I have been thinking about solar panels and even battery storage lately. It ends up being a complicated game of costs and paybacks. This is odd because we don’t do this with other technologies. It bet my computer sits idle 99% of the time. Of course, that would not have been acceptable when computers were scarce.

My air conditioner has a similar problem. I only use it in the summer. Yet, nobody bemoans all that lost cooling potential sitting around idle all winter. We just accept a certain low level of efficiency.

With solar panels getting so cheap it occurs to me that maybe we just need more of them. Same with batteries. I suppose the real problem is that there is an alternative and comparisons are easy. Yet somewhere in the food chain, as solar prices keep plummeting, the notion of efficiency should go away, like it does for many technologies. Found and article in Quartz that talks about this.

It’s time to start wasting solar energy