I'll race that Cobrajet but I get to call the race course. BTW that course is a drive from Warren, MI to Lake George, NY. That's about a 690 mile drive.
As for Electric Vehicles being the right direction to go, do some searching on the Net. The electric grid in the US and Canada barely has enough capacity to support Air Conditioning in a hot week in August. This means that there currently is barely enough capacity to support the current electric fleet and I expect if 5 years or so that we will start to see limitations on the Time of Day when a vehicle can be charged. We will also see the electric companies insisting on having the ability to shut down charging stations when the grid is approaching overload.
The obvious solution is to expand the capacity of our electric grid. The Problem is that the cost estimates I found for doing this range between 200 to 300 TRILLION. Folks that is 200,000 to 300,000 Billion dollars. The Total World Domestic Product for 2018 was estimated at 180 Trillion dollars. That grid expansion, it aint gonna happen.
Which is where home solar comes into play. I just installed a Sense in my load box and it's telling me that a small-ish 6-8KW grid-tied system will get me close to net-0 in August with a pool pump running and my thermostat set to 72º. That means that 12KW will get me there once I get back to driving my EV 70 miles a day during my commute. Now it's true that I charge at night and a home solar system won't generate then, but my pool pump and A/C aren't running then, either. Moreover, during the day when a home solar system is over generating and pumping energy onto my local grid, my neighbor can burn it off, reducing the net load on the grid.
Decentralization of production, i.e. getting production closer to consumption, will have a massive positive effect on grid-load. There are ~95M single family homes in the US. If you allocate $25K to each for a 10KW solar system you've spent $2.4T and have added almost 1 terawatt of capacity that's available during peak-usage right next to consumption.
To put that in perspective, a 10KW solar system will produce something on the order of 800KWh per month, averaged over the year and locations in the US. 800KWh/month * 12 month/year * 95M homes = ~ 912 terawatt/hours per year. But only 10% of the single family homes are suitable and we end up with 91 terawatt/hours. And the systems are shaded and otherwise compromised so that they only work at 10% of advertised efficiency and we end up with 9 terawatt/hours. The US burned 4.1 terawatt/hours last year. Home solar, at 1% of a (my) theoretical ideal, will produce over twice that, closer to consumption, during peak usage, with minimal additional load to the grid.
It's certainly not *the* solution as we'd still need to produce power when the sun isn't shining so wind (300 gigawatt*hr in 2019), hydroelectric (274 gigawatt*hr), nuclear (809 gigawatt*hr), micro and macro storage, and natural gas (1.6 terawatt*hr) will all have to play a part, but it's something, and it creates a ton of jobs and shutters the horrible coal-power industry for good.
![[wink]](/images/smilies/wink.gif "Wink [wink]")
