216: Solar Panel Scam?

Using a flywheel as an emergency backup power source doesn't sound very energy efficient. It's going to require a constant, albeit small, input of energy to keep it spinning at a constant speed.
Then again, I have solar and a single Tesla Powerwall which most days does a full charge and discharge cycle, when fully discharged it still draws a small amount of electricity from the grid to maintain itself. If I only had the Powerwall as an emergency backup device, it too would not be an efficient backup energy source. The whole point of batteries and mechanical energy storage devices is to use them as often as practical to shift the time of day energy is consumed.

Thank you for this wonderfully informative video. Sheila Mink in New Mexico

The solar company that seemed best on Energy Sage might be scamming me. Or it might be Black Hills, the energy provider. Or it might all be fine and it's just my paranoid brain balking at dropping $30,000.

Everything was supposed to be done by March. Black Hills knows nothink! and the solar company is blaming black hills. So I don't know where the delay's coming from.
That's not the scammy part, though and it may actually be a good thing as it's allowed me to do more math. Beware the power of math!

The solar company wants to put 26 panels on the roof. It's just me and a couple cats. Yes I work from home, and have electric everything, but so far I'm on track to use less than 7000kWh for the year and their planned 26 panels would generate around 16,000kWh.

Do you think they're trying to sell me way more than I need on purpose, or could it be an honest mistake? 10,000kWh is the national average, and electric everything would drive me above that average, but not by 60%.

I don't have a full year of data in this house, but unless this house is way harder to cool than it was to heat I shouldn't use nearly that much. I have October-April data, January was by far the highest at just under 800kWh for the month. Even 12 January's worth of power usage wouldn't be over 10,000kWh though.

Now that I'm asking about less panels there's suddenly 'engineering fees' and 'we may have to start the whole process over'. Ugh. It's too late for this. Thanks for your input gentlebeings, and for the informative videos.

While I fully sympathize with the notion of "it makes no (financial|temporal) sense for me to do this myself" or "this job exceeds my capabilities", there are usually reasons to be familiar with either what is being done, or how it should be done. A few that come to mind are:
– "professionals" tend to oversell their expertise to win a bid, at times leading to someone sketchy doing the actual work
– an enthusiast may know more about an aspect of something than the person doing the work (Matt himself brought up the idea of working with someone working on his house while it was being built because said someone had never worked with this particular technology before)
– avoiding being railroaded by someone

If the someone doing the work is truly a pro, they will likely not shy away from engaging in a conversation with the person paying for the work ("it's your money, whether we talk or I do the work my rate is the same"), explaining why what the customer wants is or is not a good idea. On the other hand, someone who would feel inferior for one reason or another may get confrontational ("go away you micromanaging so-and-so")
At the end of the day, if the work gets done wrong, it may end up being even more expensive to make right after the fact ("remind me again why we paid someone to do this for us?")

Thank you for a great channel!

I'm gonna be that guy, so sorry in advance, but datacenter flywheels are waaaay cooler than the situation you described — also more limited. Cooler because nobody has to do anything. Industrial electrical systems can detect system voltage drop REALLY fast — sometimes in less than a whole cycle (1/60 of a second.) Critical systems like a datacenter would transfer the load to something like a flywheel almost instantly if there's a grid disruption. You might see the lights flicker for less than a second, but that's it. Nothing that matters would stop running. On the down side, the runtime of flywheels at load is pretty short. It's just enough to keep things running while primary generators spin up. The installation I'm familiar with had just a couple minutes on flywheel and had to keep prime-rated diesel generators on block heaters to target a total load transfer in 15 seconds on a multi-megawatt system, which is as cool as it is crazy 😅

Hi Matt, I’m an avid watcher of your channel and am personally building a Passive House at the moment. I do however try to take a practical and realistic approach to things and therefore wonder whether we are trying to achieve good things in the wrong way. Eg black coal in modern plants (with filtered emissions and covered transport wagons) is very efficient and in real terms very clean. Take solar, which at commercial scale creates a heat island effect, requires rare earth mining etc etc, and then needs either firming generation or batteries – the realities aren’t as clean or simple as they first seem. The knock on effect is much more expensive power and therefore more expensive everything (food, cars, couches, it all needs electricity). We then use more complex products eg LED lights vs incandescents which are simple, light to transport and efficient to make. We need more insulation in homes. It all costs more and requires more manufacturing. We need clean water, air etc but should we focus on the basics like allowing new technologies to solve problems, like better pumps, and in the long term nuclear fission, while continuing with modern clean coal in the meantime? Further to these points, I love the balanced way you look at issues and would be very interested in a video with your thoughts on this https://player.vimeo.com/video/924719370?h=2a7e9fcaa7

People don't realize how long it takes for new technology to become available to buy. The car was patented in 1886 but you couldn't go to the gas station until 1905. Kodak took the first digital picture in 1975 but you had to wait until 1990 to buy one. The fax machine was patented in 1843 but if you wanted one you had to wait until 1966.

I remember watching another YouTube channel and he said the Duesenberg car engine, all built in 1929, had an analog computer telling you when to check and change the fluids.

With regard to Change. There is a fundamental difference between introduction of the engine and the industrial age version transition to fossil free fuels.
The engine was adopted by the industrialists to make money.
The iPhone and Android smartphones were adopted by consumers to make life easier. I stopped carrying my laptop and a separate navigation gps with me whenever I travelled.
Renewable energy does what? For whom?
When engines were introduced there was no powerful opposition. Unions tried.
When smartphones were introduced it blind sided the incumbents.
Fossil free energy has powerful well entrenched opposition with unlimited resources to fight it.

Solar panels are great, but the installers overcharge IMO. And there are many underhanded installers that take advantage of the uninformed giving the industry a bad rap.

Social impatience is likely due, at least in part, to the MASSIVE shift in our daily tech in the last 2 decades or so, combined with how most things happen so quickly, from ordering items off Amazon or Temu, to geting your food from door dash. What is often forgotten or simply missed, is that our current dtate didnt happen over night, but was the evolution and combination of several techs over several decades; the integrated circuit, to cell technology, to personal computers, to the internet to smart phones to social media and our current "app culture". It all seems to have been a massive rush, but it was decades in the making.

This impatience is also REALLY evident when it comes to how Gen Z is livid that the US isn't solving the Israel/Palestinian issue immediately.

Inertia, from a technological as well as social and diplomatic perspective, is a thing, and evolutionary changes are far easier and faster than revolutionary changes, and what may seem like a single revolutionary step, may actually actually be the result of many small, iterative steps over a long period of time.

The conversation around the gap between expert and popular understanding of a topic and the way that information is discussed really brought to mind two laws from the Sci-Fi/Fantasy realm: Clarke's Law says “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”; Sanderson's Second Law states "An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic". You could perhaps summarize the interaction here as "People's willingness to accept an advanced technological solution is directly proportional to how well they understand that technology" (which I will henceforth refer to as Drake's Law 🤣)The public doesn't trust new technology to solve their problems, because those technologies no longer functions at a level that they can understand it, or meaningfully distinguish it from magic.

I'm not wasting my time with FUD.

Technology is not the problem, the control of who makes the money is the controlling factor for all new events whether good or not.