The Interior Department is almost making it impossible to build renewables.
> The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
Not to worry, there is a whole lot of farm land that is going to free up soon for renewables as farmers go bankrupt from suboptimal agriculture trade policy.
(soybean exports to China from the US are already down 96% this year; also, while most federal lands are west of the midwest great plains, there should be sufficient non federal land to meet the energy needs of West Coast load centers: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-14-map-federal-land...)
This is the same sort of nonsense they pulled on abortion providers. Just bury people in pointless regulation to keep them from operating, like requiring abortion clinics to have hallways at least 12ft wide
If it weren't for tariffs on foreign panels, I wonder how cheap solar would be. Solar's gotten cheap very quickly; we might be at the point that it's viable on its own.
Can someone in this thread please give me a good steelman that humans don't have a significant affect on climate change? This seems to be a growing sentiment among friends who I regard as intelligent, but goes against what I've believed to be the scientific consensus for years. I'm willing to admit I've been misled or wrong.
Of course humans have a significant effect on climate change - the steelman versions of why that doesn’t matter are: 1) It doesn’t matter because we will figure out some technological solution in the future. Or 2) it doesn’t matter since I personally will be ok (because I am rich and/or live in a rich country that can afford to pay the costs)
I'm of the view climate change is real but not as big a deal as some people make out. A couple of reasons:
- Solar power has been growing exponentially for years and will continue for a while allowing carbon usage to be phased out and maybe carbon capture done.
- The climate has changed naturally more than most people realise and life goes on. The sea is forecast to rise 60cm or so over this century but has risen ~120m over the last 20k years which was hardly noticed. (graph from wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Gla...)
On point 2 - notice how flat your graph is for the last 6k years?
Also, why do you think the impact of past changes on a tiny group of humans living as hunter gatherers is of any relevance to 8 billion people living in the modern world (including, for example, in massive coastal cities?)
I can point you to two legitimate climate scientists who in some sense deny climate change. They work on the satellite temperature record, which very clearly shows the increasing temperature:
Spencer's view is that there is a natural climate change going on that just happens to coincide exactly with increasing greenhouse gases. Christy believes that climate change is real and partly anthropogenic but that it's just not going to be all that bad.
If your friends think that it's not happening, you can point them at the data that these two gather:
They'd disagree with your friends that humans are not involved at all. But your friends could switch to the position that climate change just doesn't matter and it'll all be fine.
I had a look at those two and they are both strongly religious and I guess of the view that god put the resources there for mankind to make use of. Which I guess is a view, although I'm not religious personally.
Aside, but I've come to believe that the insistence of looking for steelmen explanations instead of engaging with reality as it's happening is not a positive trait.
You need to consider if your friends are high decouplers or low decouplers. If they're the latter, then their support for a position like "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change" can't be construed to mean that they actually believe that "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change". Instead, it should be taken to mean that they agree with the implications of a world where "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change".
Solar is fine, but what we need grants for is storage and transmission. There are already areas of the country that we have way too much solar, i.e. southern California. If you have too much generation and not enough storage and transmission you get strange artifacts like the price of power rapidly going from negative to extremely high values. That's not a mark of a healthy, balanced system.
The problem is that getting political support for storage and transmission is much more difficult because everyone knows what a solar panel is. They don't always understand the intricacies of a net-zero electrical system.
US battery storage tax incentives remain intact. Standalone energy storage projects are excluded from the provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill and will continue to qualify for the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC). We'll return to ramp on the low carbon generation after regime change.
I'm very curious if there are any well-informed positive takes on Trumps climate policy.
Personally, I believe even Biden-era efforts were insufficient; but all the common arguments to do less against climate change that I encounter regularly fall into the following 3 categories:
1) Selfishness/Freedom at someone elses cost ("why should I suffer from restrictions just to mitigate negative externalities")
2) Poorly informed skepticism toward solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, frequently involving extremely implausible assumptions about production costs.
3) (Misinformed) dismissal of climate-change consequences ("a few degrees warmer won't hurt too much")
Currently I can't help but think that people will look back on this in a few decades and regard the whole position as obvious idiocy (similarly to the US waging war in Vietnam).
Having looked at Solar for my house in NY, I can only summarize as this:
Solar tax credits are subsides for the well off. The poorest folks can't afford the cash cost of panels and don't have enough taxable income to use the offsets.
The workaround to the high cost has been to lock less diligent people into 30 year power purchase agreements in return for no upfront costs. The lessor takes the subsidies and credits and it just creates another lien on the house.
> Solar tax credits are subsides for the well off.
Sounds like a good thing to me! Subsidizing things that benefit the whole of society are 100% a good thing, even when rich people take advantage of them
A valid point, but to me this sounds like you would want such a program to be a wealth redistribution program at the same time, and I believe trying to do that would just diminish the effectiveness (=> less panels built per spent tax dollar), and is better tackled separately.
Greater adoption pushes prices down so that the less well off can afford. But it’s not so much that the poor need to switch, but rather than there are more households regardless of income who do switch to reduce fossil fuel reliance.
The best positive take I could make for the Trump policy is that the negative consequences of it are somewhat too late.
Solar, wind, and battery, even without the grants, is already quite cheap. You'd have to fine the industries to really slow down deployment at this point.
That means the 7B is mostly saved money with not too much negative impacts.
(I still think it's a bad idea, don't get me wrong, but it's probably not the worst thing in the world).
> Solar, wind, and battery, even without the grants, is already quite cheap. You'd have to fine the industries to really slow down deployment at this point.
Hence the other part of this Evil Sinister Traitor plan, denying & rescinding permits for green energy blanketly:
> The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
I *strongly* disagree with Trump climate policy but I can give it a shot.
Basically, fossil fuels have been a machine for lifting people out of poverty and creating economic growth. If you overlay charts of growth on top of charts of energy use, they're almost one and the same. Now, a bunch of head-in -the-sky liberals come along and decide we can't use these fuels anymore, and instead should use... Windmills? And their reasons are obviously fake. The climate has always changed, and isn't changing so much now, maybe even cooling recently. Their dire predictions keep failing to come true, and all their evidence comes from more liberal SJW University snowflakes.
Worse-- all the stuff they want to deploy comes from communist China, while we have tons of oil and gas right here at home.
My goal was to steelman an argument I disagree with. I'm not convinced -- I think climate change is a huge problem and we should move as fast as possible to try to solve it. But I also strongly dislike my allies on the left who reflexively dismiss any argument they don't immediately agree with as illegitimate. If you can't even attempt to pass the ideological Turing test, you should retain low confidence in your opinions.
I am talking about argument-based-on-reasoning. Yes, I understood you did not believe the crap you were writing.
Rational arguments have nothing to do with marketing labels like left, and any other binary belief traps. The things you mentioned are nothing more than echos of nonsensical political marketing that is deliberately NOT targeting the ratio.
Instead, they aim the underbelly, the non-rational core we all have. It speaks to the peoples need to belong to a group, it speaks to deeply held beliefs, it speaks to identity.
I understand it is incredible hard while drowning in a sea of identity politics, but do not conflate reason with political memes.
In a few decades? Anyone remotely rational or educated is looking at what is happening in the US right now as unbelievable idiocy. Idiocracy was overly rosey, as at least there Camacho understood self-limitations and could defer to others. In the US, a pedophile traitorous imbecile is busy laying out the same policy goals you would find in an online forum full of angry old assholes who never accomplished anything and are a joke, so the best they have is tearing down.
A lot of very smart, capable people gave the US such a comfortable position on this planet that it allows absolute garbage like Trump to float (not going to sugarcoat it for the many Trumpists on here -- the guy is a garbage human being, and encapsulates the absolute worst traits of humanity. His takes on almost everything are impossibly stupid and ill-informed nonsense, but he has captured his party so thoroughly that the clucking chickens all start repeating buffoonery verbatim), and so many in US politics, to ply unbelievably clownery and get away with it for a while. But the collapse is coming much faster than many people realize.
You had me until collapse. What are you picturing exactly? I think humans are really good at muddling through, and life will go on. I think enshittification is a better paradigm to think about the future than apocalypse
Just ignoring the massive devaluation of the dollar underway, the complete loss of the US' geopolitical standing (which China is rapidly taking over), and just the general economic collapse the US is likely to face (though don't worry, Herr Trump is going to fire everyone that doesn't sharpie fake numbers in)...
...the dissolution of the union. Already representatives from one state -- one that is actively destroying democracy to serve the agenda of rapist Trump -- are sheltering in the opposition camp's state, under the protection of its governor.
How long do people think this nonsense is going to continue? How long will better states endure having this human trash lording over them with their grievance and grift (remember that "free for the taxpayer" jet? Actually will cost taxpayers a billion dollars to be transferred to that criminal thief)?
Soon enough tax withholding will happen, there will be a struggle, and the divisions will arise.
I mean the positive take is sustainable change needs to be profitable; unprofitable change always turns into corruption. It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar, while still having much cheaper electricity costs. When you create these government subsidized programs, you hurt low income individuals and risk creating bad government incentives.
Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
> It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar
Texas surpassed California in terms of utility-scale solar because California both uses less electricity and has been so successful with distributed (customer premises) solar between the old incentives (now phased out) and its newer construction mandates that there is basically no energy demand for new utility solar to fill, because solar generation already peaks at above 100% of demand much of time, the utility demand is for storage and/or generation that is not on the same cycle as solar.
Texas has less total solar generation capacity than California, and gets much less of its total electricity from solar.
Best case is that all these companies doing solar stuff are "almost there" in terms of profitability and killing credits will kill some of them but the ones that don't die will find ways to be profitable on their own, which would be a very good thing.
It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons the electricity in Texas may be cheaper is due to not winterizing the grid and the lack of planning for deep freezes. Anyone else remember the black outs?
You do realize how much worse blackouts in CA are, right? TX never even experienced a full grid collapse like CA; CA has planned blackouts based on how dry the forests are, because power companies aren't allowed to trim nearby trees.
I don't mean to get personal but this is a really ill-informed opinion. Texas has to deal with hurricanes and legitimate weather events, CA has invented problems that cause blackouts at the expense of CA taxpayers; meanwhile CA pays 2-3x for the same power. It's really not a good comparison, CA has a famously mismanaged electric grid
87 people died in the 2018 CA outage, and PG&E was eventually charged with 117 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Nobody died due to power outages in Texas during the freeze, and the power companies were not charged with any counts of involuntary manslaughter.
In 2024, there were no deaths due to power outages in CA or in TX.
That said, comparing natural disaster deaths is a stupid way to measure the success or failure of a power grid. Success should be determined by factors like uptime or cost.
Why don't you look up the uptime and cost of the Texas grid vs the CA grid in 2024?
I do think solar companies have hired door to door marketing teams that use straight up manipulative tactics. I don't want to hold that against the whole industry, and even sales reps for many solar companies hold themselves to a much higher ethical standard.
But some states have had to push regulations because door to door marketing teams have misrepresented who they are, used pressure, and tried their best to imply without saying that a "switch" to renewable energy was non-optional or was like some technical correction with a billing problem.
Around here the door to door sales are always a pair of college age floozies with pairs seemingly selected to cover fluency in multiple languages. Based on the quality of sales tactics I assume it's some sort of BS pyramid scheme because nobody who would make money by having them succeed would ever send them out so un-prepared. I kinda feel bad for them.
I have researched several companies which knocked on my doors. All of them have accusations online of scammy behavior and not really passing the benefit of the grant.
I was told I would get "FREE SOLAR".
At least in the midwest, when I hear solar, I hear scam. I would much rather purchase equipment myself and do the install myself.
This matches my experience in the midwest as well. “Let me see your bill real fast”, “you pay nothing up front”, “you can get 4% extra value at resale”
All of it is a scam. I head these people off early if I see them walking around my neighborhood.
That's sad. When I had a company come by in California, they did the math on my house and bill and said "actually in your case this would never pay off, sorry" and moved on.
Although this was probably 10 years ago, so maybe it's changed now.
If you're knowledgeable enough to know how to do the installing, you'll save the money that way too. I feel like it's the community solar that's probably the worst offenders, they build it, you effectively rent the generation capacity, but ideally the cost of the electricity you get back is more valuable than what it cost you to pay your rent.
I still think everyone should believe in it as a value proposition, and as as a way to balance risk from grid instability, but I would like better information about who is reliable and who the bad actors are.
But the US government is not replacing the grants with grants to anyone else. Instead of the EPA giving out 7B in grants to their friends, each company will now have to fairly compete in the free market.
Bribes here are likely donation based to PACs and they would be by fossil fuel interests who want to see the share of energy production from renewables slow or decline to maintain their own business. This is frankly akin to subsidizing cigarette smoking, a habit that fouls the air and kills people, but on a global scale. Sigh.
This particular bribe was reported on over a year ago, when Trump was raising money from oil execs for his campaign. It seems likely that the overall push against clean energy (pushing for dispatchable generation, canceling tax credits for green energy projects) is related.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
Rivian execs gave money to the Biden/Harris campaign and their causes, and they gave Rivian a ~6.6 billion dollar taxpayer subsidized loan. The idea an executive might have personal political opinions is not enough to claim it's corruption.
It feels like your argument is they will have to compete in the free market instead of just being given free money, which isn't corruption. Corruption would be giving companies 7B in grants through the EPA or 6.6B dollar loans through the DOE. Letting people plan on a fair playing field isn't corruption
This is a simplistic understanding. Competing industries: solar, oil & natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydro etc.
Cancel tax rebates, subsidies, grants, etc. for one of your competing industries and your own benefits because your costs and supply is relative to the others. Your own price is never evaluated in a vacuum where those other energy options are not relevant.
But you would definitely bribe so your competitors don't get money and your services are required for longer. Existing coal and various other fossil fuel power generating and supply chain companies would be very happy to have less competition from solar.
See Boeing managing to get the KC-45 tanker contract awarded to Airbus cancelled (for a plane that mostly existed and needed some US specific updates), to get a new one they won, that not only have they still not managed to deliver on, but they're also losing money.
I don’t know if I buy that this is a conspiracy with bribes but killing the grants reduces the rate of growth of energy generation which reduces its future supply.
Adding energy capacity reduces the prices at which firms can sell energy since there would be more supply. Removing the grants means that existing energy generation firms need to worry less about how increased supply would harm their prices.
Or the fact that Microsoft believes they have cracked *fusion* power. Sun in a bottle.
Microsoft is breaking ground in WA state building a new fusion reactor.
https://kpq.com/helion-fusion-plant-chelan-pud/
EDIT: Adding description to video link
Video from Real Engineering showing Helion's Pulsed Compression Fusion reactor prototype (2022). The same kind of reactor Helion is building in WA state for Microsoft.
I'm disappointed with both parties in regards to Solar, especially considering the sheer importance for the future.
The problem I had with the Biden subsidies (as far as I'm aware) was that it didn't really foster hyper competition in the solar manufacturing industry.
Furthermore, the best solution here is to create giant solar farms in the American SouthWest, then funnel energy across the country, is it not? Energy loss is minor, even along thousands of KM in distance.
My dream here is Trump comes out with some new subsidies, focusing on manufacturing, which would drive the price down substantially and hopefully negate the need for consumer subsidies.
We need the new tech-right guys in his admin to speak up on this!
> My dream here is Trump comes out with some new subsidies, focusing on manufacturing, which would drive the price down substantially and hopefully negate the need for consumer subsidies.
Locally manufactured panels will never be substantially cheaper than imported panels + tariffs. It does not make sense economically to be substantially cheaper.
Once again cutting off their nose to spite their face. And showing their complete ignorance of economics. Or possibly just their personal indebtedness to the oil and gas industries for supporting their election. The long term costs of climate change are going to dwarf any outlays for renewable energy adoption.
OR, fusion. Microsoft is putting their bets on a sun in a bottle. If it works Solar and wind is dead. Maybe the administration doesn't want to back a losing horse.
> OR, fusion. Microsoft is putting their bets on a sun in a bottle. If it works Solar and wind is dead.
I find this laughable. It is truly mental somersaults attempting to justify an insane policy.
On one hand we have an extremely complicated machine that does not exist yet with an unknown pathway to create electricity. With steam being too expensive.
On the other hand we outsource the complicated machine to the sun and passively collect the results with solar and wind power.
Good enough tends to beat imaginary perfect solutions.
You're giving the administration far too much credit. The policies are decided on alignment with culture war tribalism, or in some cases outright personal grift. Science and technology, or even sensible economics don't enter into it.
No. Renewables are the best policy. They have become aligned with liberals because conservatives decided to make energy policy a wedge issue instead of being rational.
Conservatives could just as easily call intermittent renewables the irrational wedge issue created by liberals. I think you need to actually make a non-symmetric argument about how it supposedly lowers energy prices. All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not. Thats pretty strong evidence that the all-in cost of wind and solar is high
> All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not.
You’re quite far out of your depth here.
The science has concluded that renewables decrease electricity costs. But comparing regions the ones that went straight into renewables were the ones with nearly 100% fossil fuel usage which were desperate for alternatives.
They started with expensive electricity and fossil fuels still often are the marginal producer in their systems.
And don’t get me started on investing in nuclear power taking 20 years to build and delivering $170-250/MWh electricity today. That is pure lunacy to propose.
Solar and wind are not "renewable" in the same way plastic recycling "works". The total LiveCycle of wind and solar arguably cause more pollution from the materials used. you can't recycle wind and solar when they are done. The generator itself is the waste produced from the process.
Not only that Solar changes the local climate because they absorbed and radiate heat as well as taking vast amounts of land that is stripped of life. Wind drives whales insane on the coast and kills massive amounts of birds.
If we can crack fusion then the only fuels used are helium and such. Much cleaner and they work at night and whin the air is still.
The environmental impacts of wind and solar are nonzero but absolutely miniscule compared to fossil fuel extraction. Base load is a concern but not unsolvable especially as scaling batteries becomes easier. Most importantly, solar + battery is already deployed at scale and is now the cheapest to install and operate in the real world. We are also close to being able to scale geothermal as renewable base load.
Fusion is great but it's still years away at least from a single viable commercial reactor. We need solutions to be deployed ten years ago. Waiting for Godot isn't an option.
This is just blatantly stupid in the crudest sense. You want to showcase yourself as a friend of big industrial interests, oil and whatever else, fine. Want to spit in the face of "progressive" energy rhetoric? okay, sure, whatever. But why try to ruin a genuinely useful, powerfully developing technology for such crude motivations? Of course, because you're Trump (or a Trump appointee) and need to showcase your reactionary ass to the world of your perceived enemies even when it's completely counterproductive to do so.
I dont think there is a conspiracy by oil and gas companies to sabotage solar and wind. I think solar and wind are just not as easy and cheap to build a reliable grid because of transmission and storage costs which advocates always underestimate.
Sentiment doesn't get anything done. Cash and political influence does. There are literally thousands of causes with "grass roots" support. How many translate into policy?
Unfortunately that's what a lot of the people that voted for him want. Either accelerationists of their own variety, or the many many evangelicals banking on apocalypse on earth.
> Michelle Moore, the chief executive of Groundswell, a nonprofit group that received a Solar for All grant, said revoking the award would undermine the Trump administration’s efforts to address soaring electricity demand fueled by artificial intelligence data centers.
Solar is so expensive and cost-inefficient per-household. Data centers need their own large, uninterrupted power supplies.
Wrong, solar is cheap and probably the cheapest energy source a household can get if they have a sunny roof. Source - I have solar, have done the math.
It's not ideal for everyone's situation but it's damn cheap. One of my neighbors has solar panels, no battery or storage of any kind, we don't have net metering here, and their electric bill is single digits.
Having solar myself, I completely agree with you that solar is - comparatively - cheap. But because it is cheap, the argument goes that you don't really need to subsidy it.
There are many reasons for subsidies and it is a complex field. I was not discussing subsidies I was replying to a flat out false statement that solar is very expensive.
When discussing solar subsidies one should keep several things in mind:
- Federal solar subsidies are expiring at the end of this year thanks to Trumps tax law with a name so ridiculous I shall not repeat it.
- This news item is talking about money that has already been granted. This is especially screwed up because these are situation where the government has already promised to pay and people have been making investments and putting in work in expectation of payment.
- Solar is actually much less subsidized than nuclear. In many cases solar subsidies will help the taxpayer avoid costs as they avoid much more expensive nuclear subsidies.
Not only that, the demand from AI Data Centers is going to push up the price of electricity tremendously. Add in demand from electric vehicles too and there could be shortages as well. Who knows, but one thing is certain: demand for electricity is going to skyrocket.
Having an alternative source for your house is a wise idea.
Don't worry the utilities will still make sure you pay their fees. Watch the markets move from paying per kwh or demand charges to just straight up fees. Its disheartening.
Wouldn’t it just make more sense to use nuclear and keep the grid reliable so individual homeowners don’t need to worry about huge blackouts ruining their quality of life?
Nuclear is very expensive to build. It takes a long time to build. Also, it takes quite a bit of time to power up and power down a nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants use a lot of water. Water that could be used to cool the AI hardware.
As a result nuclear power isn't cheap.
Then there is still the safety issues and environmental concerns regarding the waste. Some people say they are safe now and you can just bury the waste deep underground. Putting it deep underground seems a bit like just pumping the carbon into the air: someone else's problem further down the line in time.
Do you want to live next to a Nuclear Power Plant?
I live in Minnesota, we get about 34% less sun than most of the southern states like Arizona or Florida.
Arizona - 3,800 hours of sunlight hours per year
Minnesota - 2,500 hours of sunlight hours per year
Ergo, I can't generate as much energy as someone who lives in a state that gets significantly more sunlight.
I would also add that setup and installation of even a small solar array has an ROI of around 10 years because I can't generate as much energy, therefore it takes longer for me to break even.
Right now in Minnesota:
The average cost of installing a 5 kW solar panel system in Minnesota is approximately $14,900 before applying the 30% federal tax credit, which can significantly reduce the overall expense. After incentives, the out-of-pocket cost can be around $13,860
Sorry, I'm not going to lay out 15K and then have to wait ten years before I break even. If you want to know why people aren't adopting solar, this is the reason. Its cost prohibitive for many, many people.
Does it make sense for people in those Southern states? 100%. For everybody else? Not so much.
You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments. And in many cases, the energy savings exceed the finance payments, resulting in a net monthly gain from a cash flow basis with no upfront payment.
Every single year I talk to companies and the cost has gone down, barely. I've been told every year for the last 20 years that technology is getting so much better. The panels are so much more efficient, cost less, the state and federal govt have tax breaks, blah blah, blah. The Chinese have found a way to produce them this way and that way, "Oh you just wait, its really going to be affordable in the next few years!"
No, its still not affordable. If it were, like OP said you would see them on every house in your neighborhood.
I've wanted to put solar on my house for very long time and every year its the same thing. "Finance a $15,000 loan and in ten years you'll have free electricity!!"
I would say anybody who's rational, informed and interested looking at that would 100% of the time its not worth it.
>> You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments.
Yeah and then you pay interest on the loan. Which then makes it EVEN MORE expensive AND lengthens your ROI just to break even.
FYI you're not "saving" anything until A) Your loan is paid off and B) Your array is generating enough energy to compensate for your existing energy use.
Your numbers just don't add up:
$15,000 for a 5Kw array.
$15,000 loan with a VERY generous 5% interest rate on an also very generous 6 year term.
Interest paid over six years: $4,500
Total paid after six years: $19,500
Monthly payments would be around $240.00
The average monthly cost of electricity for Minneapolis is about $190.00 which is about 1,097kWh
The monthly average your 5kWh array can generate in a month (assuming optimal conditions) is around 700kWh. Leaving you with a deficit of 397kWh you still need to pay for.
So no, I'm not seeing how the cost savings will exceed your finance payments. It will eventually pay for itself once you get outside of that ROI period. And then what? You get 15 years of free electricity which amounts to:
$190.00 * 12 = $2,280
$2,280 * 15 = $34,200
So then, over 25 years, your net gain is about: $14,000? Which is about $560/year?
If so, please ask your representatives to copy Germany's "Balkonkraftwerk" rules.
We've got one, cost €350 including delivery and a balcony railing mounting kit, could've been €250 if we'd collected and not had the stands. Whole thing is trivial DIY, no skill or training needed: you literally just assemble the kit and plug it into a power socket, register it online as a small power station, and you're done.
Sure, the legal limit of 800 W output sure isn't a huge supply, but at that cost it's also a no-brainer — at €350, it will pay for itself in 1y8m.
With the notable difference that lawn flamingos are not necessary because of the terrible energy policies of the government, whilst balkonkartoffel are.
In other words you have lawn flamingos because you have bad taste not because the government impoverished you.
"Eyesore" is in your own opinion. What I've seen on balconies around here, anything covering them is a 50% chance of being an improvement — and unlike some acquaintances, I've not encountered balkon-FKK. And IMO they're a big improvement over, e.g. the AC units on the skyscraper walls of Manhatten.
I have balkonkraftwerk because they're a 60% return on investment, per year for 35 years, tax free and self-adjusting for inflation. By far the best (reliable) investment one can make.
That €350 is currently economically worth €7350 over their lifetime in reduced energy bills, tax free. The economics are so strong that it would be worth doing even if energy was 1/3rd the current price.
I had it priced out by 5 different vendors. Only one of those 5 was in any way truthful about the reality for my particular home: "you will likely only get 15% of what others with panels might due to the shape of your roof and tree cover now and especially in 10 years." That said, WITH grid-kickbacks (all of which are not at all guaranteed), according to 4 of them, I would be looking at a net zero cost in 30-36 years.
I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
I was looking primarily for cost reduction and a very small percentage of saving the environment or whatever you want to call it. But; depending on your locale, home structure, etc, solar may not at all be that. If you're leaning more on the side of energy independence and eco-friendliness, maybe it's a better fit for you.
> I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
If I was buying a house with a solar array on the roof I would consider it to be a liability that is going to add to the TCO of the home and ask for a discount to cover the future costs of removal. The labor to remove and replace the solar array when reroofing is never going to be paid for by the solar array, it’s just an added expense to the TCO of a home.
There are plenty of people who are not aware of the added costs of a roof mounted solar array, I just happen to be aware since I sell and run electrical work for a living.
> A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
Why do you need two electricians for a week? My rooftop solar array went up in an afternoon. They had three labourers. The (singular) electrician came in separately and worked for under and hour.
the cost to remove isn't 2 electricians for a week, it's 2 people with arms for a day. This is like saying that you would consider light fixtures a considerable TCO increase because whenever the lightbulb goes out, you'll need to pay an electrician for a day of work to change it.
The study from Compare the Market finds the average residential solar installation cost in the US is $A4/W, while Canada’s national average was $A3.65/W. By contrast, Australia’s national average was $A0.89/W, more than $A2/W cheaper.
The cheapest offers for a PV system with 10 kW of power without storage are just over €1 per watt, the most expensive are around €2 euros per watt.
All these countries have access to the same solar panels. The national minimum wage is lower in America than in the other countries. So why do American rooftop systems cost so much more? Mostly because of high "soft costs" in America:
Soft costs are the non-hardware costs associated with going solar. These costs include permitting, financing, and installing solar, as well as the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, and cover their bottom line. These soft costs become a portion of the overall price a customer pays for a solar energy system. While solar hardware costs have fallen in recent years, soft costs represent a growing share of total solar system costs.
First of all your post is off topic. Second of all, the reason why solar panel installations in both Australia and Germany are cheaper than the US is solar panel tariffs. Neither Australia nor the EU has solar panel tariffs. The US does. The cheapest solar panels come from China, where there is significant overproduction of panels. If you do not have tariffs you get a lot of cheap Chinese panels.
He said “cost inefficient” which i would interpret as meaning “expensive”. I think it’s pretty plausible that a single nat gas or coal plant would be a cheaper way of generating a fixed amount of electricity than solar + enough batteries to last several days of cloudy weather. All the sources ive seen only include a few hours of battery storage to go along with their solar which keeps the cost down but also means frequent outages which data centers really dont want
The Interior Department is almost making it impossible to build renewables.
> The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/interior-department-wind-solar-l...
Yeah, like, there's zero chance a solar plant is going to be as power dense as a natural gas plant.
America has been taken over by traitors trying to destroy this nation.
Not to worry, there is a whole lot of farm land that is going to free up soon for renewables as farmers go bankrupt from suboptimal agriculture trade policy.
https://www.uaex.uada.edu/media-resources/news/2025/july/07-...
https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2025/07/farm-bankruptcie...
(soybean exports to China from the US are already down 96% this year; also, while most federal lands are west of the midwest great plains, there should be sufficient non federal land to meet the energy needs of West Coast load centers: https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/pad-us-14-map-federal-land...)
This is the same sort of nonsense they pulled on abortion providers. Just bury people in pointless regulation to keep them from operating, like requiring abortion clinics to have hallways at least 12ft wide
> unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant
That's amazing! America is famously known for lacking land.
If it weren't for tariffs on foreign panels, I wonder how cheap solar would be. Solar's gotten cheap very quickly; we might be at the point that it's viable on its own.
There are good US producers, I have 9kW of Silfab[1] panels on my roof, made in Washington state.
1: https://silfabsolar.com/
https://archive.is/BYFSO
Can someone in this thread please give me a good steelman that humans don't have a significant affect on climate change? This seems to be a growing sentiment among friends who I regard as intelligent, but goes against what I've believed to be the scientific consensus for years. I'm willing to admit I've been misled or wrong.
Of course humans have a significant effect on climate change - the steelman versions of why that doesn’t matter are: 1) It doesn’t matter because we will figure out some technological solution in the future. Or 2) it doesn’t matter since I personally will be ok (because I am rich and/or live in a rich country that can afford to pay the costs)
I'm of the view climate change is real but not as big a deal as some people make out. A couple of reasons:
- Solar power has been growing exponentially for years and will continue for a while allowing carbon usage to be phased out and maybe carbon capture done.
- The climate has changed naturally more than most people realise and life goes on. The sea is forecast to rise 60cm or so over this century but has risen ~120m over the last 20k years which was hardly noticed. (graph from wikipedia https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Post-Gla...)
On point 2 - notice how flat your graph is for the last 6k years?
Also, why do you think the impact of past changes on a tiny group of humans living as hunter gatherers is of any relevance to 8 billion people living in the modern world (including, for example, in massive coastal cities?)
If hunter gathers could deal with change maybe modern people with all our tech can too?
(1) feels like a red herring when powers that be are fighting tooth and nail against solutions we have today
I can point you to two legitimate climate scientists who in some sense deny climate change. They work on the satellite temperature record, which very clearly shows the increasing temperature:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Christy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(meteorologist)
Spencer's view is that there is a natural climate change going on that just happens to coincide exactly with increasing greenhouse gases. Christy believes that climate change is real and partly anthropogenic but that it's just not going to be all that bad.
If your friends think that it's not happening, you can point them at the data that these two gather:
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/climate/
They'd disagree with your friends that humans are not involved at all. But your friends could switch to the position that climate change just doesn't matter and it'll all be fine.
I had a look at those two and they are both strongly religious and I guess of the view that god put the resources there for mankind to make use of. Which I guess is a view, although I'm not religious personally.
I encourage people to read both of those Wikipedia biographies, not just the one who also doesn't believe in evolution.
Aside, but I've come to believe that the insistence of looking for steelmen explanations instead of engaging with reality as it's happening is not a positive trait.
I'd be curious about your friends' Youtube viewing habits.
You need to consider if your friends are high decouplers or low decouplers. If they're the latter, then their support for a position like "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change" can't be construed to mean that they actually believe that "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change". Instead, it should be taken to mean that they agree with the implications of a world where "humans don't have a significant affect on climate change".
Solar is fine, but what we need grants for is storage and transmission. There are already areas of the country that we have way too much solar, i.e. southern California. If you have too much generation and not enough storage and transmission you get strange artifacts like the price of power rapidly going from negative to extremely high values. That's not a mark of a healthy, balanced system.
The problem is that getting political support for storage and transmission is much more difficult because everyone knows what a solar panel is. They don't always understand the intricacies of a net-zero electrical system.
US battery storage tax incentives remain intact. Standalone energy storage projects are excluded from the provisions of the One Big Beautiful Bill and will continue to qualify for the federal Investment Tax Credit (ITC). We'll return to ramp on the low carbon generation after regime change.
https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64705
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586
I'm very curious if there are any well-informed positive takes on Trumps climate policy.
Personally, I believe even Biden-era efforts were insufficient; but all the common arguments to do less against climate change that I encounter regularly fall into the following 3 categories:
1) Selfishness/Freedom at someone elses cost ("why should I suffer from restrictions just to mitigate negative externalities")
2) Poorly informed skepticism toward solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, frequently involving extremely implausible assumptions about production costs.
3) (Misinformed) dismissal of climate-change consequences ("a few degrees warmer won't hurt too much")
Currently I can't help but think that people will look back on this in a few decades and regard the whole position as obvious idiocy (similarly to the US waging war in Vietnam).
Having looked at Solar for my house in NY, I can only summarize as this:
Solar tax credits are subsides for the well off. The poorest folks can't afford the cash cost of panels and don't have enough taxable income to use the offsets.
The workaround to the high cost has been to lock less diligent people into 30 year power purchase agreements in return for no upfront costs. The lessor takes the subsidies and credits and it just creates another lien on the house.
> Solar tax credits are subsides for the well off.
Sounds like a good thing to me! Subsidizing things that benefit the whole of society are 100% a good thing, even when rich people take advantage of them
A valid point, but to me this sounds like you would want such a program to be a wealth redistribution program at the same time, and I believe trying to do that would just diminish the effectiveness (=> less panels built per spent tax dollar), and is better tackled separately.
Greater adoption pushes prices down so that the less well off can afford. But it’s not so much that the poor need to switch, but rather than there are more households regardless of income who do switch to reduce fossil fuel reliance.
The best positive take I could make for the Trump policy is that the negative consequences of it are somewhat too late.
Solar, wind, and battery, even without the grants, is already quite cheap. You'd have to fine the industries to really slow down deployment at this point.
That means the 7B is mostly saved money with not too much negative impacts.
(I still think it's a bad idea, don't get me wrong, but it's probably not the worst thing in the world).
> Solar, wind, and battery, even without the grants, is already quite cheap. You'd have to fine the industries to really slow down deployment at this point.
Hence the other part of this Evil Sinister Traitor plan, denying & rescinding permits for green energy blanketly:
> The Interior Department released a new secretarial order Friday saying it may no longer issue any permits to a solar or wind project on federal lands unless the agency believes it will generate as much energy per acre as a coal, gas, or nuclear power plant.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/interior-department-wind-solar-l...
Renewables aren't dense power! But America has land, and if we switch to renewables, maybe maybe the oceans won't rise & we won't lose a ton of land.
God these people are literally the worst Captain Planet supervillain shitheels. Literally the worst hive of scum and villainy.
I think they will find a way to fine or otherwise penalize wind and solar. Just give it some time, it hasn't been even a year yet.
Here you go https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/president-trump...
I *strongly* disagree with Trump climate policy but I can give it a shot.
Basically, fossil fuels have been a machine for lifting people out of poverty and creating economic growth. If you overlay charts of growth on top of charts of energy use, they're almost one and the same. Now, a bunch of head-in -the-sky liberals come along and decide we can't use these fuels anymore, and instead should use... Windmills? And their reasons are obviously fake. The climate has always changed, and isn't changing so much now, maybe even cooling recently. Their dire predictions keep failing to come true, and all their evidence comes from more liberal SJW University snowflakes.
Worse-- all the stuff they want to deploy comes from communist China, while we have tons of oil and gas right here at home.
These are belly sounds, they don't form an argument.
My goal was to steelman an argument I disagree with. I'm not convinced -- I think climate change is a huge problem and we should move as fast as possible to try to solve it. But I also strongly dislike my allies on the left who reflexively dismiss any argument they don't immediately agree with as illegitimate. If you can't even attempt to pass the ideological Turing test, you should retain low confidence in your opinions.
I am talking about argument-based-on-reasoning. Yes, I understood you did not believe the crap you were writing.
Rational arguments have nothing to do with marketing labels like left, and any other binary belief traps. The things you mentioned are nothing more than echos of nonsensical political marketing that is deliberately NOT targeting the ratio. Instead, they aim the underbelly, the non-rational core we all have. It speaks to the peoples need to belong to a group, it speaks to deeply held beliefs, it speaks to identity.
I understand it is incredible hard while drowning in a sea of identity politics, but do not conflate reason with political memes.
In a few decades? Anyone remotely rational or educated is looking at what is happening in the US right now as unbelievable idiocy. Idiocracy was overly rosey, as at least there Camacho understood self-limitations and could defer to others. In the US, a pedophile traitorous imbecile is busy laying out the same policy goals you would find in an online forum full of angry old assholes who never accomplished anything and are a joke, so the best they have is tearing down.
A lot of very smart, capable people gave the US such a comfortable position on this planet that it allows absolute garbage like Trump to float (not going to sugarcoat it for the many Trumpists on here -- the guy is a garbage human being, and encapsulates the absolute worst traits of humanity. His takes on almost everything are impossibly stupid and ill-informed nonsense, but he has captured his party so thoroughly that the clucking chickens all start repeating buffoonery verbatim), and so many in US politics, to ply unbelievably clownery and get away with it for a while. But the collapse is coming much faster than many people realize.
You had me until collapse. What are you picturing exactly? I think humans are really good at muddling through, and life will go on. I think enshittification is a better paradigm to think about the future than apocalypse
Just ignoring the massive devaluation of the dollar underway, the complete loss of the US' geopolitical standing (which China is rapidly taking over), and just the general economic collapse the US is likely to face (though don't worry, Herr Trump is going to fire everyone that doesn't sharpie fake numbers in)...
...the dissolution of the union. Already representatives from one state -- one that is actively destroying democracy to serve the agenda of rapist Trump -- are sheltering in the opposition camp's state, under the protection of its governor.
How long do people think this nonsense is going to continue? How long will better states endure having this human trash lording over them with their grievance and grift (remember that "free for the taxpayer" jet? Actually will cost taxpayers a billion dollars to be transferred to that criminal thief)?
Soon enough tax withholding will happen, there will be a struggle, and the divisions will arise.
[dead]
[dead]
I mean the positive take is sustainable change needs to be profitable; unprofitable change always turns into corruption. It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar, while still having much cheaper electricity costs. When you create these government subsidized programs, you hurt low income individuals and risk creating bad government incentives.
Even when programs are helpful initially, long-term they're unlikely to be repealed and are likely to overstay their use, eventually harming the climate.
> It's why Texas surpassed CA in terms of utility solar
Texas surpassed California in terms of utility-scale solar because California both uses less electricity and has been so successful with distributed (customer premises) solar between the old incentives (now phased out) and its newer construction mandates that there is basically no energy demand for new utility solar to fill, because solar generation already peaks at above 100% of demand much of time, the utility demand is for storage and/or generation that is not on the same cycle as solar.
Texas has less total solar generation capacity than California, and gets much less of its total electricity from solar.
Best case is that all these companies doing solar stuff are "almost there" in terms of profitability and killing credits will kill some of them but the ones that don't die will find ways to be profitable on their own, which would be a very good thing.
It’s worth remembering that one of the reasons the electricity in Texas may be cheaper is due to not winterizing the grid and the lack of planning for deep freezes. Anyone else remember the black outs?
You do realize how much worse blackouts in CA are, right? TX never even experienced a full grid collapse like CA; CA has planned blackouts based on how dry the forests are, because power companies aren't allowed to trim nearby trees.
I don't mean to get personal but this is a really ill-informed opinion. Texas has to deal with hurricanes and legitimate weather events, CA has invented problems that cause blackouts at the expense of CA taxpayers; meanwhile CA pays 2-3x for the same power. It's really not a good comparison, CA has a famously mismanaged electric grid
Luckily I don't have to deal with too much American fun. So take my opinion as you will.
How many people died in the last major California outage? Didn't Texas have people freezing to death? I know what I'd rather deal with.
87 people died in the 2018 CA outage, and PG&E was eventually charged with 117 counts of involuntary manslaughter. Nobody died due to power outages in Texas during the freeze, and the power companies were not charged with any counts of involuntary manslaughter.
In 2024, there were no deaths due to power outages in CA or in TX.
That said, comparing natural disaster deaths is a stupid way to measure the success or failure of a power grid. Success should be determined by factors like uptime or cost.
Why don't you look up the uptime and cost of the Texas grid vs the CA grid in 2024?
> When you create these government subsidized programs, you hurt low income individuals
how?
The only good thing about this, is that I won't have these annoying solar companies knocking on my door.
Not that this news is great. We should promote green energy.
I will just get the panels and do it myself.
If you are Serious about DIY solar I made a whole site about how I did mine with a calculator and graphs, etc.
https://www.pvh2o.com/
I am serious! Nice resource.
This is excellent! Thanks!
I do think solar companies have hired door to door marketing teams that use straight up manipulative tactics. I don't want to hold that against the whole industry, and even sales reps for many solar companies hold themselves to a much higher ethical standard.
But some states have had to push regulations because door to door marketing teams have misrepresented who they are, used pressure, and tried their best to imply without saying that a "switch" to renewable energy was non-optional or was like some technical correction with a billing problem.
Around here the door to door sales are always a pair of college age floozies with pairs seemingly selected to cover fluency in multiple languages. Based on the quality of sales tactics I assume it's some sort of BS pyramid scheme because nobody who would make money by having them succeed would ever send them out so un-prepared. I kinda feel bad for them.
I have researched several companies which knocked on my doors. All of them have accusations online of scammy behavior and not really passing the benefit of the grant.
I was told I would get "FREE SOLAR".
At least in the midwest, when I hear solar, I hear scam. I would much rather purchase equipment myself and do the install myself.
This matches my experience in the midwest as well. “Let me see your bill real fast”, “you pay nothing up front”, “you can get 4% extra value at resale”
All of it is a scam. I head these people off early if I see them walking around my neighborhood.
That's sad. When I had a company come by in California, they did the math on my house and bill and said "actually in your case this would never pay off, sorry" and moved on.
Although this was probably 10 years ago, so maybe it's changed now.
If you're knowledgeable enough to know how to do the installing, you'll save the money that way too. I feel like it's the community solar that's probably the worst offenders, they build it, you effectively rent the generation capacity, but ideally the cost of the electricity you get back is more valuable than what it cost you to pay your rent.
I still think everyone should believe in it as a value proposition, and as as a way to balance risk from grid instability, but I would like better information about who is reliable and who the bad actors are.
Oh I they’re still going to be knocking. Their sales pitch here has already shifted.
Policy based on revenge, stupidity and probably bribes.
Lobbying vs bribes can be a distinction without a difference, but it usually needs to be included with bribes on any such list.
Why would canceling contracts require bribes? Bribes are something you do to get government contracts. I wouldn't bribe you to not give me money
If there's fewer money to invest in solar, that means traditional (read: fossil) fuels get used more.
I can bribe you to cancel a contract so you can enter a contract with me
But the US government is not replacing the grants with grants to anyone else. Instead of the EPA giving out 7B in grants to their friends, each company will now have to fairly compete in the free market.
Fair market competition =/= corruption
Bribes here are likely donation based to PACs and they would be by fossil fuel interests who want to see the share of energy production from renewables slow or decline to maintain their own business. This is frankly akin to subsidizing cigarette smoking, a habit that fouls the air and kills people, but on a global scale. Sigh.
This particular bribe was reported on over a year ago, when Trump was raising money from oil execs for his campaign. It seems likely that the overall push against clean energy (pushing for dispatchable generation, canceling tax credits for green energy projects) is related. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/09/trump-asks-oil-exec...
Rivian execs gave money to the Biden/Harris campaign and their causes, and they gave Rivian a ~6.6 billion dollar taxpayer subsidized loan. The idea an executive might have personal political opinions is not enough to claim it's corruption.
It feels like your argument is they will have to compete in the free market instead of just being given free money, which isn't corruption. Corruption would be giving companies 7B in grants through the EPA or 6.6B dollar loans through the DOE. Letting people plan on a fair playing field isn't corruption
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biden-throws-struggling-ri...
This is a simplistic understanding. Competing industries: solar, oil & natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydro etc.
Cancel tax rebates, subsidies, grants, etc. for one of your competing industries and your own benefits because your costs and supply is relative to the others. Your own price is never evaluated in a vacuum where those other energy options are not relevant.
Do you seriously think "drill, baby, drill" is a policy based on careful study of the data on the impact on people's lives now and in the future?
> I wouldn't bribe you to not give me money
But you would definitely bribe so your competitors don't get money and your services are required for longer. Existing coal and various other fossil fuel power generating and supply chain companies would be very happy to have less competition from solar.
See Boeing managing to get the KC-45 tanker contract awarded to Airbus cancelled (for a plane that mostly existed and needed some US specific updates), to get a new one they won, that not only have they still not managed to deliver on, but they're also losing money.
I don’t know if I buy that this is a conspiracy with bribes but killing the grants reduces the rate of growth of energy generation which reduces its future supply.
Adding energy capacity reduces the prices at which firms can sell energy since there would be more supply. Removing the grants means that existing energy generation firms need to worry less about how increased supply would harm their prices.
Bribes by those who would benefit from the contract being cancelled (oil, gas). Probably not actual bribes but “favors”, PAC support and the like.
Oil companies desperately trying to burning fuels relevant
Or the fact that Microsoft believes they have cracked *fusion* power. Sun in a bottle.
Microsoft is breaking ground in WA state building a new fusion reactor.
EDIT: Adding description to video linkVideo from Real Engineering showing Helion's Pulsed Compression Fusion reactor prototype (2022). The same kind of reactor Helion is building in WA state for Microsoft.
Boy, people don't seem to like the idea of fusion...
Always downvoting YouTube links unless they come with extremely clear context ("This is a talk I gave at conference X", etc.)
That's fair, I forget there is no auto preview here... I'll add the description
It's time to build!
Trump is a gift to our adversaries. They could not have created a better path to overtaking the USA in science, tech, healthcare and defense.
Sure makes one wonder if he is legitimately this stupid or if he has been legitimately compromised.
I don’t wonder about either. He is one of the stupidest — if not the stupidest — individual to occupy the White House.
Why not both?
I'm disappointed with both parties in regards to Solar, especially considering the sheer importance for the future.
The problem I had with the Biden subsidies (as far as I'm aware) was that it didn't really foster hyper competition in the solar manufacturing industry.
Furthermore, the best solution here is to create giant solar farms in the American SouthWest, then funnel energy across the country, is it not? Energy loss is minor, even along thousands of KM in distance.
My dream here is Trump comes out with some new subsidies, focusing on manufacturing, which would drive the price down substantially and hopefully negate the need for consumer subsidies.
We need the new tech-right guys in his admin to speak up on this!
> My dream here is Trump comes out with some new subsidies, focusing on manufacturing, which would drive the price down substantially and hopefully negate the need for consumer subsidies.
Locally manufactured panels will never be substantially cheaper than imported panels + tariffs. It does not make sense economically to be substantially cheaper.
Don't worry about Solar or wind... Fusion might be right around the corner.
Microsoft backed Fusion (Yes FUSION) power plant.
https://kpq.com/helion-fusion-plant-chelan-pud/
Just 5 more years!
More like 3, quote from Helion about the ne plant being built right now.
Also, wind and solar are not the end, only a stop gap.Once again cutting off their nose to spite their face. And showing their complete ignorance of economics. Or possibly just their personal indebtedness to the oil and gas industries for supporting their election. The long term costs of climate change are going to dwarf any outlays for renewable energy adoption.
OR, fusion. Microsoft is putting their bets on a sun in a bottle. If it works Solar and wind is dead. Maybe the administration doesn't want to back a losing horse.
https://kpq.com/helion-fusion-plant-chelan-pud/
A fusion plant is not going be around until about 50 years from now at the earliest outset and thats optimistic.
> OR, fusion. Microsoft is putting their bets on a sun in a bottle. If it works Solar and wind is dead.
I find this laughable. It is truly mental somersaults attempting to justify an insane policy.
On one hand we have an extremely complicated machine that does not exist yet with an unknown pathway to create electricity. With steam being too expensive.
On the other hand we outsource the complicated machine to the sun and passively collect the results with solar and wind power.
Good enough tends to beat imaginary perfect solutions.
You're giving the administration far too much credit. The policies are decided on alignment with culture war tribalism, or in some cases outright personal grift. Science and technology, or even sensible economics don't enter into it.
>The policies are decided on alignment with culture war tribalism
Couldn’t the same be said for policies that subsidize solar and wind?
No. Renewables are the best policy. They have become aligned with liberals because conservatives decided to make energy policy a wedge issue instead of being rational.
Conservatives could just as easily call intermittent renewables the irrational wedge issue created by liberals. I think you need to actually make a non-symmetric argument about how it supposedly lowers energy prices. All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not. Thats pretty strong evidence that the all-in cost of wind and solar is high
> All the places that have invested in wind and solar have seen electricity prices go up and all the places that stuck with fossil hydro and nuclear did not.
You’re quite far out of your depth here.
The science has concluded that renewables decrease electricity costs. But comparing regions the ones that went straight into renewables were the ones with nearly 100% fossil fuel usage which were desperate for alternatives.
They started with expensive electricity and fossil fuels still often are the marginal producer in their systems.
And don’t get me started on investing in nuclear power taking 20 years to build and delivering $170-250/MWh electricity today. That is pure lunacy to propose.
Solar and wind are not "renewable" in the same way plastic recycling "works". The total LiveCycle of wind and solar arguably cause more pollution from the materials used. you can't recycle wind and solar when they are done. The generator itself is the waste produced from the process.
Not only that Solar changes the local climate because they absorbed and radiate heat as well as taking vast amounts of land that is stripped of life. Wind drives whales insane on the coast and kills massive amounts of birds.
If we can crack fusion then the only fuels used are helium and such. Much cleaner and they work at night and whin the air is still.
The environmental impacts of wind and solar are nonzero but absolutely miniscule compared to fossil fuel extraction. Base load is a concern but not unsolvable especially as scaling batteries becomes easier. Most importantly, solar + battery is already deployed at scale and is now the cheapest to install and operate in the real world. We are also close to being able to scale geothermal as renewable base load.
Fusion is great but it's still years away at least from a single viable commercial reactor. We need solutions to be deployed ten years ago. Waiting for Godot isn't an option.
This is just blatantly stupid in the crudest sense. You want to showcase yourself as a friend of big industrial interests, oil and whatever else, fine. Want to spit in the face of "progressive" energy rhetoric? okay, sure, whatever. But why try to ruin a genuinely useful, powerfully developing technology for such crude motivations? Of course, because you're Trump (or a Trump appointee) and need to showcase your reactionary ass to the world of your perceived enemies even when it's completely counterproductive to do so.
I dont think there is a conspiracy by oil and gas companies to sabotage solar and wind. I think solar and wind are just not as easy and cheap to build a reliable grid because of transmission and storage costs which advocates always underestimate.
> I dont think there is a conspiracy by oil and gas companies to sabotage solar and wind.
That's exactly what someone participating in the conspiracy would say.
At this point it's an open secret that oil and gas have used their money to lobby against all alternative sources of energy, including HN's golden boy: nuclear. Exhibit A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Club#Budget_and_funding
Environmentalists didn't kill nuclear energy. They are a patsy for Big Oil.
That’s great information thank you. I still think there is plenty of grass roots anti-nuclear sentiment
Sentiment doesn't get anything done. Cash and political influence does. There are literally thousands of causes with "grass roots" support. How many translate into policy?
That’s incorrect
How else is Trump going to pay for those tax cuts for his billionaire buddies?
[flagged]
Unfortunately that's what a lot of the people that voted for him want. Either accelerationists of their own variety, or the many many evangelicals banking on apocalypse on earth.
This isn't conservatism, it's regressionism
Will take DECADES to rebuild this country back
Medicine, Science, Weather, Academia, etc. etc.
Certainly not my lifetime, maybe not even anyone on HN right now
> Michelle Moore, the chief executive of Groundswell, a nonprofit group that received a Solar for All grant, said revoking the award would undermine the Trump administration’s efforts to address soaring electricity demand fueled by artificial intelligence data centers.
Solar is so expensive and cost-inefficient per-household. Data centers need their own large, uninterrupted power supplies.
Wrong, solar is cheap and probably the cheapest energy source a household can get if they have a sunny roof. Source - I have solar, have done the math.
It's not ideal for everyone's situation but it's damn cheap. One of my neighbors has solar panels, no battery or storage of any kind, we don't have net metering here, and their electric bill is single digits.
Having solar myself, I completely agree with you that solar is - comparatively - cheap. But because it is cheap, the argument goes that you don't really need to subsidy it.
The subsidies probably cost significantly less than we'll end up paying for whatever effects of climate change they would have averted.
Yes, but if everyone was going to get them anyway, you might as well use the same money for something else, like free school lunches.
Will they actually get spent on something sensible, including but not limited to free school lunches? Probably not.
Think of it as a stopped-clock-right-twice-a-day kind of thing.
There are many reasons for subsidies and it is a complex field. I was not discussing subsidies I was replying to a flat out false statement that solar is very expensive.
When discussing solar subsidies one should keep several things in mind:
- Federal solar subsidies are expiring at the end of this year thanks to Trumps tax law with a name so ridiculous I shall not repeat it.
- This news item is talking about money that has already been granted. This is especially screwed up because these are situation where the government has already promised to pay and people have been making investments and putting in work in expectation of payment.
- Solar is actually much less subsidized than nuclear. In many cases solar subsidies will help the taxpayer avoid costs as they avoid much more expensive nuclear subsidies.
Not only that, the demand from AI Data Centers is going to push up the price of electricity tremendously. Add in demand from electric vehicles too and there could be shortages as well. Who knows, but one thing is certain: demand for electricity is going to skyrocket.
Having an alternative source for your house is a wise idea.
Don't worry the utilities will still make sure you pay their fees. Watch the markets move from paying per kwh or demand charges to just straight up fees. Its disheartening.
Wouldn’t it just make more sense to use nuclear and keep the grid reliable so individual homeowners don’t need to worry about huge blackouts ruining their quality of life?
Yes more nuclear does not inhibit solar. More of both option is the winning salvo.
Nuclear is very expensive to build. It takes a long time to build. Also, it takes quite a bit of time to power up and power down a nuclear power plant. Nuclear plants use a lot of water. Water that could be used to cool the AI hardware. As a result nuclear power isn't cheap.
Then there is still the safety issues and environmental concerns regarding the waste. Some people say they are safe now and you can just bury the waste deep underground. Putting it deep underground seems a bit like just pumping the carbon into the air: someone else's problem further down the line in time.
Do you want to live next to a Nuclear Power Plant?
>Do you want to live next to a Nuclear Power Plant?
Yes! I think that would be great!
I live in Minnesota, we get about 34% less sun than most of the southern states like Arizona or Florida.
Arizona - 3,800 hours of sunlight hours per year
Minnesota - 2,500 hours of sunlight hours per year
Ergo, I can't generate as much energy as someone who lives in a state that gets significantly more sunlight.
I would also add that setup and installation of even a small solar array has an ROI of around 10 years because I can't generate as much energy, therefore it takes longer for me to break even.
Right now in Minnesota:
The average cost of installing a 5 kW solar panel system in Minnesota is approximately $14,900 before applying the 30% federal tax credit, which can significantly reduce the overall expense. After incentives, the out-of-pocket cost can be around $13,860
Sorry, I'm not going to lay out 15K and then have to wait ten years before I break even. If you want to know why people aren't adopting solar, this is the reason. Its cost prohibitive for many, many people.
Does it make sense for people in those Southern states? 100%. For everybody else? Not so much.
You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments. And in many cases, the energy savings exceed the finance payments, resulting in a net monthly gain from a cash flow basis with no upfront payment.
Im pretty sure if that were a common situation more people would have rooftop solar and there wouldn’t need to be subsidies for it.
Are you assuming people are rational, informed, and interested? Strong assumptions. I recommend doing a little research vs going off the vibes
I've been doing research for the last 20 years.
Every single year I talk to companies and the cost has gone down, barely. I've been told every year for the last 20 years that technology is getting so much better. The panels are so much more efficient, cost less, the state and federal govt have tax breaks, blah blah, blah. The Chinese have found a way to produce them this way and that way, "Oh you just wait, its really going to be affordable in the next few years!"
No, its still not affordable. If it were, like OP said you would see them on every house in your neighborhood.
I've wanted to put solar on my house for very long time and every year its the same thing. "Finance a $15,000 loan and in ten years you'll have free electricity!!"
I would say anybody who's rational, informed and interested looking at that would 100% of the time its not worth it.
>> You can finance the purchase to avoid upfront payments.
Yeah and then you pay interest on the loan. Which then makes it EVEN MORE expensive AND lengthens your ROI just to break even.
FYI you're not "saving" anything until A) Your loan is paid off and B) Your array is generating enough energy to compensate for your existing energy use.
Your numbers just don't add up:
$15,000 for a 5Kw array.
$15,000 loan with a VERY generous 5% interest rate on an also very generous 6 year term.
Interest paid over six years: $4,500
Total paid after six years: $19,500
Monthly payments would be around $240.00
The average monthly cost of electricity for Minneapolis is about $190.00 which is about 1,097kWh
The monthly average your 5kWh array can generate in a month (assuming optimal conditions) is around 700kWh. Leaving you with a deficit of 397kWh you still need to pay for.
So no, I'm not seeing how the cost savings will exceed your finance payments. It will eventually pay for itself once you get outside of that ROI period. And then what? You get 15 years of free electricity which amounts to:
$190.00 * 12 = $2,280
$2,280 * 15 = $34,200
So then, over 25 years, your net gain is about: $14,000? Which is about $560/year?
Not worth it at all.
You're right that the economics of residential solar don't add up in the north. Utility-scale solar however is a different story.
Is this if you just do the entire setup yourself? I'm pretty sure the math on solar currently is quite bad for the vast majority of people in the USA.
If so, please ask your representatives to copy Germany's "Balkonkraftwerk" rules.
We've got one, cost €350 including delivery and a balcony railing mounting kit, could've been €250 if we'd collected and not had the stands. Whole thing is trivial DIY, no skill or training needed: you literally just assemble the kit and plug it into a power socket, register it online as a small power station, and you're done.
Sure, the legal limit of 800 W output sure isn't a huge supply, but at that cost it's also a no-brainer — at €350, it will pay for itself in 1y8m.
Damn, I've looked at it on Google and it's such an eyesore.
So are lawn flamingos - with the notable difference that Balkonkraftwerke actually do something useful.
With the notable difference that lawn flamingos are not necessary because of the terrible energy policies of the government, whilst balkonkartoffel are.
In other words you have lawn flamingos because you have bad taste not because the government impoverished you.
"Eyesore" is in your own opinion. What I've seen on balconies around here, anything covering them is a 50% chance of being an improvement — and unlike some acquaintances, I've not encountered balkon-FKK. And IMO they're a big improvement over, e.g. the AC units on the skyscraper walls of Manhatten.
I have balkonkraftwerk because they're a 60% return on investment, per year for 35 years, tax free and self-adjusting for inflation. By far the best (reliable) investment one can make.
That €350 is currently economically worth €7350 over their lifetime in reduced energy bills, tax free. The economics are so strong that it would be worth doing even if energy was 1/3rd the current price.
I had it priced out by 5 different vendors. Only one of those 5 was in any way truthful about the reality for my particular home: "you will likely only get 15% of what others with panels might due to the shape of your roof and tree cover now and especially in 10 years." That said, WITH grid-kickbacks (all of which are not at all guaranteed), according to 4 of them, I would be looking at a net zero cost in 30-36 years.
I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
I was looking primarily for cost reduction and a very small percentage of saving the environment or whatever you want to call it. But; depending on your locale, home structure, etc, solar may not at all be that. If you're leaning more on the side of energy independence and eco-friendliness, maybe it's a better fit for you.
So wait, what you are saying is that a rooftop solar array may be a bad deal if your roof is not sunny? Wow hold the presses.
> I'm not even talking about the fact that panels MAY act like a pool for resale. Some people DO want them--again depending on your locale--most, at this point, do NOT where I live.
A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
If I was buying a house with a solar array on the roof I would consider it to be a liability that is going to add to the TCO of the home and ask for a discount to cover the future costs of removal. The labor to remove and replace the solar array when reroofing is never going to be paid for by the solar array, it’s just an added expense to the TCO of a home.
There are plenty of people who are not aware of the added costs of a roof mounted solar array, I just happen to be aware since I sell and run electrical work for a living.
> A roof mounted solar array easily adds $20,000 - 25,000 to reroofing a house just in labor (assuming two electricians for one week on either side of the reroofing with labor priced at $150/hr)
Why do you need two electricians for a week? My rooftop solar array went up in an afternoon. They had three labourers. The (singular) electrician came in separately and worked for under and hour.
the cost to remove isn't 2 electricians for a week, it's 2 people with arms for a day. This is like saying that you would consider light fixtures a considerable TCO increase because whenever the lightbulb goes out, you'll need to pay an electrician for a day of work to change it.
American rooftop solar power has much higher costs than in Australia:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/rooftop-solar-three-times-cheape...
The study from Compare the Market finds the average residential solar installation cost in the US is $A4/W, while Canada’s national average was $A3.65/W. By contrast, Australia’s national average was $A0.89/W, more than $A2/W cheaper.
It's also significantly higher than in Germany:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/10/24/residential-pv-prices...
The cheapest offers for a PV system with 10 kW of power without storage are just over €1 per watt, the most expensive are around €2 euros per watt.
All these countries have access to the same solar panels. The national minimum wage is lower in America than in the other countries. So why do American rooftop systems cost so much more? Mostly because of high "soft costs" in America:
Soft costs are the non-hardware costs associated with going solar. These costs include permitting, financing, and installing solar, as well as the expenses solar companies incur to acquire new customers, pay suppliers, and cover their bottom line. These soft costs become a portion of the overall price a customer pays for a solar energy system. While solar hardware costs have fallen in recent years, soft costs represent a growing share of total solar system costs.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/solar-soft-costs-basics
First of all your post is off topic. Second of all, the reason why solar panel installations in both Australia and Germany are cheaper than the US is solar panel tariffs. Neither Australia nor the EU has solar panel tariffs. The US does. The cheapest solar panels come from China, where there is significant overproduction of panels. If you do not have tariffs you get a lot of cheap Chinese panels.
Solar is so cheap that it's worth doing even just to reduce the fuel consumed running an existing plants.
So your saying natural gas + solar is cheaper than natural gas alone? Could you provide a source for that? That would be a great thing to know. Thanks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity#...
https://www.irena.org/News/pressreleases/2025/Jul/91-Percent...
LCOE doesn’t include storage and transmission
So what?
My previous comment said:
> to reduce the fuel consumed running an existing plants
As in: no storage or new transmission needed, put it right by the existing gas plant and wire it together, *burn less while the sun is shining*.
Batteries… well, I hope they keep getting cheaper, but IIRC them+PV currently beat nuclear. Not sure about other stuff though.
rooftop solar saves transmission cost and doesn't require storage.
Nothing “requires” storage, but if you want power at night or during a cloudy week you need it or you need dispatchable generation like gas or nuclear
right. the fun point were at is that solar+gas is cheaper than gas. it's worth buying solar panels just so you don't have to burn the extra gas
Thats what i would like to know lol
Do explain how how solar is less efficient than burning gas or coal for electricity.
He said “cost inefficient” which i would interpret as meaning “expensive”. I think it’s pretty plausible that a single nat gas or coal plant would be a cheaper way of generating a fixed amount of electricity than solar + enough batteries to last several days of cloudy weather. All the sources ive seen only include a few hours of battery storage to go along with their solar which keeps the cost down but also means frequent outages which data centers really dont want