But critics insist the costs of those solar panels are beginning to outweigh the benefits.
Incentive payments to homes with solar, they say, have led to higher electricity rates for everyone else — including families that can’t afford rooftop panels. If so, that’s not only unfair, it’s damaging to the state’s climate progress. Higher electricity rates make it less likely that people will drive electric cars and install electric heat pumps in their homes — crucial climate solutions.
The solar industry disputes the argument that solar incentive payments are driving up rates, as do many environmental activists. But Newsom’s appointees to the Public Utilities Commission are convinced, as they made clear Thursday.
“We need to reach our [climate] goals as fast as we can,” said Alice Reynolds, the commission’s president. “But we also need to be extremely thoughtful about how we reach our climate change goals in the most cost-effective manner.”
When I am having a stroke, I don’t stop and calculate of the most cost effective treatment options. I go to the emergency room. We could have done this calculation in 1970 and acted, but that ship has sailed.
Every dollar the state spends on subsidizing private individuals’ renewable energy projects is a dollar the state can’t spend on public, at-scale renewal energy projects.
Here in the uk we stopped subsidising private green energy a while ago, and it’s still worthwhile to install solar - we pay our energy supplier (one of a few privatised options) for the connection and infrastructure, and any power we use, and they pay us for the power we put back into the grid. Essentially, a portion of the money we earn from our power is kept by the utility company to cover infrastructure maintenance, and we still make money. I very much doubt that the base power generation or infrastructure costs in the us are so much higher as to stop it making money for homeowners without subsidies, unless (as I’d imagine) the local power generation is a monopoly, and they’re just trying to protect their profits. Solar became cheap enough to be genuinely profitable without subsidies here a few years back.
I don’t understand. What’s the difference? One one hand, energy production is distributed and on the other it’s centralized.
What I mean is, if eveyone had solar then we would have a “public, at-scale renewable energy project”
In theory you’re not wrong. The problems with this in practice are several, which I won’t go into, except to say that it’s a very American/individualistic/neoliberal solution to what is a collective problem.
I’ll add that I’m not universally against installing small projects. It has its uses. Given federal dollars I think it’s fine to have such projects in the mix, just not as the bulk of the infrastructure.
If we just called them freedom panels adoption would be so much faster. Then if everyone had panels it would be decentralized.
USA! USA! USA!
According to the op-ed
Those groups make the case that large solar farms produce electricity at a far lower cost than rooftop panels.
Which is kind of short on details. Googling, I see:
2019 non-partisan estimates put the midpoint unsubsidised levelised cost for residential rooftop solar at 20¢/kWh, for commercial/industrial rooftop solar at 11¢/kWh, and for grid-scale solar at 4¢/kWh. That’s a big gap.
As the author says, that’s a big gap.
what’s the value of single point of failure?
16c/kWh?
I think they should move to subsidising home batteries instead, just to smooth out the peaks and troughs that come with renewables. If you do that, and add some smarts to electric car chargers you’d be able to remove the need for fossil powered peaker plants. Solar is generating more than can be used on some days, and we need to focus on time shifting load and generation when possible.
Decentralized power generation can be good for redundancy/resilency/off-the-grid purposes, but if you want the highest efficiency, you need large scale, centrally engineered not-for-profit projects.
You only need high efficiency if your energy source costs money.
When your energy source falls out of the sky every damn day, efficiency is irrelevant.
Yes as we all know it is free to build solar panels. It is free to write the software to control the solar panel. It is free to wire the solar panels to the grid and solar panels and all supporting hardware last forever.
And since all of this is 100% free, there is also absolutely no difference in the energy collected or the amount of materials used between 10,000 contractors slapping down some solar panels in dubious configurations as quickly as possible so they can get their subsidized installation fees, versus a centralized public project designed to minimize transmission losses, material waste, and maximize longevity and light energy collection.
the cost argument is silly
Yes, yes, those are all very good points.
Another very good point is “taxes”.
A centralized project necessarily involves regular (monthly) transactions between a seller and a buyer. That involves metering expenses. Accounting. Billing. Collections when some of your customers don’t pay their bills. Losses, when collections don’t work. A legal department. The liability associated with having deep pockets in a litigious society. Inflation: your costs are going to be rising on a regular basis to keep up with it. Managers and supervisors. An HR department. A CEO, board of directors. Shareholders.
And, of course, every kWh you sell is taxed by the government, every bill, every month. That just isn’t true of a personally-owned solar panel.
You have a wide variety of continuing operational expenses associated with all those transactions you have to conduct between your centralized project and the customer. Those made sense with fossil fuel generation: a small, household generator has a high fuel bill. A central facility can buy fuel cheaper, and their larger engines are more economical. That margin leaves a lot of room to fund the additional overhead needed to sell power to the consumer.
But, if he has free fuel available (virtually nil operating costs) at home, all those efficiency gains are irrelevant: he can still be cheaper while being less efficient.
Save the centralized projects for things that rooftop solar can’t do: distribution, storage, etc.
