Rooftop solar by itself cannot operate when the electric utility goes down. This shutdown happens at the inverter to prevent backfeeding electrical power onto the offline grid and killing workers who expect lines to no longer be energized. Backfeeding to downed power lines also risks starting fires and killing other people who happen upon them. Technically, adding a battery by itself does nothing to change the situation, but in virtually every implementation of solar+battery you get an inverter capable of islanding the solution; effectively severing the utility connection and operating exclusively internally. If the batteries fill, the solar panels are still disabled because there's nowhere for the power to go.

I do have a solar+battery solution capable of islanding, which is the only reason I still have power when the utility cuts out. However, Powerwalls are expensive and I already have a Tesla vehicle with a massive 82kWh battery sitting on it that would be wonderful to tap in case of emergency. There's no real technical hurdle to simply pulling power from the car to the Tesla Energy Gateway where it can trickle-fill the Powerwalls to a given threshold when they get below a certain point. The cycling on the EV battery should be minimal as long as it's not happening all the time and as long as the feed isn't too rapid. The Model 3 Performance motor can draw (ballpark) 340kW from the pack at max output, but it more likely will draw around 20kW during normal driving conditions. If you pull max 10kW from it, that will feed enough power for nearly any home while charging the Powerwalls and not stressing the battery pack in the slightest.

Whether my AC runs all night depends on the night. If the low temperature at night remains above 90 degrees, my very efficient heat pump HVAC will operate throughout much of the night in a low stepping mode for the condenser and the air handler, gently feeding cool air to maintain the desired internal temperatures indoors. My house isn't massive and it's as insulated as it's economically feasible to make it.

There are no basements in any houses here; all slab-on-grade. Constructing a basement would involve demolishing the existing foundation in place and digging out a basement with the house still standing. Assuming you could find anyone crazy enough to do this work, it would likely cost more than the house itself.

Every oversimplified bullshit "solution" you come up with reinforces how ignorant you are about the real world. You know nothing, but supply flippant answers as though they're realistic or based on anything not pulled directly from your own ass.

I see the problem now: you're an asshole with no life experience and no functional knowledge.

Solar doesn't work during a power outage:
https://www.sunrun.com/go-sola...

You're a fucking idiot who has no idea how residential rooftop solar works.

Go to a hotel with working AC so my newborn baby and son with asthma don't die. Because vulnerable people die in extreme heat: https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10...

You're a fucking idiot who has no idea how the human body works.

Two Powerwalls installed is about $17,000. The cost to fully renovate a 35 year old home to achieve anywhere near 1 or 2 ACH50, including replacing all existing insulation, air sealing and ventilation system install, replacement of all windows and doors with modern energy efficient ones, duct sealing, foundation insulation, etc. is between $70,000 and $90,000. And even doing all that won't help the loads of thermal bridges present in the original construction, so you'll still see massive heat exchange when you're looking at a 30+ degree gradient. Yeah, I looked into it.

You're a fucking idiot who has no idea how home construction works.

You know hundreds of thousands die each year due to heat related causes even today? Including plenty in the US in places that are used to seeing high temperatures like Arizona: https://www.azfamily.com/2023/...

Particularly when you look at vulnerable populations like the elderly, newborns, and people with respiratory issues like asthma.

You're a fucking idiot who has no idea that people die every single day due to heat and have for as long as humans have been a species.

Groceries are expensive, which you would know if mommy and daddy didn't buy all yours.

No they don't, ya fuckin' retard. That's not how they work. Again, no life experience.

Milk supply can drop suddenly: https://onewillow.com/blog/wha...
It can even stop with little or no warning due to stress and lack of sleep: https://utswmed.org/medblog/de...

Further, if a mother is working and exhausts the available time off, but still wants her baby consuming what every bit of scientific research on planet Earth has said is best, she needs to have a stockpile of breastmilk available.

So, again, you're a fucking idiot who has no real experience, no real knowledge, no real concept for how humans, houses, or technology work. Do the human race a favor and go win yourself a Darwin award before you infect the gene pool.

I live in an area that regularly exceeds 105 degrees in the summer, have an unreliable power company, and I have small children including an infant and a child with asthma. If my power goes out for any extended period of time, I have to leave my home. I have two Powerwalls and solar to keep the lights and AC on for a period of time, but it doesn't go indefinitely. If I can use my car's battery for emergency backup, we can survive for far longer without utility power.

It's not just AC. It's charging phones for news updates (e.g., when the power might come back on or if we're in the path of a wild fire). It's freezers and refrigerators with hundreds of dollars of perishable foods. It's hundreds of hours of my wife's breastmilk storage. These are important. It's not a Playstation.

There's only about 8,000 homeless people in San Francisco at any given time. Just give each of them $5,000 cash.

$40 million to cut the number of homeless people in half? You'd think people would jump at the chance!

The high cost of housing is due to rising construction costs (materials and labor) and land prices, along with an imbalance between supply and demand. And the market isn't crashing again, at least not in any widespread sense. Some markets will see short term value declines, but that will halt new housing starts anyway, because you don't build a house that costs you $400,000 to make if you have to sit on it for a year to make any profit.

And your solution for all this? You're endorsing a nightmare scenario where private property rights are trampled on and land is seized by a totalitarian government? That's a haunting echo of Mao's disastrous policies in the late 1950s. This disastrous experiment in state control resulted in one of the deadliest famines in human history, wiping out an estimated 60 million lives. Yet here we are, decades later, with the same doomed ideas being paraded around as if they're fresh and innovative. Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it, and it's alarming to see just how many people are willing to march blindly down a path that we know ends in catastrophe. It's a sobering reflection of the state of education when failed, lethal ideas from the past are presented as new and revolutionary solutions for the future.

At a time when housing affordability is at its worst in history and when commercial real estate stands on the edge of oblivion, and industrial manufacturing is being moved to places around the world to cut costs, you want to massively jack up costs for all new construction?

That's why we don't just default to all new buildings having solar panels: most people can't begin to afford that. You speak from the same place of privilege a lot of green energy activists do; shouting down from your ivory tower about why the people barely hanging on don't fork out five figures to implement a solution you find agreeable.

Tell ya what, if you want most people (who can't afford a $1,000 unexpected expense) to make a five-figure investment in solar, YOU BUY IT. I'm sure they'll be happy to accept your gift.

As an American, this is 100% accurate. Everything is political, and everything is tribal.

You literally have Republicans cheering on Russia in a victory over a NATO effort to defend Ukraine because the defense of Ukraine is happening while a Democrat is in the White House. 30 years ago, if people had been cheering on Russian victory over NATO, Republicans would have been looking to haul such people in for sedition and/or treason.

That's one example. There are a thousand more. People are completely reversing their own claimed principles and turning themselves inside out with mental gymnastics in order to justify how they're against the other guy's position when the other guy's position perfectly aligns with their own. And yes, it's happening across the political spectrum. Anti-war progressives suddenly support riots, mob justice, and violence against people with differing ideologies. Again, one example among a sea of examples. The ideas don't matter anymore. The actions don't matter anymore. All that matters is if the other side is for it, then I'm against it because fuck them. This will be our undoing.

Except the power company doesn't pay you the market price and you can't arrange a damn thing. They tell you what they'll pay and it's typically a small fraction of what they'll charge you for that power. You don't have any negotiating power. You don't have any choices. Well, you have two: buy it or don't.

A lot of places make it effectively impossible to opt out (i.e., go off-grid) using things like building codes which make grid connectivity a prerequisite for habitation. In other words, you can tell the power company "no thanks"; you just can't live in that house anymore - legally. Which leaves you back to dealing with a power company that doesn't care about you as an individual. In texas, they might be selling you power at 10 or 15 cents per kWh normally, but they're probably only giving you something like 3-5 cents for power sold back to them.

In California, the situation is even worse. PG&E, for example, might be charging you 30 cents per kWh to use, but they'll flat tell you themselves that they're going to pay you 2-4 cents per kWh for what you sell to them. (https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/green-energy-incentives/solar-and-renewable-metering-and-billing/net-energy-metering-program-tracking/understand-net-energy-metering.page - "California State Assembly Bill 920 allows PG&E to make payments to NEM customers who generate more electricity than they use over their 12-month billing cycle. The compensation received is called Net Surplus Compensation (NSC). The NSC rate is based on a 12-month average of the market rate for energy. The rate is about two to four cents per kilowatt hour (kWh).")

I see posts like this and I can only assume they're written by teenagers who've never actually lived in the real world, because the real world doesn't work like some textbook's hypothetical economic fantasyland.

Sure, but that's just pointing out the problem with no real solution, right? A new AC unit can easily cost $13,000 - $25,000 (ask me how I know!), and a comprehensive energy efficiency upgrade (windows, insulation, etc.) can similarly reach well over $10,000 as well. And while some upper middle class families may be able to absorb those kinds of costs, the vast majority of people don't have $30,000 sitting around. And while you can say they'll save money on the electricity bill, even the most optimistic assessment wouldn't show break-even until at least 5 years in.

57% of Americans can't afford an unexpected $1,000 expense. $30,000? Not a chance. So yes, those are problems, but they're problems without economically feasible solutions for the vast majority of the people who need a solution.

You didn't witness it because it didn't happen. If it had, it would have been in every newspaper and scientific journal on Earth because it would be the first documented case of the laws of thermodynamics failing to apply, thus throwing our entire understanding of the physical universe into chaos.

If your body loses the ability to burn calories then you die. Full stop. The systemic cessation of metabolic processes is the definition of death.

A calorie is a unit of energy. If energy is not entering a system, but the system is outputting energy, there is a net loss. Your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) is the number of calories you burn as your body performs basic (basal) life-sustaining function.If you were in a coma laying on ground, your body would burn a given number of calories, typically between 1,000 and 2,000 calories per day. An 8 lb newborn baby will burn around 207 calories per day if they're in a coma.

When you say that you knew someone who was consuming 200 calories a day and not losing weight, what you're saying is that you know someone for whom the physical laws of thermodynamics do not apply. It's like saying you once witnessed an actual perpetual motion machine. The claim is, on its face, false, given all we know about the physics of our universe.

ALL obesity ultimately stems from in imbalance between calories in and calories out. All. The laws of thermodynamics and our physical universe DO apply to the human body.

An underlying medical problem may CONTRIBUTE to an unhealthy lifestyle (e.g., it can be more difficult to get exercise if you're on oxygen for respiratory problems), and people who experience a sudden loss of physical ability (e.g., suddenly unable to walk) often don't modify their eating habits to adjust to their new level of physical activity, but it is a myth that one cannot control their weight through caloric control.

Eating properly nutritious foods, individually appropriate exercise, and caloric balance are the cornerstones to human health. This is basic factual information; activists be damned.

This is absurd. You want the US Federal government mandating convenience features in products?

If a product doesn't meet your needs, DON'T BUY IT.
If enough people agree, the product will either add features to meet the need or a competing product will eat their lunch.

Government mandates increase costs for everyone and are typically about the least effective way to manage a market. If you really want a government that manages every aspect of every product you buy, try China. Of course, like other authoritarian governments, China's is rife with corruption, so I'd stay away from the baby formula.

Ridiculous claim given that the Koprowski vaccine trials in Belgian Congo occurred in 1958 and the origin of HIV is estimated to be in the 1920s (but absolutely 100% prior to 1958 as it was already in the US no later than 1952).

"I do not believe that college is about getting a good job."

If your product is expensive and the ROI is infinity years, then your product is dogshit and should be avoided.