You make a good point. In the future I can see them deliberately spacing dormers and such to balance usability and solar energy potential.

That being said, solar panels don't have to be restricted to the roof. I'm tempted to set up a 'solar car park'.

If you don't need house-level water resistance or insulation they're perfectly suitable as a roof surface.

As a bonus, if you write it up as the structural members are to keep it out of the way and from interfering with your car as opposed to being a car park with solar panels on top, the whole construction cost is deductible. Not that structural members to raise the panels 8-10' high are all that more expensive than ones that would only raise it 4'.

Just the opposite, actually. Remember, you don't have to melt all the snow. Just a very small layer that's touching the solar panel.

The heavier the snowfall, the less energy you need to spend on heat to make it fall off.

That being said, after doing the math, my answer for solar power in the winter once it snows is indeed 'fuck it', my simulations assume NO power generation for four months/year.

No. If and when there's even a tiny manifestation of Amazon actually doing such deliveries, it's not going to be to residential front porches. It's going to be to things like pre-designated safe spots on the roof outside the mail room at a corporate office park, or into something interesting like a jump-chute funnel set up for the occasion next to loading docks or in back yards where a delivery rep has made a survey on behalf of very regular customers. People have this vision of powerful package carrying drones buzzing around at patio-level in suburban neighborhoods, and that's just simply never going to be how it's done.

A lot of people forget or ignore the fact that this applies to Apple as well (and almost certainly to numerous other manufacturers). Apple didn't invent touch screens or radios, and the performance of CPUs and memory had been increasing along with the size and power consumption decreasing. Apple's major accomplishment was recognizing that all of the technology had advanced to the point that they could assemble a device that people wanted to buy at a price that people were willing to pay. If Apple hadn't done it when they did, someone else most likely would have done it, and not much later.

I think, indeed, that's related to your track record as a customer. I've received TXT messages from Amazon about a processed credit within literally seconds of a UPS drop-off point scanning a package. Fun to see that many moving parts moving so quickly.

Your unstated assumption is that access to these printers is the only thing stopping people from doing illegal things like murdering a patient in a hospital. I am not convinced that your assumption is correct.

The key question is the reliability and accuracy of this printing method. If there are fewer mistakes with this method than there are with current methods, the liability problem should decrease.

Except that YOUR standards for "annoyed" and "surveillance" may be very difference from the next guy's (are you really able to discern what a camera the size of a pack of gum is actually doing, if anything, 100' up in the air? really?). But you're saying that your standard is the one that makes it OK to destroy that piece of equipment with a shotgun.

Scenario: You're standing at the top of a 750' cliff, and launch for a 200' view of something at the edge of the cliff. You fly one foot to the left, which means you're still 200' above your own head, but technically 950' above the dirt that is immediately below the drone. Does it precipitously drop 250' in an effort to keep itself legal, thus leaving it 50' below your feet and just inches from a collision with the cliff face? What happens when you are granted permission to fly from the observation deck of a 600' building? Etc.

Fixed it for you.

The real numbers:

If you figure out what the "just enough" solar panel count would be for your max power needs during the shortest day of the year in full sunlight at whatever angle(s) you'll be able to manage, you'll need five to seven times that many to make sure that on non-sunny days you're good to go.

This is because solar panels produce between 15% and 20% of rated capacity on non-sunny days. Non-sunny days are not "dark", they are only "dim." It is a very rare day indeed where it is so dark as to drive a solar panel below 15% output (major snowstorm which has the atmosphere nearly opaque, that kind of thing.) But dim days can come in very long strings, so that's the target to aim at.

For a reliable system that will never let you down, you do tend to need considerably more space than you would initially think. But it is possible, given that you have the space (lots) and the budget (also lots) required. Panel-wise, it's a quantity issue.

But there's a wolverine in the woodpile: Batteries. To be blunt, they suck, as in, expensive to replace and very short lifetimes compared to the rest of the system.

Until or unless ultracaps reach a point where they are on par with batteries for the service you need, reasonable full-on solar installations remain quite expensive.

Installations that use batteries are regarded highly by their owners only until the first battery replacement. Then their wallets straighten them right out.

I have a lowish-power setup, with an unfortunate number of ultracaps (because capacity is very low, about 1/10th that of a battery right now) as the energy storage medium. I did it both to give my ham gear a constant supply, and to explore what would actually work. It took a custom controller design -- ultracaps don't act even remotely like batteries -- and it took me quite some time to put it all together and make it work like I wanted it to. There are way more panels than you'd expect because of that 15% number (my panels are cheap ones), and there are way more ultracaps than I wanted to expend room for, but I did have the room, so I kept at it. It works great, and it isn't going to need service for decades unless there is an actual component failure or a severe weather event (large hail, for instance.)

Trying to do this for a full house load? A typical US house? Not yet, I'm afraid. There will be tons of compromises to make in appliances, lights, and lifestyle, and in the end, you're not likely to have the same lifestyle you had prior to your switchover.

The battery problem will probably be solved. One way or another. Eventually. I have no idea if solar panel efficiency will get up into a range where the costs and space will fall within the range needed to go truly off grid. That's a physics question in an area where I have nowhere near enough knowledge. But right now? No.

Which brings us to on-grid, grid power use mitigation. Now that is an interesting area, and we can leave batteries right out of it, as peak power also comes during peak power use (right now... electric cars may change that.) But it involves all kinds of compromises for the utilities if it is adopted in any kind of mass manner. They will need power storage, as I understand it at the moment.

Full-on solar is a great, great thing with huge potential (ha, a pun, hooray), but it's not a panacea by any means except in very rare sets of circumstances that involve very large amounts of money and large areas of space for the panels.

If you trust all that, and you believe it isn't vulnerable to the NSA and hackers, that's your call to make.

Which is the only way to make it better. Right now, it's just a simple wealth transfer tax. It does exactly nothing to in any way reduce the cost of practicing medicine. The Democrats explicitly rejected any attempt to make the law even slightly about things like tort reform or the ability to operate across state lines in order to wildly reduce the unnecessary overhead.

What? He has explicitly said that he has no interest in anything that Republicans tried desperately to add to the mix while the law was being written, or anything they've said since. Why? Because anything that would lighten the load on the people who've suddenly had their rates quadrupled would reduce his party's ability to harp about how many people to whom they're redistributing the goodies.

This is factually incorrect, pure and simple. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Which is exactly why your entire premise about being over your own yard or over some other patch of dirt means exactly nothing in the context of your complaint.

But you think they're going to somehow be smart enough, without a pilot's certificate, to stay under 500' above their own dirt, but can't be trusted to make exactly the same decision thirty feet to the right, above a different patch of grass? People who are going to break the law are going to break the law. Drivers licenses don't prevent tens of thousands of deaths every year, involving certified drivers on heavily regulated public roads. Meanwhile literally millions of RC aircraft of all shapes and sizes are flown. Give us a run-down of the ensuing blood bath, would you? Details, please.

AC is one of those things where a custom solution is often better than just trying to throw more solar panels and batteries at it.

First, you start by designing the house for the region, not forcing it by 'simply' tossing a X ton AC system at it. This can dramatically reduce the heat load. Much better done when building the house, of course, rather than as a refit.

Second, consider your total cooling requirements, at the reduced level. Consider what resources you have. Options include adsorption, absorption, air & ground source heat pump, evaporative, etc... Let's say we're sticking with that our cooling energy MUST come from solar power. We can use solar photovoltiac or solar thermal. Thermal pulls more energy from the sun per square meter and be cheaper, but processes after it are less efficient.

Today you can buy high efficiency heat pumps that work directly off of DC.

Third - get creative with storage. Batteries are not the only option! Thermal mass is an option - you cool down some media - water, bricks, dirt, doesn't really matter. Then use that to keep blowing cool air through the night. In the case of a thermal system, you can dump heat into storage and keep using it to run the absorption chiller overnight. In the case of an Adsorption chiller, you can size the media to last through the night and regenerate it during the day.