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Op-Ed: How I Gave Up Alternating Current

posted by takyon on Tuesday August 04 2015, @10:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the tune-out dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

Soylent [food replacement] founder Rob Rhinehart shares his thoughts on extreme sustainability.

I am electrically self-reliant. My home life runs comfortably on a single 100W solar panel, which cost $150 and was available on Amazon Prime. I tracked down a few manufacturers in China who all said it costs around $40 to make. The US for some reason leverages massive tariffs on Chinese solar panels, so they ship them through Malaysian customs. Why do the politicians even bother?

For storage a $65 lead acid automobile battery does the trick. It's 12V so can be charged directly from the solar panel, and holds 420Wh, way more than I use in a day. That's $0.15 / Wh so I don't see why everyone is so excited about Tesla charging $0.43 / Wh for the Powerwall, sans inverter and installation.

He got rid of his fridge and other kitchen implements to make it work. What are the biggest energy users in your place? Could you pare things down as much as Rob?

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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:20PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday August 04 2015, @11:20PM (#218206) Journal

    Let him try that for a whole city or nation worth of people.
    ...
    and is just more marketing for his liquid-diet goop.

    Note: if he can fool 2% of the population of LA to do the same, he'd carved a niche good enough to live rich for his entire life*. Because TFA it is pure marketing:

    If you can strip wires you can set this up yourself. Everything I used is available on Amazon except for soylent 2.0, which is only available at soylent.com.

    Move him in Alaska and see if he'd be able to pull the same trick.

    ---
    3.8M*2%=76k. Say $0.5 profit per each bottle and 2 bottle/day=>$76k/day. Times 365d/y=>$27.74M/year

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @03:14AM (#218323)

    You nailed it on the head: this is why people outside of (Alto) California think people inside California are so batshit-crazy! This article proves beyond a shadow of a doubt! And the worst part is that the vast majority of (interior, urban) Californians think this way!

    The rest of us are fed up with their bullshit. IMHO, if they want their own country, by all means let them!