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A comment on Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels in the US. Parent comment

Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by jajko on Friday September 06, 2024 @07:58AM (#41465341)
Swiss could power entire nation (plus export some more) if they cared enough to harness all that kinetic energy of water coming down 3000m from the mountains. That's the last country with renewables problem.

Plus I see tons of solars here on rooftops, on new buildings etc. Colleagues with houses got some tax breaks so they poured some serious money into these and drive teslas basically for free (doesn't change TCO that much given how brutal repair costs or more frequent changes of those big tires & brakes are, but still, they have a warm fuzzy feeling about it).

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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by TeckPerspecc on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:21AM (#41465497)
Brake pads typically last the lifetime of a vehicle for an EV. 90%+ of braking is regenerative.
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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by jve on Friday September 06, 2024 @08:42AM (#41465629)
> given how brutal repair costs or more frequent changes of those big tires & brakes are, but still, they have a warm fuzzy feeling about it

Regarding brakes: that is pretty far from the truth as other sibling commented they use regenerative braking.

Tires - yeah. Well, except minivan or some pickups weights the same as Tesla so it is not like out of ordinary.

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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by jajko on Friday September 06, 2024 @02:37PM (#41468636)
Sorry my bad, it actually makes sense re brake pads.

And those bigger cars - thats not majority on Swiss(=european) roads, we have tons of narrow roads, parking spots are short and narrow too. Roads with traffic generally look very different compared to US.

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Re:Oxford commercializes its 20% more powerful solar panels ... by Leherenn on Tuesday September 10, 2024 @04:27AM (#41498511)
Do you have a source for your first claim? My understanding is that hydro is mostly saturated in Switzerland (https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/baug/depar...)

There's also very little appetite (and it's been the case since the 80's) for hydro anyway. Even before the biodiversity argument, simply moving whole communities is just no longer a thing.

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