The thing is, owning a car is a thing of the past and owning a ready to be off the grid passive house is the future.
That’s why I never really quite get into excitement mode when I hear Elon Musk. Electric cars and battery charging stations, cool. But I don’t want to invest in that, only use them as a last resort in my life. I’d be much more interested in some kind of quick and fast public transportation system deployment based on monorails, owned and co-operated between cities and private companies (It happened but failed: Nobody Walks in L.A.: The Rise of Cars and the Monorails That Never Were). You know, trying to reach and help as many people as possible.
Annual energy cost in average Alaska home: $5,470. That (passive) house? 900 bucks. In one of the toughest climate in the world. It’s a small house of course in this hell you can’t do passive AND big. But it cost $169,500.
That’s two Tesla model S “lite” cars. The performance model is at $96,070 (sold $146,500 in Europe). It makes me daydream.
A passive house for a “normal” climate would probably cost around 80K, maybe less. And now it looks like something I would totally invest my money in. That’s pure Quality of Life right here. That’s saving money, forever.
Little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes, little passive boxes.
What I’d like to see is a website where you would order your house, get it prefab, mounted in a week, finished in a month. Hemp insulation all the way, local farms and plants to grow and make houses in order to limit transportation.
Best part? All of that is possible right here right now, not in 2016 at best when finally Tesla cars get kind of affordable to start to make a difference. I am just saying.
One more thing I read on the internet.
Buildings have a lifespan of 50-100 years during which they continually consume energy and produce CO2 emissions. If half of new commercial buildings were built to use 50% less energy, it would save over 6 million metric tons of CO2 annually for the life of the buildings—the equivalent of taking more than 1 million cars off the road every year.”
Boom.