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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/8471507
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?
The manufacturing would still have probably been moved to China at this point, but it's frustrating that we didn't even try to support it.
100% true
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.
Seems like the real problem is corporations and the solution would be to violently nationalize at the slightest hint of bad faith.
I don't think it's a good idea to have our infrastructure be used as a hostage.
All I keep reading is the failure of capitalism at the end of the day.
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
Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse
Isn't this the point of the free market? Shouldn't capitalists rejoice when things are working as intended?
Only when they own the means of production.
If they can't extract profit from Chinese imports, they don't want anyone else to import them.
Yes but we don't have a free market.
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.
except the U.S. needs solar panels for military industrial complex reasons too, and they don't want to rely on a notoriously hostile power to build the groundwork of that structure. a big part of selling the U.S. on solar is the promise of energy independence, you don't get independence if your entire foundation is built on another country's tech.
The US exports oil and gas so we are already energy independent. If China sold Gold to US consumers at $1000 an ounce, should the US step in and stop China from giving Americans cheap gold?
Yes I understand the need for domestic production. Factories take a few years to ramp up. Domestic production can be started after everyone has solar panels and old panels need replacement.
The USA keeps several wartime industries afloat with subsidies in case of war. The big one is steel, but there are others as well.
There has been a recent rethink of what industries are needed during war and solar capacity is part of that.
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.
A $20k LiPo4 battery in every home can remove almost all base load needs and is available today.
Get to 100% solar, then figure out how much coal/gas/oil can slowly be removed.
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.
You start running into major issues with regulation and ownership of equipment that there isn't a vested interest in solving. If a local battery isn't owned by the utility company, who owns it? How do you track power input and use? Can one house use another house's power?
It is a lot less complicated to keep things separated.
Sorry I should have probably worded it better I meant that it would be run by a public utility not by residents.
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.
Nuclear is about $6k per KWatt. Solar with battery is about $5k per KWatt.
If it's cost effective to build and maintain a nuclear reactor for $6k per KWatt, then it can also be done with the cheaper solar.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine. No one says, "We can't have coal power, where are all the trained miners going to come from? Someone will need to drive that coal to the powerplant and that power plant will need trained electricians. It's a huge problem!"
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine
I think the problem from the capitalist standpoint is that its not a very profitable business model, well thats fine then the public sector should do it just like we do the roads and other essential services. But no politician in america would even have the balls to propose that.
Opinion time:
Human population will grow to consume all there is, always.
We as a species will ever escape scarcity.
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.
We were the gray goo the whole time
Until something gooier comes along.
(really I just saw an opportunity to use "gooier" for the first time and I just couldn't pass it up)
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.
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.
I was thinking about something similar recently.
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.
Renewable energy is great
Having a power grid is great, needs money to maintain
Having on demand power generation is great, needs money to maintain.
The current model pays for the maintenance and carrying costs of the grid and always available power generation with usage.
The current model doesn't work when electricity has a negative cost. So we would lose either the on demand power generation or access to the grid.
It's not capitalism that's the problem, just the current pricing model.
So in theory a baseline maintenance fee could solve this. You just make it so the metered charge counts against that fee until it's covered, so the people who don't have alternate sources of electricity aren't affected.
I think the "capitalism" part comes around because most electric grids (in the US) are privately owned and actively try to turn a profit. For those companies, the fact that some people use solar panels will just become an excuse to charge everyone a fee.
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.
Just food for thought.
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.
Well the point is the powerplant, if not currently a municipal service, has to pay for itself, make capital improvements, pay wages, etc.
If the powerplant doesn't have "regular" income they are in a tougher spot and "may" go out of business.
Solar and green energy is wonderful and we need more and more. But we should agree we want power at any time, in any condition, so the powerplant currently still needs to exist.
This problem is not wholly removed if the powerplant is a municipal service either.
Edit Not sure what the downvotes are for, nothing I said is wrong. I even praised green energy.
Negative prices are good for BESS. It also has no bearing on the consumption market, which is detached from the generation market (so they can charge consumers more).
This.
For those not in the industry, the drivers for this are green tags and production tax credits (more common in wind).
Green tags are basically attaboys for funding the generation of renewable electricity, and are tradable.
Production tax credits are a $/MWH tax incentive for generating renewable power, and are, again, tradable.
In both cases, then, there are incentives for renewable projects to keep producing power even when the wholesale power price at the point of interconnection is negative, as there are generation incentives that still make it better than idling.
From an environmentalist perspective, this is fantastic, as virtually all of this renewable generation represents offset coal and gas peaker plant generation.