> Plugging in four 400w solar panels in series is similar to filling your gasoline powered car with diesel and wondering why the car manufacturer isn't replacing your new car.
I don’t think this analogy works. The solar input works like Diesel or Gasoline in different temperature. It’s pretty unreasonable to assume the consumer knows when depending on temperature unless the explicitly state in the manual (I’m willing to bet good money majority of the people in US have never read their car manual either)
Around the skiing season, many automotive magazines will remind diesel drivers to buy “winter diesel” or use additives if e.g. driving up to the Alps or similar cold places.
Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) diesel conversions do. It'll gel at low temperatures, so they blend or switch to a separate tank of regular (or bio) diesel while the engine is cold, wait until it generates enough heat, circulate that heat along the SVO lines and into the tank, then switch over. Then switch back a few minutes before shutdown so the lines are full of regular diesel for the next cold start.
Because they run their engines well within the margins of their design. If you were running at the edge of the envelope you would find that the temperature does matter.
I'm not sure I know what a good analogy looks like. If the two things are identical, then the analogy is uninformative. If they're at all different, you will zero in on the differences rather than the similarities.
Sometimes they can be ok pedagogical tools, but they're easily misused as tools of persuasion.
You’re not supposed to zero in on the ways in which an analogy doesn’t apply. You’re simply supposed to read the analogy in order to see what it’s attempting to _highlight_ about the scenario.
This is a common pet peeve of mine, people not understanding how analogies are supposed to work and getting distracted by the differences. They’re supposed to work like a light filter placed over a lens, something will be highlighted and focus on that, don’t focus on the fact that “but all the colours are different now!”, the only purpose of using the light filter was to highlight a specific part of the image, the fact that it also coloured everything wrong temporarily is supposed to be ignored.
You know, just to use an analogy to explain analogies. Gotta be as meta as possible.
I don’t think this analogy works. The solar input works like Diesel or Gasoline in different temperature. It’s pretty unreasonable to assume the consumer knows when depending on temperature unless the explicitly state in the manual (I’m willing to bet good money majority of the people in US have never read their car manual either)