Re:Miscellanea: The War in Iran
by Fr0styMatt88 on Wednesday March 25, 2026 @09:11PM
(#47525559)
I agree with this, but I don’t trust that it will stay this way.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.
It always seems like there’s no real way to ‘get ahead’. They’ll always find a way to make the system cost such that it barely pays itself off, by introducing fees or cutting rebates.
For example, there was a proposal in Australia to raise our fixed grid access fee from something like $1 a day to $5 a day.
Or consider even just the feed-in-tariff for solar — that’s gone down as solar power has gotten cheaper, which is expected, but it’s another thing that increases that mythical payback period for the system.
Now to be clear I think the tech is wonderful and would 100% have a big battery and solar system if I could, but not for financial reasons.
For all intents and purposes you’re just pre-paying for the next X years of your electricity. I would at least want my battery warranty to be four times X, which it currently is not. Now in 5 years there might be battery tech that gets to that multiplier that I want and THEN I could start thinking of it as investing in ‘free electricity’.
But I’m sure the government and electricity suppliers will close any loopholes they can to prevent that.