It’s not difficult, but it is expensive and inefficient. There are very few financially viable battery technologies on the market currently, and although incremental improvements are happening on that front, there are also roadblocks (lack of raw materials like cobalt, toxic metals, thermal runaway fire risks), we really need a big breakthrough before we’ll see large adoption of batteries.
There are literally countries that went all in on nuclear power (france and switzerland come to mind), that now regret that play and are trying to transition away from them. Not for safety reasons, just because they are extremely expensive to operate and they become a money pit when renewables eat away at the base load that they were built to supply. You have nuclear plants paying people to take their power during the afternoons because they cant shut down quickly when the sun comes out.
I’ve gotta chime in here with an opposing viewpoint. I got all laser lasik and while it mostly corrected my myopia (went from -5 to -0.5 sph), it gave me really bad astigmatism, to the point where night driving is much more dangerous for me. Glasses were a pain in the ass but at least they made things crystal clear. Post surgery everything except bright sunlight now has an annoying halo. I’m 3 years post surgery btw, and went back under the laser twice to try to get it corrected.
There’s a lot more nuance to this than most people will admit.
Net metering is 100% unsustainable, when renewables become a big enough chunk of the grid generation mix, they often generate when no one needs the power. Forcing the grid to accept that power and even pay the homeowner a premium for it is a perverse incentive. Effectively what it does is allow solar array owners to avoid paying to maintain a grid they still use, and since the rich trend to go solar first, the poor are left holding the bag to maintain the grid for everyone.
Just pointing out that the grid is paid for by your electric bill, roughly half of what you pay is for delivery (paying to maintain the equipment needed to deliver you that energy), the other half is for supply (paying the power plant that generated the energy). So even if you and all your neighbors are energy independent you’ll still be on the hook for at least half your bill, or they’ll have to recoup it in taxes or something.
Not saying that’s a bad thing, just clarifying a common misconception that going solar should not mean you eliminate your electric bill. In fact many places where solar does offset 100% of your electric bill are ending up with the rich owning solar and the poor paying to maintain the grid for them.
Yes and no, the progress of solar array technology continues unabated, with multiple areas of research that are beginning to reach commercial applications. Module conversion efficiencies now are in the 20% range, but heterojunction cells, or Gallium Arsenide, or Perovskites, or any number of other possible advancements could easily put efficiencies up into the 30% range.
That being said, the price of the solar modules themselves has already shunk to a small piece of the cost to build a solar array, with the bulk of the costs now being the support structures, wiring, electrical equipment, labor, development, etc. And those costs aren’t going to decline, they’d still be there even if the solar panels themselves were free, so they effectively set a floor to the cost reductions we’re seeing.
As others have commented, the open source home assistant project can take voice commands and perform smart home functions like turning lights on and off, reading off the forecast, taking down notes, etc etc. But it does have limits, you will have to script any kind of complex commands, like pulling headlines from an RSS feed, or playing spotify playlists, or really anything that requires fetching info from an API, it won’t do those kinds of things out of the box.
The other factor which others have called out is that it doesn’t currently handle wake word functionality, though that’s been on their road map this year and the Oct update might fix that. That being said, running a dedicated wake word app to fill in that gap is very much possible. See my thread here for more info: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/setting-up-a-100-local-smart-speaker-on-an-android-tablet-using-tasker-and-snowboy-to-handle-wake-word-detection/611435
Same, including an IR led is such a simple thing, why did this ever go away. Though I’m pretty sure most Chinese phones still have them, Xiaomi phones do for sure
Hell yes, just jumped on the ulefone train myself!
I actually meant to reply to your comment but replied to the main thread by mistake, I had the same frustrations with modern phones losing features, and even fairphone dropping the 3.5mm jack was a wtf decision to me. See my comment on the ulephone 18t, it had virutally everything I wanted in a phone.
I’m going to chime in here to plug the ulefone power armor 18t I just got. I was pretty nervous to get a chinese phone as I’ve only had samsung and lg phones before, but this thing legit blows me away. Not only does it fully support every band that my carrier uses (rare even for phones made for the US market), but it has:
Replaceable battery that lasts 3+ days between recharges
Extremely rugged, IP69 waterproof and designed for underwater photography (physical shutter button and diving camera app)
3.5mm jack, sd card slot, FM radio (with built in antenna - no headphones need to be plugged in), and an RGB notification led
Dimensity 900 chipset that beats a lot of the snapdragon chips on the market.
12 fucking GB of RAM… yes, 12…
Wifi 6(ax)
Wireless charging and reverse charging
A fucking 60x magnification microscope? (Why???)
A FLIR thermal camera (Just because, why the fuck not)
Runs mostly bloat free stock android
All that for under $600 (on aliexpress)
The only thing it’s missing is an IR blaster, otherwise this is the best phone I’ve ever had, bar none. It is a chonky beast though, be warned.
This has really changed my view on Chinese electronics, especially at a time when phones for the western world are losing features and functionality all the time (including stuff from South Korean). Turns out capitalism isn’t that great for innovation!
Could it be worse than giving them to power hungry octogenarians?
I’m an electrical engineer who designs commercial and Utility Scale PV systems (i.e. Multi acre solar power plants), though I’ve done a couple dozen residential systems as well.
@evranch@lemmy.ca chimed in with some really good advice, but I wanted to add a few things.
If I were to do my own system I’d go with micro inverters, enphase IQ8 most likely, as they can be setup to operate during a grid outage, either with a battery backup, or with a load balancing panel.
Careful of the downfalls of going the DIY route, not sure how it is in your state, but in some states I’ve worked in you will forfeit incentives if you don’t use a qualified installer.
Get familiar with your utilities net metering policies, if they don’t net meter power at or near retail rates then you’ll end up giving them your power for free/cheap whenever you overgenerate. Some utilities will also make it difficult if you’re not going through a qualified installer.
Lastly, and this is coming from someone who understands the industry intimately, really take a look at the numbers and decide if this makes sense for you. Most residential solar will take 5-10 years to pay for itself (after incentives) and start to generate a profit. Compare that with the same sum invested in a general s&p500 index fund which would likely have doubled in value during that time.
Ultimately I decided not to install solar on my home, despite the ability to 100% DIY the whole thing and get parts at steep discounts, and instead installed a backup generator and signed up with a local community solar array (which is not something that all states/utilities allow).
Happy to answer any questions you may have!
Reducing dependence on their aging expensive nuclear power infrastructure has been a campaign promise of every French president for the last decade. Switzerland just voted via referendum to shutter their nuclear fleet, Germany has phased out nukes almost entirely.
The reality of it is: They’re expensive. They generate waste which could theoretically be reused or even locked away in underground vaults, but it’s frequently just stored on site in reality. And whether the danger is real or perceived, no one wants to live next to a nuke, because if things go wrong, they go very wrong.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to see nukes make a comeback, I think they’re a valuable part of the energy mix. I actually know a guy in crypto who is trying to set up financially strained nuclear plants with on-site crypto miners to help them gain back some of that lost revenue from paying people to take power during light load periods. Which I think is a fantastic use case and a great way to make Bitcoin less environmentally destructive. There are other dispatchable loads that could fill the same niche (water desalinization, green hydrogen production).
But the unfortunate reality is that nuclear plants are dying right now, and unless something big changes they’re going to be driven out of existence by wind and solar.