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

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: 3, Insightful) by gman003 on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:17AM

    by gman003 (4155) on Wednesday August 05 2015, @02:17AM (#218294)

    Okay, I'll concede I overstated the Uber usage, and you *may* have an argument on more efficient utilization via collective usage, but preferring a Prius to a Tesla on oil-efficiency grounds is *blatantly* wrong.

    And if you think my argument is about discarding marginal improvements, you're as guilty of overstating as I was. Most of what he is doing is not an improvement at all. A Prius is not more efficient than a Tesla, buying new clothes is not more efficient than washing them, eating at restaurants is not more efficient than cooking for yourself. I even suspect that using an EC2 instance as a workstation is less efficient than having a proper local machine. All of these are things he does to appear more environmentally conscious, and the planet is worse off for him having done so.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 05 2015, @04:14AM (#218336)

    > Prius is not more efficient than a Tesla, buying new clothes is not more efficient than washing them, eating at restaurants is not more efficient than cooking for yourself

    You say those things has if you have never critically thought about them. For example, a restaurant is another case of better utilization - they centralize shipping, storage, prep and clean-up and do it in volume for economies of scale and minimization of waste and spoilage.

    > . All of these are things he does to appear more environmentally conscious

    Seems like all of these things appear to be less environmentally conscious to you, someone who has spent less than a thousandth the time thinking about them than he has.