How I turned a shipping container into a solar off-grid charging station with A/C
After one of my most recent Alibaba import adventures, I was left with a shipping container in my yard. These engineering wonders are great for many uses outside of merely transferring goods around the world, with one of the most common secondary uses being watertight storage units. That seemed like a great idea to put to use for all of my electric “toys”. Between my electric bikes, e-motorcycles, e-ATVs, electric tractors, and a few other things I’m probably forgetting, having a weather-sealed, solar-powered off-grid charging shed would be a big benefit. And if I could add an air-conditioning unit to keep the machines from baking in the sun (and function as a dehumidifier at the same time), then all the better. As it turned out, the project was a lot easier than I expected. Here’s how I did it.
There are many ways to skin a cat, and even more ways to add solar power to a shipping container.
To be fair, I cheated a bit. Well, not really cheated, but I just went with a retail solar generator system instead of DIYing that part myself from à la carte components. It’s more expensive since you’re paying for a pre-designed and engineered solution, but damn if it doesn’t make it easy! To save a bit of money instead, you can source your own solar panels, solar charge converter, batteries, inverter, and wiring, then make it all play together.
For me and my limited time, an offer from Pecron for a solution that would do all of that for me sounded perfect, so I went with Pecron’s system.
To make it all work as a solar shed, I’d have to mount the various components around the container. I started with the solar panels, which would need a frame. I used pressure-treated 2x4s to build a pair of mounts for the solar panels, each of which would hold three 200W panels.
With 1,200W of theoretical power (and probably more like 900W of solid real-world Florida solar energy), that would be a decent flow rate.
The panels I used are Pecron’s folding panels, which aren’t really meant for this type of long-term permanent installation. They should work, it’s just that you’re not really taking advantage of their folding nature.
They’re really designed for camping and other mobile scenarios where you’d want the ability to pack up and move your solar setup with ease.
You can imagine that with a setup like this, you could easily set up a 1,000-ish watt solar array at your campsite or off-grid cabin for a few days, then stow it all away in your trunk again later.
I mounted the panels using screws and big fender washers to hold them to the wooden panels. You can see it in more detail in my video of the project.
I know that everyone and their brother is going to ask me why I didn’t put the panels on an angle. And the answer is to hopefully give them better wind protection.
As I mentioned, these aren’t really designed for permanent installation, and thus they don’t have rigid frames. They’re pretty rigidly mounted to the wooden frames now, and the frames are lashed to the container, but it’s still a giant sail.
We occasionally get storms with pretty decent gusts, and so I wanted the panels flat to not give the horizontal gusts a surface to push against.
Angling the panels south would have been slightly more efficient, but the site is within spitting distance of the southernmost point in the US, so the efficiency difference of flat vs angled panels isn’t as big as if this was in Maine.
From there I had to get the wiring set up to feed my batteries. Here is where the beauty of the pre-built system really shows. All of the panels are wired for the inverter/battery/charge controller gear (which is an all-in-one unit) and the kit includes all of the adapters.
However, because I had to run the wires much further, I bought a set of 20 ft MC-4 solar panel extension wires. That allowed me to run all of the panels in parallel and then send them on a long enough run to make it through the existing vent hole in the side of the container. I had to drill out the vent hole a bit, and despite it not looking like it, I did put a small drip loop in the wires to prevent rainwater from running down the cables and into the container.
It’s been sitting there through plenty of rainy days over the last month, and not a drop of water has entered the container through the hole for the wires.
Once on the inside, I bundled the wires and ran them down to the Pecron E2000LFP and a pair of EB3000 auxiliary batteries.
Between the three of them, I’d have around 8 kWh of storage capacity. The 1,200W solar array should be able to nearly fill that entire battery bank with a solid day of strong Florida sun, though it’s pretty rare that I’d even use the entire 8 kWh in a day anyway.
The three units are all designed to plug into each other and cascade power between them, making this a simple operation. I literally just plugged in the wires and it worked like magic. I don’t mind getting custom, and I’ve got an engineering degree on my shelf that says I enjoy designing solutions, but sometimes it’s just nice to have something arrive ready to work.
To support them all and keep them off the floor so they don’t cut into my valuable storage space, I built a hanging shelf for them. That’s probably 180 pounds of batteries all together, so the shelf is made out of C-channel galvanized steel and hung from chains.
Next came the air conditioning.
I got one of the cheapest portable air conditioning units on Amazon I could find, and despite now realizing that was probably a bad idea, from an efficiency standpoint, it seems to work pretty well.
I should have gone with a small mini-split type of air conditioning unit, would would have been much more efficient. But I’m generating way more solar power than I can possibly use in this off-grid container, and so peak efficiency is less important to me.
For this cheap portable unit, I had to cut a hole in the side of the container for the hot exhaust air to flow, then drill a smaller hole for the condensation tube to drain.
Despite not being the most efficient solution, it quickly cools the air in there (even if it is also sucking some outside air in through the container’s vents). It also acts as a dehumidifier, which is perhaps even more important to me, as my electric toys are likely just as unhappy about being in a super humid environment as they are about just being hot.
In the end, it all works! I mean, I took the easy way out with the Pecron system, but it’s still a cool feeling to start with a bare shipping container and end up with an off-grid solar charging shed that you put together with your own two hands.
With 8 kWh of stored energy and nearly 1,000W of real-world power in direct sun (and often 600-800W in less-than-ideal conditions), this is a seriously powerful system for just charging up all my EVs.
This could power a tiny home or other small off-grid setup like a hunting cabin. For me though, I’ll start with just keeping my electric tractors and motorcycles charged!
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk threw shade at Waymo for having “rookie numbers” amid Tesla’s own disappointing autonomous-driving performance, raising the question: Is Elon Musk delusional or simply lying about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving?
Every year since 2018, Musk has alternately claimed that Tesla would solve self-driving “by the end of the year” or “next year.”
It never happened.
Tesla claimed a sort of victory this year with the launch of its “Robotaxi” service in Austin, Texas, but even that has been misleading since the service only operates a few vehicles in a geofenced area, something Musk has criticized Waymo for in the past, and unlike Waymo, Tesla has in-car supervisors with a finger on a killswitch to stop the vehicle in case of a potential accident.
Even with in-car supervisors preventing an unknown number of accidents, we recently learned that Tesla’s robotaxi crash rate is almost twice that of Waymo’s, which operates its service without any employees inside its vehicles.
Now, Musk called Waymo’s 2,500 fully autonomous vehicles currently in operation “rookie numbers”:
To put the comment in perspective, Tesla is believed to have about ~30 “Robotaxis” in its Austin fleet. In addition, Tesla claims to be operating “robotaxis” in the Bay Area with just over 100 cars, but it is officially considered a ride-hailing service because drivers are in the driver’s seat, and Tesla hasn’t even applied for an autonomous driving permit in California.
Tesla has also been pushing increasingly more misleading claims about its “Full Self-Driving” system being safer than humans.”
In the last few weeks, Tesla has repeatedly shared this misleading data as “proof” that its system is safer than humans:
This dataset is based on Tesla’s quarterly “Autopilot safety” report, which is known to be misleading.
There are three major problems with these reports:
- Methodology is self‑reported. Tesla counts only crashes that trigger an airbag or restraint; minor bumps are excluded, and raw crash counts or VMT are not disclosed.
- Road type bias. Autopilot is mainly used on limited‑access highways—already the safest roads—while the federal baseline blends all road classes. Meaning there are more crashes per mile on city streets than highways.
- Driver mix & fleet age. Tesla drivers skew newer‑vehicle, higher‑income, and tech‑enthusiast; these demographics typically crash less.
With the new chart on the right above, Tesla appears to have separated Autopilot and FSD mileage, which gives us a little more data, but it still has all the same problems listed above, except the road-type bias is less pronounced, since FSD is also used on city streets.
However, many FSD drivers choose not to engage FSD in potentially dangerous or more difficult situations, especially in inclement weather, which contributes to many crashes – crashes that are counted in the human driver data Tesla is comparing itself against.
Lastly, it is unfair to say that the data proves FSD is safer than human drivers, as even with the flawed data, Tesla should claim that FSD with human supervision is safer than human drivers. It’s not FSD versus humans, it’s FSD plus humans versus humans.
It leads us to this.
With Tesla and Musk being undoubtedly wrong and misleading about the performance and the very nature of its current autonomous driving offering, I wanted to know your opinion about the situation through this poll:
Electrek’s Take
Personally, I think it’s a little of both.
I think he sometimes really believes Tesla is on the verge of solving autonomy, but at the same time, he is perfectly willing to cross the line and mislead people into thinking Tesla is further ahead than it actually is.
For example, I believe I can explain this comment about Waymo having “rookie numbers” despite the Alphabet company having about 10x more “robotaxis” than Tesla – even with Tesla’s very loose definition of a robotaxi.
Based on job listings across the US and his recent ridiculous comment that Tesla will magically cover half of the US population with robotaxis by the end of the year, I think Tesla is hiring thousands of drivers. Soon, it will put them in Model Ys with ‘Robotaxi’ stickers on them and have them drive on FSD and give rides in the Robotaxi app in several US cities.
Musk will claim that Tesla’s Robotaxi is now bigger than Waymo, even though it will basically be the equivalent of Uber drivers in Tesla cars with FSD, which is already the case. Just this week, I took an Uber from the Montreal airport, and it was in a Model Y with FSD. Has Tesla launched ‘Robotaxi’ in Montreal?
It’s either that or he counts consumer vehicles with FSD, which is even dumber.
In short, he is delusional, and when he realizes that he was wrong, he is willing to lie to cover things up.
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Solar and wind are growing fast enough to meet all new electricity demand worldwide for the first three quarters of 2025, according to new data from energy think tank Ember. The group now expects fossil power to stay flat for the full year, marking the first time since the pandemic that fossil generation won’t increase.
Solar and wind aren’t just expanding; they’re outpacing global electricity demand itself. Solar generation jumped 498 TWh (+31%) compared to the same period last year, already topping all the solar power produced in 2024. Wind added another 137 TWh (+7.6%). Together, they supplied 635 TWh of new clean electricity, beating out the 603 TWh rise in global demand (+2.7%).
That lifted solar and wind to 17.6% of global electricity in the first three quarters of the year, up from 15.2% year-over-year. That brought the total share of renewables in global electricity – solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy, and geothermal – to 43%. Fossil fuels slid to 57.1%, down from 58.7%.
Renewables are beating coal
For the first time in 2025, renewables collectively generated more electricity than coal. And fossil generation as a whole has stalled. Fossil output slipped slightly by 0.1% (-17 TWh) through the end of Q3. Ember expects no fossil-fuel growth for the full year, driven by clean power growth outpacing demand.
China and India are partly driving that shift. In China, fossil generation fell 52 TWh (-1.1%) as clean energy met all new demand, resulting from a structural change in its power system. India saw fossil generation drop 34 TWh (-3.3%), thanks to record solar and wind growth and milder weather.
Solar is leading the charge
Solar is doing the heavy lifting. It’s now the single biggest driver of change in the global power sector, with growth more than three times larger than any other electricity source in the first three quarters of the year.
“Record solar power growth and stagnating fossil fuels in 2025 show how clean power has become the driving force in the power sector,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember. “Historically a growth segment, fossil power now appears to be entering a period of stagnation and managed decline. China, the largest source of fossil growth, has turned a corner, signaling that reliance on fossil fuels to meet growing power demand is no longer required.”
Electricity demand rose 2.7% in the first three quarters of 2025, far slower than the 4.9% jump seen last year when extreme heatwaves pushed up cooling demand in China, India, and the US. This year’s milder weather helped take some pressure off the grid, making it easier for clean energy to close the gap.
A turning point for the global power system
For the first time outside of major crises such as the pandemic or the global financial crash, clean energy growth has not only kept up with demand but surpassed it. The next big question: can solar, wind, and the rest of the clean power sector keep up this pace consistently? If they can, 2025 may be remembered as the year global fossil generation plateaued.
Read more: FERC: For two years straight, solar leads new US power capacity
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![The Genesis GV90 really does have coach doors [Video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/09/Genesis-GV90-space.jpeg?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Genesis is taking luxury to the next level with its new flagship SUV. The GV90 is shaping up to be the brand’s most lavish vehicle yet, offering ultra-premium features like coach doors.
Genesis GV90 caught with coach doors in real life
After unveiling the Neolun Concept at the New York Auto Show last March, Genesis said it was a preview of its first full-size SUV.
The “ultra-luxe, state-of-the-art SUV,” as Genesis describes it, will be the brand’s largest and most luxurious vehicle yet, slotted above the GV80.
It wasn’t the stunning design or the over-the-top interior that caught most people’s attention, but the B-pillarless coach doors.
Although we were worried that some of the ultra-premium features, like the coach doors, wouldn’t make it to the production model, new spy photos reveal otherwise.
A GV90 prototype was spotted out in public with the coach doors wide open, giving us our closest look at the setup. The new spy photos, courtesy of SH Proshots (via TheKoreanCarBlog), show the hinged door system in action and offer a glimpse of the interior.
Earlier this year, Hyundai Motor filed several patent applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, detailing new door latching devices.
Two patents, titled “Cinching Device For Door Latches in Vehicle” and “Door Latch Device for Vehicles,” offer a better idea of how the Genesis GV90’s coach doors will work.
Genesis has previously said that B-pillarless coach doors are now a reality in production vehicles. It looks like the GV90 will be the first to debut it.
Yes, the Genesis GV90 will be available with coach doors, but it likely won’t be standard on all trims. It could be a premium feature reserved for higher-priced variants. The GV90 has been spotted out in public several times now with a traditional door design. We’ve also caught a glimpse of other premium features it will offer, like adaptive air suspension.
Genesis has yet to reveal prices or final specs. We could see the GV90 debut by the end of the year, with sales expected to start in mid-2026.
One thing is for sure: The Genesis GV90 won’t be cheap. It’s expected to start around $100,000, but higher trims could cost upwards of $120,000.
Earlier this week, a production version of the GV90 was caught for the first time driving in South Korea. It was still covered in camouflage, but from what’s shown, it looks nearly identical to the Neolun concept.
Reports suggest the flagship SUV could debut on Hyundai’s new eM platform. Hyundai claims the platform will deliver a 50% improvement in driving range per charge compared to its current EVs. It’s also expected to offer Level 3 autonomous driving and other advanced driver assist capabilities.
The flagship electric SUV will serve as a tech beacon, showcasing Hyundai’s latest tech and software. It’s expected to feature a massive 24″ curved infotainment as part of a digital cockpit design.
Genesis is also launching its first hybrid, the GV80, next year, and an extended-range electric vehicle (EREV) in late 2026 or early 2027. The luxury brand will also introduce a new off-road SUV as it expands into new segments.
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