According to filings I was able to find, The Commonwealth has a 20 year procurement contract with Vineyard Wind for 6.5c/kwh (2017 dollars, about 8.5c/kwh today). Or $85/MWh

In January the average wholesale electricity price was about $124/MWh.

This doesn't mean the average customer will see a ~30% drop in their utility bill of course, but this is definitely adding cheaper power to the market which in turn should bring utility bills down.
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You'd need to examine the bill closely. 35c/kwh sure sounds like total bill divided by total consumption, but there's likely (if it's anything like my bill) a bunch of line items either not directly tied to kwh consumed (connection fees, taxes, 'adjustments' etc) or the kwh are partitioned into tranches and/or time of use pricing tiers.

3c/kwh sounds like the actual retail value of the electricity per kwh.

So basically they're buying the energy from you at what it's actually worth.
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> The storage that would be required to fully go off grid ... just doesn't exist ... it wouldn't be physically possible to have that much on my lot

You say "massive home" but how massive are we talking? I reckon you could stack 3MWh of LFP into as little as 300 sq.ft. (including BMS but not chargers/inverters). Exactly how much space would depend on ceiling height and layout to account for isle space. :)

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The problem is the LLM can't be held liable for mistakes. And since you can't prove if some dumb bullshit came from the LLM or not, or what the LLM:Human nonsense ratio is, all this does is absolve the humans involved from any and all responsibility for their dumb bullshit. Just blame the LLM and shrug because now that it's law it will take another act of congress to undo it which could take months or years if ever.

This is the wet dream of techbros everywhere... power with no accountability. It's what they tried to do with DAOs and crypto.
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> Lots of solar panels on a vehicle add negative value. The same money equivalent of panels on a building where the vehicle is parked will generate more power.

Not that I disagree with your premise, but the value in having it on the vehicle is it's there no matter where it's are. Solar on a building is better bang-for-the-buck but at the very real inconvenience (from a vehicle user's perspective) of having to be connected to that building to make use of it.

I say that as someone who has solar, home batteries (15kwh worth), and an EV.

> What is the power consumption of running the AC to get the vehicle back down to a tolerable temperature after an hour of parking in the sun, vs the power generated?

Probably not that much of an issue. Definitely still a net positive. If I remember to do so, I can check the power draw on my car's AC once the weather gets warmer. I want to say it's about 1kw full blast but it modulates and cooling the entire cabin takes only a few minutes, so we're talking maybe 150-200 watt-hours I reckon.

> A popular thing these days is to cover parking lots with solar panels.

Not popular enough to worry about with EV-integrated solar, unfortunately. The vast, vast, vast, VAST majority of parking lots are just blacktop.
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Maybe 40 miles in ideal conditions. Like absolutely perfect conditions. That is typical Aptera marketing wank, sadly.

I feel you'd be very lucky to get 30 in reality, and I think 20-ish is a safe expectation to not get caught without enough to get home. Any more than that is just a happy bonus.
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Assuming you own a car at all; How many hours a day do you spend driving? Assuming it's somewhat less than 24 hours, what are you generally doing the rest of the time?

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It can be a very usable amount of energy; definitely a "meaningful" amount.

The Aptera gets a (claimed) ~8mi/kwh. This version supposedly has 700 watts of panels on it. If we assume average production is slightly less than half nameplate due to weather, sun angle, and poor cleanliness, and panel->battery losses, let's say 300 watts.

So in 8 hours you're getting 2400 watt-hours or about 19 miles of driving. That's comfortable more than the average daily commute distance of 12 miles for the kind of urban commuter market the Aptera is aimed at. And that's in a average to bad weather day.

Even a more typical vehicle - which can probably fit more solar on it since it'll be larger - getting 3 mi/kwh could easily get 10+ miles of additional driving daily, which ain't nothing.

The only real question is if this is worth the additional cost. For a typical car? I'd say no. For the Aptera? I'd also say no... but I don't think the Aptera is worth buying in the first place.
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Parental controls/locks have been a thing for decades. There are lots of options out there for parents to take direct action curating content their children are able to access. The problem is already solved to the extent that it could ever be solved.

This "solution" only does two things; Transfers the responsibility of raising children from the parents to the government/corporations, and further normalizes giving up privacy in exchange for the illusion of safety. Either of these should invoke fear and anxiety in any sensible person.

And of course you can guarantee that any bullshit, AI-infested, global database of faces and personal data they end up creating to facilitate this is going to be abused by governments and corporations alike. When will we learn that the best way to secure personal data is to stop putting it all in one place...
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> So, youâ(TM)re volunteering to be the test pilot for all new electric aircraft and spacecraft?

I feel like you skipped a few steps in here somewhere... as if you were so enthusiastic to shit on something you forgot to take your own pants off first...

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Yes.

Any online requirements would either need to be disabled, or modified to work with a locally provided service. So if EA couldn't patch out the login entirely, they could also provide a local auth server and patch the game to use that instead.

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> If curb weight is 300 lbs higher this either means 300 lbs less loading of cargo and passengers or facilitating 300 lbs of additional gross weight rating which itself requires added vehicle mass to achieve.

And that extra mass to accommodate is negligible. I'll use a 2020 Hyundai Kona as an example because that's the car I own and I know for a fact the ICE and EV versions are identical in basically every detail not directly related to the drivetrain.

ICE curb weight: About 3000lbs.
Weight of engine + transmission (2.0L MPI Atkinson DOHC + A6GF1-2): ~430 lbs
Net chassis weight: ~2570 lbs

EV curb weight: about 3700 lbs.
EV battery 64kwh pack weight by itself: ~1000lbs.
EV motor, gearbox, inverter: ~200lbs.
Net chassis weight: ~2500 lbs

By your logic, the EV variant would need to weight more than the ICE. That's demonstrably not the case; the chassis is basically identical within the margin of error.

> What "apocalyptic concerns" have I raised?

You personally? I don't know you well enough. But if you look at all the complaints about EVs from 10-15 years ago, and even up to this day, they were making the same arguments as you while claiming our roads and bridges would collapse and all sorts of other nonsense. None of those fears have come to pass.

> EV owners are going thru new tires every other year.

I've owned an EV for five years and the tires still have plenty of tread on them.

> As explained above this is not the case.

Your position is in direct conflict with observable, lived reality.
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You forgot the part where you spend over a decade building name recognition and a devoted following who will help make your project a success for the memes alone.

No shade at Markiplier but let's not delude ourselves that any random dude can get the same results; most indie films run at a negative, but in terms of successful indie films Iron Lung is pretty far down the list... though it's not been out that long.

The real lesson here is to find a way to generate hype while keeping budgets low, and it doesn't really matter how much or how little you "play their game."
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> scaling is not linear.

With weight it literally is, though.

> This translates into increased mass to support the added mass impacting struts, brake, tire and road wear, safety and efficiency.

We're talking about an increase in mass equal to two, maybe three, passengers. You're adding an estimated 5% or so to the total vehicle mass going from LFP to Sodium to keep the same total energy store.

For comparison, 1600lbs to an F150 Lightning is over 25% more vehicle mass. Mass that it was already designed to carry, because that's its bed payload capacity.

Struts for a 3250lbs car are not any larger or heavier than those you'd use on a 3000lbs car. The brakes do not need to be any larger. Tire wear increase is minimal to negligible (despite all the pearl-clutching headlines, reports from actual owners and real world data never indicate accelerated wear). Increase in road wear is absolutely negligible in this weight class.

The arguments you are making now are exactly the same arguments made when EVs first became a big deal (EVs being heavier than ICEvs and all that) and none of those apocalyptic concerns turned out to be true. Hell, cars in general have gotten much heavier than this hypothetical increase and none of what you're saying has been an issue.

But back to the original point; The added weight of a less energy dense battery to get the equivalent kwh will have a negligible impact on range. It's just not a big deal.
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> I see this on a regular basis with ICE but it's less than that

19.6 -> 18.0 is an 8% drop in efficiency. 8% is more than 5%, not less.

Granted you'd need to account for speed as well, but considering similar tests are done with gasoline pickups and they also see 8% to 9% decrease in range - still less than 5% - I think you've just helped prove my point that a few hundred pounds extra is not a significant impact on a vehicle's efficiency, no?
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