Don't forget, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was just in China to protect US interests - this time because China has flooded the market with cheap solar panels.
We can't have solar power becoming affordable and accessible for most people.
I’ve said it a million times, we had the opportunity to get into the market early under Bush JR, but he shot down investing in the tech. Now who is one of the top exporters?
It's more complicated than that. Supply shocks cause short term instability in markets that require long term revenue streams to offer service.
Because we privatized our infrastructure, and because private firms divert a bunch of their revenue to profit, we have a bunch of material infrastructure that needs to be maintained by firms more interested in extracting profit than keeping them functional.
That's the real threat of solar panels. If we cut into private profit margins, they'll allow the infrastructure to collapse rather than maintain them with declining profit.
It's nuanced. Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse. It is not necessarily evil to want to have local production, and if we live under capitalism then it has to make money.
I agree though that for the most part even our good politicians do whatever they can to maintain the status quo, and that is generally bad for us and good for corporations and the billionaires
I don't see the problem. Buy the underpriced Chinese Solar. If they raise prices, build a factory. It's only a few years of overpriced panels, then prices go back down. If they are dumping panels, it's the Chinese who are handing free money to US consumers.
After the US is 100% solar we can worry about domestic manufacturing for maintaining infrastructure.
That doesn't sound nuanced. That sounds like the free market, so capitalism, did its thing and the US doesn't like the outcome. It's almost like capitalism is a terrible system that the US's lead economist is trying to subvert.
Id say the bulk of jobs being created in north america wont be in manufacturing the panels, but rather in the installation and upkeep of solar farms and solar panels on houses. If thats the case, then we want the panels themselves to be as low cost as possible to keep the overall cost of projects down.
If politicians had any balls at all (they dont) they'd be proposing publicly funded solar farms outside every major city. But we cant have that because that would be the government directly competing with oil companies, and thats why oil companies have bought one side of our entire political system to keep that from ever happening.
Cynicism aside, there are genuine engineering and logistical problems with relying too heavily on solar power. Storage and distribution being chief among them.
Hard sell. Also, say through collective action we actually somehow get governments to pay for a $20,000 battery for every home. How will you make that many, who will install them, who will maintain and replace them? You need a very large number of trained electricians and manufacturing capacity to make that a reality. You also need to plan for and earmark funds for replacements to make it not a complete waste. Just throwing out batteries as a solution is way easier said than done. There are a lot of barriers. That is why things take time.
Genuine question out of curiosity, do people think it would be more efficient to have some sort of battery substation for a neighborhood that's funded publicly? I just think it would be really inefficient to have everyone fund their own private batteries. It'll be way easier to balance a neighborhood than each individual house.
In addition to other comments here, I think that there’s added risk to having such a starkly segmented way of running things. Having neighborhood stations (publically owned/owned by the utility service provider) reduces a lot of redundancy and hedges some risk for families. If a battery fails and gets spicy it’s less likely to put a family out of their home, when a substation could be highly specialized for managing that kind of risk so that even if a battery or several batteries fail, it doesn’t impact the whole. There’s also some specialization that goes into handling them at end of life, and trusting normal every day laypeople to both maintain and manage them is a tall ask when most people find themselves in a position to be unable to do larger maintenance on their homes already (it cost me 20k to put in a sump pump and encapsulate my crawl space to treat and protect it from mold and pinhole beetles, which I could only do by taking out a loan that I’m still paying for).
We have already escaped scarcity. In fact, we have escaped scarcity to such a degree that the parasitic elites have to artificially enforce scarcity onto us in order to maintain their positions as parasitic elites.
Even if population doesn’t, the constant advancement and use of portable electronics, electric cars, and a warming earth will require more environmental controls for living spaces. These will drive up demand for electricity.
No, but maybe as a first approximation in very small slices of time. It is far more complex than that. Just look at the olive tree. Olive trees detect new olive trees and release poison to kill them off, at the same time they have multi thousand year lifespans. Individuals in that species have "decided" that the only way it can live a long ass time is to have no competition and is willing to kill their own to get it. You can't apply the carrying capacity model to olive trees.
They say we have about 20 years to get to net zero, or face irreversible consequences, increasing exponentially to what is potentially species ending event.
let’s say we achieved nuclear fusion TOMORROW - solving all the planet’s energy need need immediately and forever.
Capitalism means we would be FORCED to drip feed the technology, because plentiful energy cheaper than water would crash the world economy.
Energy generation requires intense planning as the amount generated has to be spent immediately.
Reason all countries require some sort of permission before installing solar power to your roof is this; as you can't just add more power to your grid without addressing proper storage for excess electricity or decreasing certain plant outputs.
let's be honest, this is the real threat, oil/coal/natgas based power production would take a hit midday, because at the end of the day, the shareholder is simply more equal than you are, and he is owed the income
I don't know of a single country that prevents you from adding panels to your roof without permission. The connection to the grid might be regulated, but that's a totally different claim, my friend. And the difference is important when evaluating the rest of your statement.
This is true if you want to export the power back to the grid (aka grid tied), however, some solar controller systems can operate without this happening, and do not require any form of permission to operate.
Generally homes are grid tied unless they have batteries, simply for the fact that the solar power is generally available when power isn't in high demand, and not available when power is in high demand. So the daytime power is pushed to batteries, and the batteries are consumed during usage time (usually near or after sunset).
Systems can be augmented to use grid power when solar/batteries are insufficient, and do so without sending any excess power back to the grid.
These systems are generally more expensive than grid tied systems, but they have obvious upsides to power availability when the grid is not delivering power. Another caveat is that most solar systems are not built to be able to handle the full power load from a household, so some things will be solar while many others will not be.
Unless you're exporting the power, a permit is not required for generating power with solar. Installing it, however, you may want a permit for that....
I am pretty sure this is terribly taken out of context. The issue is solar is unreliable. By being cheap, it is pushing reliable sources out of business. And if you want to know how bad the consequences can be, just look at how many people died due to the relatively small blackout in Texas.
So the issue is not capitalism disliking solar. The issue is capitalism liking solar too much. Endangering people by choosing cheap over reliable.
The 2020 incident? Texas failed because they didn't properly winterize their infrastructure. Not because they were using green energy. It was almost entirely gas that failed.
Also there are a number of ways to store and transfer energy.
The real issue in Texas was unregulated capitalism. Energy prices skyrocketed like 6000% at the time, because they could get away with it.
I live in Minnesota and those idiots are charging me for their lack of preparation.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With volatility comes high peak prices, so speaker plants should be doing ok. We should be approaching a stage where fossil fuel plants are evolving into peaker plants, and peaked plants will still have decades of use to generate a profit, as we continue to build out renewables and try to get a handle on storage
Curious what the current average cost is for solar on a home? Sadly I haven’t been keeping up with the technology to really have a frame of reference. 🤔
Depends on the region and supplier, but generally speaking the price per kW of solar install has been dropping like 20-50% per year.
Let's say you spend $5,000 on 5 kW of panels and your monthly energy bill is ~$200. It'll take 25 months or just over 2 years for the panels to break even.
However, panel substrate materials tend to die after 25 years of service life, so for the remaining 23 years that they exist, they will be making you ~$4,600/year (since you no longer pay for electricity).
The main positive of solar is that the sun will literally outlast human civilization and is about the closest thing to free energy that we have in our fucked up world. No one rushes over with an umbrella in public parks and charges tariffs.
I'm an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here's how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.
The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.