Though prices can drop and even go negative sometimes it's never a long term thing. There is kind of a price floor in the market, if prices get too low energy intensive businesses will move into the state, eg. aluminum smelters, bitcoin miners, and so on.
What this does is force new homeowners to make an iffy investment that they probably wouldn't otherwise make given a choice in the free market, but cleverly hides it in the price of new construction.
If it was such a slam-dunk great idea, everyone would be installing solar systems right now but they aren't because it isn't clear that it makes any financial sense.
Solar panels, themselves, are incredibly cheap, partly because China is dumping their overproduction on the market, partly because we’ve just gotten really good at making them.
Most of the price of installing solar is the labor for getting the roofers and electrician to come out, plus in some jurisdictions an architectural study.
All of those costs come down dramatically if you’re already bringing in roofers and electricians for the normal process of building a home.
Additionally, PV panels themselves have near zero maintenance costs, and dramatically reduce maintenance/replacement costs of the underlying roof.
As a result, it is just a gargantuan failure of the market that all new homes aren’t, today, built with PV panels.
This seems like a great correction to that market failure.
For anyone stumbling across this thread, the above is wrong (possibly intentionally so). The cost of the panels and related hardware are roughly 30-50% of the total installed job cost (for me, roughly $6-8k of the $15k total). The rest is standard labor cost for installation, electrical, etc. None of that is unreasonable. If I was doing 100% of the labor myself (which is impossible because I'm not a licensed electrician), it would still cost me nearly $10k.
mercutio2 is indirectly making the claim that PV installers are inflating the prices. He does this in an attempt to frame the investment as being better than it is, by claiming it's much cheaper than it really is. This is disingenuous.
He then makes the claim that economies of scale will magically make it even cheaper, because the roofers and electricians will already be there to build the home. This is absurd. Just because they are already building the house does not mean the craftsman will do the PV work for free. It will take them X additional hours to do it and that costs money, just about as much as it would cost for a house that has already been built.
Lastly he makes the totally false claim that PV reduces roof maintenance/repair costs. Nothing could be further from the truth! PV actually increases replacement costs, dramatically! For example:
This California regulation is a boondoggle that is being done for social/political reasons, pushed by the environmentalist lobby. It is a way of forcing consumers to purchase something they wouldn't otherwise do under the free market. Whenever you hear someone say "market failure", chances are they want the government to force you to buy something they like.
Wow, you really think I’m speaking in bad faith. I assure you I am not. I am certainly not making any of the indirect claims you accuse me of.
Certainly it’s true that a poorly architected solar panel system can be bad for your roof. If you know you have to design the roof for solar panels, that’s much less expensive to do in advance than to try to mitigate bad roofing materials after the fact.
For reference, I just installed solar panels on my roof. The raw cost of the panels was 25% of the full installation cost. The architect study was another 5%. Hardware to fasten the panels to my theoretically solar ready roof was another 8% of the cost.
The rest was labor.
I am shocked you think it’s controversial that dramatically less labor is required to do something at construction time than as a retrofit.
This doesn’t require any economies of scale (although I think those will also appear with this bill). It just requires that coordination costs that are already being paid at construction time not increase dramatically when adding solar panels to the list of things planned for.
Shading and cooling dark roofs is, in fact, a good way to reduce the weathering of a roof. They don’t do much for metal roofs, and they are signally inappropriate on several types of shingle roofs, but torch down roofs, which are very common in California, are in fact likely to be improved by panels, not degraded.
The contention that talking about market failures implies someone trying to sell you something doesn’t seem like it lines up well with the economists I’m familiar with, but you know, at the end of the day, we’re going to have to see how much actual builders in California charge once this bill is in full effect.
I’m perfectly willing to admit I was wrong if, in fact, the TCO of solar panels ends up being enough to make this other than an extremely good bit of legislation.
I posted in the other thread about why I think this policy is a really good idea: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17008950
Also it's only for new homes. You can still get that new bathroom.