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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I know it's not the main point of his video, but I really wish he'd looked into the CapEx vs OpEx stuff a bit more.
For example, when talking about how much fuel his car uses in its lifetime vs. the cost of buying solar panels, he makes it clear that the solar panels are a better investment than buying gasoline. But, what he doesn't talk about is the difficulty for a lot of people in coming up with the money up-front to make that investment. Especially if you're poor, finding $25 per week to put gas in your car is easier than spending $3000 up front to put solar panels on your house. I know later he makes the argument that it might not even make sense to put solar panels on your house. But, that up front cost is also there for buying an electric vehicle vs. buying a car with an ICE (fuck ICE). The Nissan Cube he showed had a starting price of $18k when it was last available new in 2014. The Ioniq 5 starts at double that, at more than $36k. As far as I can tell, you can't get a new electric car for less than $30k, whereas the cheapest gas cars are only $23k or so.
A big reason for the status quo is that paying small amounts constantly is possible when you're poor, but paying a big up front cost to go electric isn't. What's worse (and goes with the last half hour of his video), is that we're in this situation because the fossil fuel companies keep getting subsidies, whereas any subsidies for electric cars or photovoltaic panels keeps getting shut down.
Also, I know it's an American channel so it has to use things like "gallons", but please when talking about energy, use Joules, not "kilowatt hours".
Nah americans are very familiar with debt being the country with the most personal debt in the history of the world. If only they took debt for investment not for buying a new truck.
This is entirely on people's lack of trying.
My partner does Energy research and Kilowatt hours is a very common unit of measurement she has to deal with. Its not even non-standard. It uses S.I. units, even if I find it odd. Has nothing to do with U.S. customary units Americans use.
No. Why would anybody have an intuitive frame of reference for what a joule is.
This appliance uses 1 kilowatt, running it for an hour is a kilowatt hour. Easy.
*And I can't even find anything suggesting any countries meter electrical bills by the joule so ???
This appliance uses 1 kilowatt. Running it for 1 second uses 1 kJ. Easy.
Are you billed by the hour, or by the month?
By the kilowatt hour per month.
If you're talking about systems that generate and consume power measured in watts. Why would you then convert to joules so that you can say 'this generates ___ joules per hour' when you could just infer kwh from the nameplate wattage. It's an extra conversion for no reason.
Why would I care about "Joules per hour"? What matters is power (Watts), and total energy used (Joules). "Kilowatt hour per month" is just an awkward way of saying "Joules per month"
A kilowatt hour is 3.6 megajoules. It's used for the same reason lightyears are used to measure distances in space, it's easier to say Alpha Centauri is 4.396 light years away than 4.159x10^16 metres.
Astronomy uses special units because the SI units are more than 10 orders of magnitude different. You'd have to use really exotic prefixes like "zetta" or "yotta" if you wanted to keep using metres.
The difference between a kilowatt and a megajoule is just 3 orders of magnitude. You just have to switch from "k" to "M". People are already familiar not only with "M" but with "G" and "T" because of Megabytes, Gigabytes, Terabytes, etc. There's nothing about kilowatt hours that's more intuitive or easy to use.
kilowatt hours ARE more intuitive than watt seconds when talking about something like solar panels, electric cars, and household energy where generation and consumption are better understood on the scale of hours.
No they're not. You're just used to them.
Are you seriously trying to say that if you're talking about a solar panel it makes more sense to talk about how much energy it produces per second than per hour. If you wanted to think about the amount a panel can produce per day are you sitting there thinking about how many seconds of sunlight it will get in a day.
If you want to estimate the energy usage of a 400 watt lighting system during an 8 hour workday you think it's more intuitive to go 400 * 3600 * 8 / 1,000,000 than 400 / 1000 * 8?
The reason seemingly every electrical utility in the world uses kWh is because hours are the more intuitive unit of time for this context.
Are you seriously saying that when you're talking about a solar panel you care about how much energy it produces per hour, not per second, per day, per week, or per year?
Why would you want to do that? And what kind of lighting system in 2026 uses 400 Watts?
Are you seriously saying that when you're using your 2000 watt hair dryer, you want to pretend that you used it for an hour, and then scale that back to the few seconds you actually used it? Are you seriously pretending that your 800 watt microwave oven is on for a full hour at full power while you're heating your nuggets, so it makes sense to think of it in terms of kilowatt hours?
The reason most people think kWh is intuitive is that they're used to it because their electrical utility uses it. It's the same reason that Americans think Fahrenheit is more intuitive, while the rest of the world thinks Celsius is more intuitive. It's why Americans think miles make more sense for measuring distance, while the rest of the world thinks kilometers are easier to use.
You can't scale the energy a solar panel generates per day from the nameplate capacity because you don't get days of uninterrupted sunlight. It doesn't make much sense to try to estimate at a higher resolution either because of clouds.
A commercial one might and because that's the first step to figuring out how much it uses in a 5 day work week, or per month or year.
No because if you're measuring usage of something in seconds it isn't going to have a meaningful impact on household consumption.
Ok even if that is true and they're both equally unintuitive you're the one who wants everyone to switch to an unfamiliar unit for no apparent reason. Why does it make so much more sense to talk about solar and electric car charging on the scale seconds of power than hours that everyone should change units?
In which case you're multiplying by large numbers so it doesn't matter if you start with Joules or kilowatt-hours, so you should start with the SI unit.
The reason is that there is an SI unit for energy, and using the non-standard unit is dumb.
Because there's an SI unit for energy, and there's nothing superior about kWh, it just adds to the confusion to have multiple different units that all measure the same thing. You get the stupid situation that Americans have with other units where there's teaspoons, tablespoons, cups, gallons, ounces, etc. all for measuring volume instead of just using L for everything.
fwiw there's a comment by @Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca as a top-level reply to the post that I think was intended as a reply to you.
kWh are a metric unit (even if they're not SI), and are extremely common in discussions of household electricity. I wish it weren't the case, the same way I wish countries other than Australia used kilojoules for measuring energy in food instead of (kilo)Calories. But they don't.
Does Europe use joules to measure electricity usage in your home? 🤔
I pay my European kilowatts in tears and agony
I'm sorry, we pay in tears in my American house as well. We can all be united by our tears <3
Here in Australia we measure the flow of electricity in Kangaroo Hops per Hour.
Otherwise known as kph, or hopperidoos
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