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Blog Action Day - Tesla Roadster and Solar

Okay so I missed blog action day by 2 hours but better late than never.

As with most people, I’ve been disturbed in recent years by the direction our planet is heading, climate wise. I’ve always been pro-environment but the evidence published in recent years has me convinced that we should all be doing our part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as our reliance on fossil fuels and foreign oil.

I think hybrid cars are a great first step in the right direction (I own a Prius). They are much lower polluters than other cars, and economically they make sense. If nothing more, the Prius is sending a message to auto makers and the government that people want clean energy and they don’t want to pay high prices at the pump. The next logical step would seem to be the plug-in hybrid, which is essentially a Prius with a bigger battery where you plug the car into an outlet overnight and drive 30 miles on electric power only. That works out to about 128 MPG effectively.

If you want to go all electric in style, your best option right now is the $98,000 Tesla Roadster rocket, based on the Lotus Elise chassis. The Tesla Roadster is a 0-60 in under 4 seconds super car with a range of 245 miles, 135mpg equivalent mileage, and can be fully recharged in 3.5 hours. People describe it as smooth and very fast, but not scary fast like a Porsche 911.

Go Solar

The hands down greenest combo would be an all electric car coupled with solar electric panels on your home. Solar power makes excellent economic sense, especially for larger homes that pay exorbitant tiered energy rates.

Remember when a junky Pentium 300MHz laptop cost $3,000? Demand for computer parts was so high and there was so much engineering and development in the industry, prices have plummeted and performance has grown exponentially. All of that, so we can type away on the Internet, play games, look at porn, and pay our bills. But what about saving our planet? How much engineering, development, and demand, is going into that, and isn’t that a little bit more important? If demand for solar panels increased, and R&D increased, costs would decrease. Right now, we have the technology to take some materials, manufacture them into a box that sits on our roofs and powers our homes for 20+ years without burning a lump of coal.

For most homeowners, if you do that math, solar makes sense now. Many states offer rebates that make solar cheaper than your utility company, especially over the long run. Still, it’s a tricky math problem to compare the cost of solar with the cost of your utility company, and most people either can’t or don’t want to figure it out. They see the upfront cost of solar panels ($15,000-$30,000 or more, which can be paid for via a loan) as more expensive than just paying their $100-$300/mo electric bill. So, I think solar power needs to become dramatically cheaper - no brainer cheap, so that John Q. Public can say “of course I’ll spend $5,000 to power my house for 20 years!”

Find out how much you can save by switching to solar power:

• Solar Savings Calculator
• BP Solar Savings Estimator

By buying solar panels now, you become immune to future increases in electricity costs. You also increase the value of your home by $20,000 for every $1,000/year reduction in your electricity bill.

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Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 4:03 am and is filed under General. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.