OT Chevy Volt

groups are pursuing these ideas with silicon and germanium. $125 per KWH would be a significant boost, comparable to lead-acid cost with much less weight, if nanotube anodes can be produced cheaply enough. jsw

And the rest of us will stand back and cheer them on, making sure they have plenty of drinks and snacks while they do inscrutible things with their magical stuff. d8-)

I expect to see something really practical come out of all this within my lifetime. They'd better hurry....

My cousin is working on this at Stanford. I'll tell him to step it up ;-)

10x20 feet on a house roof will generate ~2kW/Hr so less than 8 hours on a small rooftop array.

Or you could just dress warmly for your 20 minute commute. At least you are out of the wind!

Gunner Asch wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Your numbers may be a little off (e.g. I think the panel costs are closer to $4.50 per watt), but not by much. Your overall point is clearly correct: that total cost of ownership is likely to be somewhere in the vicinity of ten grand per year. It's obviously cheaper to recharge the batteries from the grid than from a solar array, but even so, TCO is probably still on the north side of $5K per year.

By contrast, three years ago I paid $3300 for a used 1999 Saturn SL2 with 90K miles on it. Still going strong. Hasn't needed any significant repairs yet, not much beyond normal maintenance. My major operating expense so far has been gasoline, about $1500 a year (45K miles / 30mpg * $3 per gallon / 3 years). Counting a few minor repairs, tires, oil changes, and so on, my TCO to this point is about $1800 per year, and that's likely to go

*down* as the initial purchase cost is amortized over more years, despite the increasing cost of gasoline. (Gas would have to average nearly ninety dollars a gallon, over the next seven years, before my ten-year TCO would reach $5K per year.)