Entertaining but also a lot of nonsense. I stopped watching after he made a show of wandering around aiming a pair of cheap folding solar panels at the sky. "These tiny solar panels won't charge my phone on a cloudy day!"
1)He compares $30 worth of solar panel to a device that probably cost several hundred dollars to build (each of those heatsinks he used cost as much as the solar panel he was waving about.) A $100 (~100W) solar panel would, even on an overcast day, produce 5-10W pretty easily.
2)You don't just use solar for power. You use solar with batteries. The panels are sized based on solar equivalent hours. There are charts that tell you what areas get in terms of "full hours of sun" each day, in summer and winter. You then figure out your typical load, how much battery capacity you want (ie how many days of zero solar output can you tolerate), and how long you want your system to recover from being completely drained while powering your typical load.
I feel there is a certain irony in Deckers hate of solar cells. Because they're pretty low tech functionally. And it's not like every other material you can acquire isn't tied to some complex industrial infrastructure.
1)He compares $30 worth of solar panel to a device that probably cost several hundred dollars to build (each of those heatsinks he used cost as much as the solar panel he was waving about.) A $100 (~100W) solar panel would, even on an overcast day, produce 5-10W pretty easily.
2)You don't just use solar for power. You use solar with batteries. The panels are sized based on solar equivalent hours. There are charts that tell you what areas get in terms of "full hours of sun" each day, in summer and winter. You then figure out your typical load, how much battery capacity you want (ie how many days of zero solar output can you tolerate), and how long you want your system to recover from being completely drained while powering your typical load.