now (no CFL’s, keep the vampires on, etc). One of these days I’d like to do a really thorough energy review on our home and see how much we can reduce energy usage.
As far as the gasoline portion of energy savings go, we’d probably save a bit by replacing my aging truck (20mpg), but since I only drive 3000 miles per year, the financial tradeoffs are dubious. The benefit of working at home. The good thing is that I don’t drive much. The bad thing is that I do “need” a truck several times a year to transport drum kits for Sing and 4×8 sheets of plywood for woodworking.
Here’s the crazy part: even if we wanted to retrofit our current home to go solar, the local homeowner’s association wouldn’t allow it. They’d rather keep our home an exact duplicate of the ones next door than allow us to put up energy saving panels. Hopefully this mindset will start to change. I’d love to see HOA’s give breaks to homeowners that did install systems.