Ty
Elio Addict
You are correct. In theory, they aren't the same thing. However, it directly knocked 30% off the price of the system that I would have had to make payments on. Further in my spreadsheet, I have the actual loan costs. I would have actually paid $2.13 MORE per month to have solar. I wanted to do it for the environment impact like you mention but I had to have a money savings to sell the idea to my wife. Having a house $15,000 more expensive than when we bought it with no advantage in the market while the housing market here is pretty stale, put the final nail in the coffin.One reason why solar isn’t taking off that much in the U.S. is that many people only look at the cost side. In other countries many people look at the overall cost combined with the environmental impact. That is a huge difference and makes solar and wind etc. look very good.
Same with the Elio. I don’t care that much about the fuel cost savings of an Elio. I use daily modes of transport that cost me more than a gas guzzling car (for example taxis) and somehow I survive just fine, same when travelling and I have to pay about four times as much at the pump as compared to what I would pay in the U.S.. I want an Elio because 84 mpg is pretty much ground breaking in maximizing how little resources a motor vehicle can use. The fuel cost savings for me are an added bonus, not a necessity.
Btw: the federal tax credit (that’s not the same as picking up 30% of the bill) is set to expire in 2016.
Another thing to remember for all environmentally friendly people, Solar panels have always required more power to construct than they produce over their life-span. That has started to change though and now they produce more power than they consume. This fact has slowed adoption in the US. It's only been about 5 years since they began producing more than they consumed.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/solar-panels-now-make-more-electricity-they-use
Here, the government says the energy payback is about 4 years now and expects that to drop to 1 year in the future. The energy payback is where you take the amount of electricity produced and subtract the amount of energy it took to construct the panels in the first place.
http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
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