Most European residential electric systems operate at 240v, versus 120v in the US, which means you can only backfeed a US outlet with half the power you could in a European outlet. That alone makes this system half as useful for US applications.

Remember the tmobile un-contract? This is literally from their press release in 2017: “T-Mobile ONE customers keep their price until THEY decide to change it. T-Mobile will never change the price you pay for your T-Mobile ONE plan. When you sign up for T-Mobile ONE, only YOU have the power to change the price you pay.” https://www.t-mobile.com/news/press/un-carrier-next

Remember how they promised the FTC they wouldn’t raise prices if they could pretty please merge with sprint to become the biggest telecom network in the country? https://www.yahoo.com/news/t-mobile-promises-sprint-merger-195428217.html

Sorry for the industry jargon, but measuring things in kW won’t give you the full picture, you want to compare things in “kWh”. Your utility bill should show your price in $/kWh and the solar company should have given you a production estimate from Helioscope or some kind of similar energy estimating software that shows expected annual kWh output

Their pricing looks good, you’re getting black on black modules and optimizers for a bit over $2 per watt after incentives. As someone who works in the industry I’d say that’s a pretty decent price.

What have they promised for your annual production estimate? Also what’s your current cost of power?

I’m an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here’s how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.

The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.

Most places where this can be done, it is already being done. The low hanging fruit for pumped hydro was all picked decades ago, and at great cost to the ecosystems it destroyed in the process - turns out that drowning thousands of acres in massive man-made lakes had a bit of an impact on the plants and animals that lived there.

Not saying that the benefits weren’t worth the cost, that’s a whole different debate. But there’s little to no opportunity to scale this energy storage tech beyond it’s current footprint.

As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can’t just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.

As others have mentioned, you can invest in the stock market within your 401k, though your options can sometimes be limited or saddled with high fees depending on what broker the 401k is through.

If yours is through a shitty broker then you might be better served by opening an individual retirement account (IRA), likely a Roth IRA given the limited info you’ve shared. You can open one with a broker of your choice, so go with one of the better ones like vanguard or fidelity. Using tax advantaged retirement accounts will always beat saving your retirement money in a non-tax advantaged one, all else being equal.

Edit to echo the flowchart from one of the other comments: https://imgur.com/u0ocDRI

This is the core of sound personal finance strategy in purified form. Great resource!

I burst out laughing while reading this article, it’s laughably bad, written by someone who doesn’t have the slightest understanding of the content matter.

Virtually all existing communication mediums are light based, since “Light” is a term that covers electromagnetic waves spanning a range from radio waves, all the way up to xrays, with visible light getting a small part of that range in the middle.

With all light there is a tradeoff where higher frequency light can carry more information at the cost of lower penetration. It’s why your 5Ghz wifi is faster than your 2.4Ghz wifi but the 5Ghz doesn’t reach as far in your house

Visible light is in the 400-800Thz (Terahertz), so it’s orders of magnitude better for transmitting a lot of data but since it’s blocked by most materials it works better if you use something to channel it, like a glass tube. Which is why visible light is already used extensively as the backbone of the internet, aka fiber optic cable. (to be completely accurate, most fiber optics use near visible infrared light, just below the visible spectrum, since it doesn’t scatter in glass as easily)

The new communication standard referenced is nothing ground breaking, it’s just a standard for any niche application which can make use of it. It’s not a new technology, and if it was better than existing methods we would already be using it.

Immediately shared this, great job OP

Definitely a bitter, almost aggressive tone to this one. It also comes off as a “fuck you, I got mine” kind of messages to say “North American infrastructure sucks, which is why I emigrated to the Netherlands”, because it’s not as if emigration is an option for most people in the US or Canada since it’s expensive and most people don’t have a viable path to a resident visa.

That being said, nothing he said was wrong, but sharing this video is probably not going to help anyone change their view.