Unfortunately insulating a building after the fact is extremely difficult, expensive, and depending on climate can approach the level of near tear down. I think it many cases it may ultimately be more environmentally friendly and cost effective to add things like solar and just brute force the heating/cooling.
The reason for this is that buildings not designed for insulation and air sealing can suffer from dramatically worse durability (mold etc) when just adding insulation. It is not necessarily wise to just add fiberglass batts to wall cavities.
The addition of insulation to our homes is a modern thing, and there have been significant issues even currently (the mold crisis).
The issue is that to build a building properly, it is necessary to address heat flow, vapor flow, air flow, condensation, drying, and water barriers. This means you often have to address the entire envelope of the building, which is very expensive, difficult, and means replacing a lot of material. Basically remove all cladding and sheathing and upgrade it.
Realistically most of these concepts are not well understood in the construction industry, and the expense is high so most corners would be cut leading to huge issues with mold and wood destroying pests down the road.
They are talking about their ability to run on biofuel (e85). They achieve the greatest performance on e85. The most recent research I’ve seen is that production of fuel ethanol is now carbon 0 or slightly carbon negative, for the whole chain (including production of raw materials, transportation etc). This won’t be the case for all plants, and it’s not clear to what extent production has reached this level, but it shows what is possible.
So yeah, burning things may not be necessarily bad. Unfortunately no one seems to be investing in similar technologies to apply to other sectors of transportation such as aviation and shipping. It would seem to me to be much more realistic to design an engine for a airliner that burns a biofuel than to design a battery electric version.
The people who have embraced biofuel (e85) the most are car guys looking for more power. E85 has good knock resistance (high octane rating) like race fuel, but is far cheaper. It also has a greater cooling effect upon injection (because you need to inject more, as it is lower energy density).
So the thing is the economics of rooftop solar are a lot different than power station solar. The DOE has public data on how much utilities pay for electricity. In a market like mine, Southern California Edison isn’t an electricity generator, they buy power at about $0.02/kWh but then they sell it to the residential consumer for up to $0.32.
So clearly it’s a very different calculation. Regardless of that generators are building large scale solar arrays to sell power to the utilities at very much lower rates than what a rooftop owner pays to generate their own power. It’s just the rooftop owner can bypass a lot, and potentially all, of the utility and grid fees which are >90% of the cost. The other thing is that many utilities are hugely subsidizing this with net metering policies, which basically means the utility is acting as a huge battery for only the grid connection fee which, depending on the market, can be as low as $15 a month. Which basically seems to make products like the Tesla Powerwalls a really tough sell. Why pay $5000 for a tiny powerwall when, assuming you want grid connect anyway, the utility will be a way bigger powerwall for free?
Unless you just make it bigger. They talked about being able to have 6 of the things and were showing dual monitors much of the time. Ultrawides have been demonstrating that there is demand for larger monitors. Most people who want a two or three monitor setup would probably be even happier with a single, larger monitor.
The reason for this is that buildings not designed for insulation and air sealing can suffer from dramatically worse durability (mold etc) when just adding insulation. It is not necessarily wise to just add fiberglass batts to wall cavities.
The addition of insulation to our homes is a modern thing, and there have been significant issues even currently (the mold crisis).
The issue is that to build a building properly, it is necessary to address heat flow, vapor flow, air flow, condensation, drying, and water barriers. This means you often have to address the entire envelope of the building, which is very expensive, difficult, and means replacing a lot of material. Basically remove all cladding and sheathing and upgrade it.
Realistically most of these concepts are not well understood in the construction industry, and the expense is high so most corners would be cut leading to huge issues with mold and wood destroying pests down the road.