zlacker

The article has a number of good ideas, as long as you live in a sunny place (the author mentions Barcelona) and can adjust your day to follow the sun. Then maybe you're OK operating you vacuum cleaner or power tools only when the sun is shining (and only on weekends if you have a day job).

Also, the author states:

> The production of lithium-ion batteries requires fossil fuels, and (unlike lead-acid batteries) they are not recycled.

I think that there's no strict requirement to use fossil fuels to produce batteries, and lithium-based batteries definitely are recycled. Unlike lead, lithium is not an environmental and health hazard.

That is, in the shortest term, limiting the amount of batteries you have and running high-powered stuff directly off solar cells is a good approach to limit your carbon footprint. But in the longer term, large amounts of energy storage (both electrical and thermal) can and should be produced completely with renewable energy, thus removing the dependency on sunshine being available at a given moment.