Charging an EV may be more expensive than you think...

The example I saw was what looked like a house no more than say 30 years old and the chap had spent 12-15k on the full bollox of the green revolution, as in an all-in-one intelligent system that comes in at the size of a 6ft high fridge freezer he has in his garage plus solar panels. He replaced an existing gas boiler and the whole system paid back in 5 years. Admittedly this looked like a factory demo of what you can do, so I doubled that so it would accommodate a wider range of properties and that these payback figures are for where our leccy bills have been hiked severely. Therefore 10 years is just a very approximate realistic guess by factoring out the bullshit factor of the sales rep and considering a typical home. If it were a brand new and highly insulated home and you built it all in from the beginning, so there was no retrofitting and you used the right radiators etc, then you could do even better. The problem is the non-cavity type walls of the Victorian era and their terrible draughty windows. To do a proper insulation job including double glazing on all windows and insulating all the walls by building out a cavity insulation layer is somewhere in the region of 30 grand, plus the 12-15k for the equipment. So in reality this makes a good few million homes uneconomic to live in. We will have to knock these down and start again.  They will be the groggy ones in cheap areas which are like throwing good money after bad. Unfortunately those who live in these places are the least likely to be able to afford a greater than 50 grand bill. You see how we really should let the market decide. More and more homes will freely and gladly opt for green tech as it will save them money, but some will not. 

These old houses with no cavities would cost more than that to insulate BVL. It would be cheaper to demolish them and rebuild. And the last thing you would want is a useless heatpump to warm them up...

It brings us back to what Le Corbusier was saying in his book the City of Tomorrow. His argument was that town planning had evolved naturally following the law of least resistance, so each road and facility was built at a particular time according to what made best sense there and then. He said this created terrible cities which were hellholes to live in because the roads didn't make overall sense. His view is the planner should start with a blank piece of paper and utilise the state of the art technology to build an entire city with everything considered, even down to the furniture as it was the case with some architects of the time, so it all worked effortlessly. This way your modern city would have all the fibre optics laid out from the start, plus all your CHP hot water pipes that feed hot water fed through a heat exchanger in a nuclear reactor and your post also travels automatically along an underground robotic delivery system and so on and so on. The idea is that if you build it all in one grand design the citizens who live there would live more efficiently, and over time those conveniences you incorporated into your modern city pay back large dividends since the whole economy runs faster and local business makes more money because none of their staff are arsing about in traffic jams half their life, and no one has to compulsory purchase land for a railway if it was though of from the outset. Also if you did this you would make the whole thing financially viable so it would be a hot investment for long-term investors. Obviously the problem here is it has a single point of failure so a poor design buggers it up for everyone. We could try and mitigate it though by double checking and making sure no one corrupt was involved, eg. exactly not like HS2 was planned. There are some areas up north though which could be entirely levelled. It would solve the crime and social disorder problem!

Also another idea that is being toyed with is roof tiles that are also solar panels. Since a large amount of the cost of solar panels is the frame and all the jiggery pokey with wires, brackets, bars and other stuff, surely a far superior way would be to have tiles that look like normal tiles but have special solar panel surface to them, and as you fitted the tiles, maybe they just clicked together electrically. This is the trick of one thing doing two jobs, and indeed you could extend that to three jobs if these tiles were super-insulators as well. There is also a problem with solar panels where they run hot, and if they run hot it both shortens their life and reduces efficiency. So now you want a roof tile that can perform the function of sinking the heat. Indeed someone ran a little experiment with solar panels where by using an electrical fan to cool the panel, roughly speaking he was using about one watt of power which in turn saved easily over ten watts of energy inefficiency due to the temperature. The best way of doing it is to design for the lowest cost of ownership. An all-in-one tile achieves lowest in construction costs of fitting it. By optimising design over all parameters you get better value for money than having four different product all individually optimised and all not really 100% compatible. Standardisation and high volume production is the way to further reduce costs. We should invent it ourselves rather than wait for the Chinese to do it for us. One good bit of news is the UK has invented a type of solar cell which can last over 100 years. Surely we are not too far off the tech needed.

It's pretty cold in Canada at the moment (well it is midwinter) so EV aficionados are suffering..

It's now 2024 and car rental companies tend to sell their vehicle after one to two years — contacts in the industry tell me the average is about 22 months.

Hertz appears to have purchased the bulk of its Teslas before their prices were reduced by Musk to encourage sales. Now many of the cars are due for replacement, Hertz may reckon that the reduced prices it will get could be offset by replacing them with lower priced ICEs.

By the time these are due for replacement, indications are that new EV prices will have dropped, making them a better investment...

You can understand why Hertz are ditching EV's - this reporter rented one to go from Chicago to New York, so hardly out in the sticks. The amount of charging stops that were required because of the cold weather was insane - it's really no wonder that demand just is not there.