It's too bad that the only people benefiting from all green power subsidies are the people that least need them.
We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Those who are most able to pay for it are those who are paying for the highest initial costs, lowering the costs for everyone else by improvements in the technology, and making it easier for others to adopt later. Early adopters take lots of risk on things not working out well, and learning what things can go wrong and how to fix them (at additional expense, too.)
This is much better than those who are least able to pay being made to shoulder the cost and risks of being early adopters.
That money is spent to fund the capital expenditures and the on-the-production-line R&D that drives down costs.
That money that subsidizes purchases of more expensive products also incentivizes all those factories, the things that make them cheaper in the future.
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH
If you can convert this vague statement into a policy with real impacts, there would be tons of people that would love to hear it. Otherwise, it's just wishing the world were different, without a path to completion.
Should we all have free energy? Of course! But how do we do it. I'm all ears and hope that you have come up with a defensible policy. (Though ideally you should have shared it 4 years ago, because it's going to be a long time before we have another shot at setting policy, and everybody was begging for ideas like yours back then.)
> That money should have been spent to fund R&D/capital expenditures to make cheaper electric vehicles and solar cells for everyone, TBH.
It kinda was, it's just that it was spend in China and the US government got the money back by putting tariffs on the imports.
The tariffs are paid by the importer, whose customers also gets a government subsidy paid for by the tariffs that the electorate is told are paid by the exporter, so they get to feel like they're getting a good deal and the voters get to feel patriotic, and why isn't my MSCI China investment doing better…
Which would be great and all, but they already exist. But rather than take advantage of the cheaper existing solar panels and electric cars we'd rather impose massive tariffs on them because of the country making them.
Isn't TFA about how the technology is not resulting in lowered costs for end users? What are you suggesting would change the dynamic described in the article?
There's two very very different things under discussion here,
1) TFA, with manufacturers using their limited production capacity to target the highest margin customers, the ones that overpay the most.
2) green energy subsidies, in the comment I'm replying to.
In the first case, the price insensitive customers are the ones paying for a build out of capacity, and taking on greater risk while doing it.
But in the comment that I'm replying to, the poster was commenting on "benefits" which is presumably the lower cost of electricity, and those with the least also have the greatest need for lower costs. Presumably this is about residential solar/storage, or at least I interpreted it to be. Lower costs in solar are not having much of an impact at the moment due to the high cost of the regulatory structure that we use in the US; Australia has a far far far lower solar installation cost, <5x per Watt. If there's disparity in the availability of our overpriced residential solar, it's due to those with less generally being renters rather than owners. So their landlord makes the decision about residential solar versus grid electricity.
And for green energy subsidies on utility solar/storage, the question gets even more complicated because falling electricity generation costs are not something that the utility wants to pass on, since most in the US are regulated monopolies and have no incentive to ever lower prices.
In any case, the existence of the subsidy is not the core problem, it's the mismatch between decision makers and beneficiaries.
Paying wealthy people to leave the power grid isn't making it cheaper for those left behind. It is making it more expensive for those who couldn't afford to leave the grid. Now more of the share of the cost to maintain all the infrastructure is pushed on to those who couldn't afford to leave it.
Those who are most able to pay for it likely have larger energy footprints too, so it's possible prioritizing this demographic gives you more bang for your buck in emissions reductions.
We need both. There's plenty of wealthy people that can afford to go solar and could arguably have a bigger environmental impact if they did since they often also have large homes, big cars etc. If they don't feel strongly about doing it for altruistic reasons then subsidies are a useful tool to get them to take the plunge. Without subsidies there's really no economic argument for them to do it since the break even times are long and they probably aren't too worried about utility costs.
Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
OP doesn't have to pay the electric bill anymore, but the average residential solar install exceeds $30k before credits. Someone has to pay off that loan...
Not to mention the Chinese factory that manufactured the solar panels is probably dumping toxic waste chemicals into the local drinking water unabated. We're all too busy patting ourselves on the back for saving the world to consider the impact of the whole lifecycle.
> Taking one single family home solar does not provide a measurable environmental impact in aggregate.
In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar. Are you saying we just shouldn't bother with solar and EVs because not everyone is going to do it? May aswell just stop donating to charity too right?
> Someone has to pay off that loan...
I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves. The subsidies are just a small part of the total cost.
> probably dumping toxic waste chemicals...
Again, I think everyone would agree that it'd be better if the solar panel production process was totally clean, but the fact it isn't yet doesn't stop solar being a net win.
>In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
Assuming that SFH remain the standard. Even with ADUs, that changes. (Idea: subsidize only based on the presence of multifamily on a lot?)
>I think the OP is probably paying for the loan themselves.
Hm. Knock-on effect. That homeowner now has to command the income to pay for the loan. That changes his job choice, consumption habits. Maybe his boss feels that he has to pay him more to keep him happy (and not another worker). If he has to sell, price has to be higher in order to break even/get a return. Solar is probably a good thing for municipal expenses, re: less strain on the power grid, but you also get a better turn in that regard converting multi-family or non-residential buildings.
CA is doing both but PG&E (and SDGE and SCE, etc) are screwing everyone over as they wasted decades without maintaining their lines properly and now charge through the roof on power distribution which they have a monopoly on.
> In order for large numbers of homes to go solar, individual homes need to go solar.
The percentage of energy going to my house which was generated by solar continues to go up every year. And yet I haven't installed a single solar panel. Strange huh?
Wealthy people pay much more in taxes than poor people. One use of taxes I am in favor of is "nudges" to achieve desirable outcomes for all. This is an example of that.
True, but not universally. In cities, lower income people living in older buildings are a significantly larger source of tax revenue than corporate parks or the wealthy communities they subsidize. I spend less in sales tax shopping at Costco than someone who eats every meal from a corner store and overpays for singles of everything.
I don't even know what a soda or single roll of toilet tissue costs, but I'd probably be horrified by it because I can afford not to spend money.
The government gets my money on occasion, but they have a chunk of the nation on a subscription plan.
>We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.
Good news, these are called "community solar gardens" and they exist all around the USA, here's a large one based in Minneapolis: https://www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com/
Community net monitoring isn’t allowed in California.
Instead, PG&E let the grid fall apart, so now they’re charging crippling amounts of money to people that can’t afford solar.
On the one hand, with the help of subsidies, our house is off-grid capable, and our power bill is $0-50.
On the other hand, there’s a red-tagged neighborhood near by (they built homes despite not having power grid access), and they usually end up having a generator fire take out a few houses every couple of years.
Anyway, I really wish California had a second political party (not the GOP).
How is it crippling? My 1900 sq. ft. loft in SF cost like $100/mo most months. That’s 5 hours of minimum wage work here. Even the $200 it hit at peak is 10 hours of minimum wage work. That was with 4 people living in it.
On the other hand, living in a purple state doesn't necessarily help with corruption either. I live in PA and we had billions "go missing" from our Department of Transportation over the course of over a little over a decade. Things have improved in the last like 6 years or so, but we had to get to the point where our bridges were crumbling and just having permanent detours setup around them first before people really got on a crusade about properly fixing our roads.
Josh Shapiro's done a bang-up job actually properly allocating the funds we managed to get from the big infrastructure bill, but that's been a major change from how things have been for the last 30 years I've lived here.
> CEF has financed and developed 6.9MW (~$16M) of low-income-accessible community solar arrays that ... offsets the utility bills of over 700 Minnesota households for the next 25 years
$16M for 700 homes = $22,857.14/home
That's not an investment, it's just charity by other means.
And even at that price, it's overlapping in price range with the non-solar equivalents.
The funny thing is, I grew up (in the UK) with news stories about how the latest computers were so expensive in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to NYC, buy one, and fly back with it, than to buy local — and now the US is having the same problem in reverse with PV (you might well be able to fit some of the much smaller flexible PV systems I've seen around here in Berlin into oversized luggage).
(Sure, I get that big projects aren't exactly the same as small ones… but usually that makes big things cheaper, not more expensive, even for home PV vs. park PV).
That's just the panels. So, I buy a bunch of panels, they get dropped off by a truck, and then...? I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
The price for installed solar in the US isn't high because of the panels. Its high because of the labor costs.
> I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?
Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could…
But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid.
If this was done in a place that already has nearby grid access:
8 h * {$25/h unskilled labour} + 0.5 h * {$50/h electrician} = $225 per one of those, assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates.
And that's a car port, it isn't designed for optimal installation time.
If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here, which is still cheap enough that you could do each of those on an entirely separate new not yet connected plot of clear land at domestic rates and still be cheaper than the quoted example in the USA.
Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of modifying your home's wiring. Its literally just the panels and a frame. So add another ~$2k to your prices here, at least. So really more like $8k for materials.
> If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here
Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
Similar prices can be found for just buying panels here in the US as your example link. As someone who has actually looked at solar proposals for an installation on my home, it's not the cost of the panels that's keeping me away from it. It's how much people are wanting to charge to put the panels on my roof, and the fact I don't want to be doing that labor myself at the moment.
> Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.
At contractor rates.
Hence me saying "assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates".
That said, I seem to have wildly over-estimated how much electricians get paid, at full-time rates the average in the USA is only $27.79 per hour: https://www.talent.com/salary?job=electrician
> And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.
So do that then.
> So really more like $8k for materials.
You're being ripped off.
You all are.
> Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.
No, that's the price if you're putting each pair of these onto its own, new, grid connection.
If you've already got a house, you already have a grid connection.
If you're building a solar park, you share the same grid connection for all of them, you don't put a completely separate connection on each 10 kW because that is a pointless waste of money… but if you did, it would still be cheaper.
Oh, you're talking about the prices the company actually installing it pays. If that's the case, solar installers get panels even cheaper than what you're quoting from that German website. It's possible here in the US to get panels retail for just a little bit more from big box stores, they're paying even less with volume wholesale prices.
And if I'm talking about prices being paid by the company installing them, I'm still needing to do a lot more labor than 8 hours of unskilled labor and half an hour of an electrician and a pile of solar panels. I'm not going to make many deals if I don't have any salespeople, people aren't going to know to hire me if I don't have any advertising/referral business going on, I'm not going to have much continued business if nobody is answering the phone, people are probably going to sue me if I don't have people running support operations, I'll need a good bit of insurance & bonding for all of this, different sites have different needs so someone will have to actually design out the system, people need to handle all the permitting requirements and deal with those processes, I'll probably need to have accountants to help manage these cash flows, my costs for their labor is a good bit more than what they see on their paychecks, etc.
I swear it's like you've never actually looked at the costs of running a business.
Once again, the price of the panels isn't why it cost an average of $22k per home in that example.
> You're being ripped off
Please show me your $0 10kW inverter plus $0 for several hundred feet of decent gauge wire, enough for handling this 10kW plus plenty of safety margin.
There'll often be a broad restriction of adornment of any kind outside of a strict list, and/or at the discretion of the HOA/property manager. Many don't allow window AC units. There's a general air of paranoia about anything that could potentially bring down perceived property values, or that might otherwise project a sense that the neighborhood is anything other than a Flanderization of affluence. (There's also a element of social control.) Think historical preservation codes, but for a pile of sticks built in the 80s or 90s.
Unpopular opinion: Things here get twisted by our sordid history with race/class. We actually do value our civil liberties and economic freedom, as a general rule... but that can and does get short-circuited by attitudes and assumptions that were steeped during segregation and industrialization (and the associated widening of economic inequality).
Our government had the bright idea to bake those issues - particularly the strict rich/poor, white/black, good/bad dichotomy - into our housing policy, so now, any divergence from the local (affluent) norm isn't just a funny quirk; it conjures up anxieties associated with the Civil War, white flight, immigrant ghettos, eminent domain, urban decay, Superfund sites, etc.
People here are desperate not to be on the wrong side of the tracks, as it were, and so they'll submit themselves to no small amount of what looks like insanity to the rest of the world, in order to not live somewhere thought of as "sketch". Not entirely irrational, mind you, since these kinds of perceptions are often what determines whether or not a neighborhood receiving amenities like "parks" and "school funding" and "a place to buy food."
Circling back: window AC and PV signal to some people that folks in the neighborhood are too poor to afford central AC or roof panels (or to not "need" solar, budget-wise). These people (and the people who want to sell their homes to the first group) will fight you to prevent that perception from taking root. It wouldn't be as much of a problem if so much wealth wasn't tied up in real estate (the buildings, not just the land), but that's where we are.
Well, the US is a strong federal state, so it depends on the level of government. At the national level, the US government is relatively hands-off compared to other places. At the local level, it depends on your local politics. In urban areas, you might have an HOA telling you whether or not you can have an AC unit. In rural areas there's almost certainly no HOA, and potentially not even a local municipal government at all, and could quite often be legal to put up a gun range in your back yard.
Look at what it's solving for. Low income households are not the largest consumers of energy. They may own less efficient appliances, but there are other programs for that, like free home sealing and heat pump installation.
One group has insufficiencies that need to be solved, the other, excesses. Lessening dependence on the grid for the ones for whom cost is not a barrier lowers costs for everyone.
Now, having some sort of solar community energy bank would eventually be novel, akin to the replaceable battery charge stations for electric scooters in the Pacific Islands. Take your high density 12VDC canisters up, slot them into the locking wells, and get a text when they're full. Dock them onto your appliance circuit when you're home, and enjoy grid-free power for your home or vehicle.
This seems like an argument for utility-scale solar and batteries, which can be used by everyone. The do-it-yourself approach makes more sense for people who own their own home and can invest in improving it. That’s going to skew towards wealthier people who live in suburban and rural areas.
Agreed with the caveat, I'm from a lower income area where solar has been on the up. Panels would get stolen often enough to warrant thoughful consideration.
Probably found out about the tax credit while wine tasting, diving a Tesla and trading crypto while on the way to buy a new house with RSU's right after was given a bonus for new internal tool development.
We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.