We’ve been an EV-only household for almost six months and would not want to return to driving gas-powered cars except under extreme duress. I’ve only become more convinced that most Americans would prefer an EV over a dino-burner if they had the chance to try the EV. Electric vehicles are better than gas in almost every way (better, faster, and cheaper), but there are a few things prospective EV buyers should know before they make a decision.

The recent price shocks make it easy to forget just how little of our effort we spend in the modern industrialized world on energy. The classic study by William Nordhaus showed that over time the amount of illumination you could get per hour of labor has steadily dropped throughout history, and today is an astonishing 1.4 million times higher than it was about 4,000 years ago at the beginning of recorded history.

Image: Stable Diffusion, “Cheap electricity, photo, realistic” prompt.

Practical and economical fusion power is just 30 years in the future, and always will be.

The economics of renewable energy are very different than fossil fuels. Cheap lifetime cost of energy and zero marginal cost of production mean that the economic incentives are lined up to build more renewable energy than the world actually needs. Eventually we will have a glut of cheap, clean power.

Solar power is remarkably drama-free. It just sits there and generates power.

The design for our solar power system starts to take shape.

Better energy storage is going to change the game for renewable power.