FWIW, I’m in the process of starting a grid-tied solar installation. Total cost, without batteries, will be about $70,000. That’s a 17kW system, that should produce an average of 30kWh/day in the winter.
If I had been doing this last year, it would have been sharply less; tariffs and the drive to kill solar has driven costs up, and the end of the solar tax credit on 31 December means that everyone that wants to do it is trying to do it now, which drives up labor costs.
IIRC, there have been a few car companies that claimed that the transmission didn’t need service. Without service the transmissions would fail at about 100k miles; with service they would last 2-3x longer.
You should be doing transmission service regularly though. Automatic transmissions are often claimed to be good for the life of the car, but regular drain and flush will prolong the life. Coolant flushes used to be more necessary than they are now.
This Russia can’t defeat Ukraine because of all of the assistance that Ukraine has been receiving from the US in particular, but other NATO and EU countries in general. If we truly ceased all military aid, and the EU countries didn’t pick up the slack, yeah, Russia would eventually roll over Ukraine. TBH, as far as the US is concerned, we’ve managed to bleed an enormous adversary almost dry, all without any American soldiers every being shot at (well, except for the people that had the guts and convictions to go to Ukraine and volunteer; I wish I didn’t have responsibilities…).
Without aid, the war would have been over in a year; Ukraine has the will, but they didn’t have the tanks, the anti-air defense systems, and so on. And on the other side of that, if the US had given them everything that they wanted up front, instead of slow-rolling ‘offensive’ weapons systems, Ukraine could have wrecked Russia in a year.
Reducing the US military budget would likely also have the added ‘feature’ of resulting in Europe being under the thumb of Russia, and Africa, Asia, and South America being under the thumb of China. A large military budget–even if the military isn’t used–has the effect of acting as a deterrent. We’ve already seen that Russia has no qualms about using their military when they think they can get away with it, and China is continually threatening Taiwan (among others).
Late reply here.
When I was spec’ing a system for a DIY build, I was at about $60k for a 20kw system, with a 50kWh battery array, not including the actual copper wire to connect to the panel. But the problem you run into there is the bit about burning your house down, or electrocuting yourself, because the voltage gets very high, very fast. Wiring an outlet in your home is pretty simple, running new circuits from a breaker a little harder but still definitely within what a homeowner can reasonably do. But I was looking at things like pouring concrete for piers for a ground mount rack (my roof isn’t adequate, and is partially shaded), trenching to get to the house, using microinverters so that it could be expanded easily, etc., AND trying to be done by 31 Dec. so that I still squeak under the federal tax credit requirements.
And it’s not nearly as easy as you make it seem. Take panels; they’re all going to have slightly different sizes, voltage output, etc., and you need to understand that voltage output when you’re wiring them together. Some of the larger commercial panels (>650W or so) aren’t going to work with microinverters at all. Then you need to consider how many panels you’re going to be wiring in each string, and how you tie those strings together. Running everything in series runs the amperage up sharply, and running everything in parallel runs the voltage up. To make it even better, panel output increases in cold weather, so building a system with inverters and wiring that’s close to the load limit at 50F can easily end up exceeding the load limit if the temperatures drop to -20F. (And goddamn, copper cables for >200A service can get expensive.) Wiring? Well, hopefully your system is actually all solid copper wiring, and not copper-clad aluminum, because at the load limits for copper-clad aluminum it gets a lot hotter than solid copper; too much aluminum wiring in too close proximity can melt the insulation off in a hurry.
And, again, i can not overstate just how easy it is to kill yourself wiring this shit, because the voltages and amperages get REALLY high, really fast. 20kW is an enormous amount of power.