New Jersey Outshines Most Others In Solar Energy

An anonymous reader points out this CNBC story which says that "New Jersey—known more for its turnpike, shopping malls and industrial sprawl—has become a solar energy powerhouse, outshining sunnier states like Hawaii and Nevada. And it's largely because of incentives that make it cheaper for residents and businesses to buy and install solar power systems."

Comments

Not solar panels...

[Anonymous Coward]

All that shine is coming from their hair gel.

Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[elrous0]

Seriously, it would be nice if my state had something like this. The crazy high upfront costs are the only thing keeping me from installing solar panels myself.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[benjamindees]

You can buy photovoltaic cells on ebay fairly cheaply, for about $1/watt. You have to assemble them yourself, though.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

You realize that there is an upfront cost whether the state kicks in or not, right? Basically your argument is "this is not worthwhile for me to do, but it is worthwhile for other people to do it for me". If the overall cost of solar isn't worth it to you, then it is likely not an economically viable project.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Smidge204]

You realize that if you live int he US, you're paying state and federal taxes too, right? A portion of that money already came out of your pocket, and you've already paid for someone else's project.

There's nothing wrong with applying for tax-subsidized funding if you're already a taxpayer. That's kind of the point.
=Smidge=

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[mi]

A portion of that money already came out of your pocket, and you've already paid for someone else's project.

Right — the cow is already dead, so all you, silly vegetarians, may as well eat it!

There's nothing wrong with applying for tax-subsidized funding if you're already a taxpayer.

You are right, that there is nothing wrong with applying for the tax-subsidized funding.

That's kind of the point.

No, the GP's point was, that it is wrong to provide tax-subsidized funding for such things — or advocate such provision, as the GGP was doing: "would be nice if my state offered that!"

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[JWSmythe]

    Many states have some sort of incentive. Unfortunately, most of them disallow you doing it yourself.

    We had worked it out to be affordable, between state and federal incentives a good grid tied solar install could free. I had intended to set up a business to sell and install grid tied solar systems, where we would "finance" the cost until the incentives were paid. That way, everyone would win. People would get solar systems on their homes. They would help save the environment. It wouldn't cost the end user anything. We would make a little bit for doing the install, and everyone would be happy.

  Unfortunately, the harsh reality didn't match the ideal scenario. We could do the install. We would have to find bank financing for the initial overhead of financing the installed equipment, which was very likely to happen. The government was the end of it though. To get the government incentives, you had to be an officially sanctioned solar install contractor. There weren't just a practical set of rules, there were huge hoops to jump through to be an officially sanctioned contractor. It eliminated any startup small business from getting into this new industry.

    Almost, if not all, of the incentives go out the window if you do it yourself, or have anyone but a specialist installer do it for you. For a lot of the folks who would read a site like this, we're screwed.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Ihmhi]

New Jerseyan here.

Just as much as you'd like your solar power incentives, I'd like your property taxes. Anywhere from $4,000 to upwards of $20,000 a year for a two floor, three bedroom home depending on where you live.

Granted it's still cheaper than what it would cost to rent such a place, but when you hear about triple digit property taxes in some places it really hurts.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[benjamindees]

You don't understand. It's free money. That's how it works. Free. Money. They print it on big printing presses and everything. You'd better get in line or you'll miss out.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

This is the kind of thinking that has gotten this country in the mess it is in. Everyone from the poor to the rich looking for a way to take a swig from the trough and not worrying about putting it back in. Want a new car? Go to the government. Screwed up your bank? Go to the government.

I think we have abstracted money (which in itself is an abstract concept) to the point that no one gets that resources are not infinite. If a project is not worth doing without government subsidy, then it is economically not viable. Sometimes, gov't should offer subsidies to kick start a program. But solar is far past that point.

The bottom line is that practically everyone is looking to someone else to pay for their wants, needs and desires. That is no sustainable. I fear that my children will be the first generation to inherit a country that is in worse condition than the one I inherited.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[conureman]

As someone who votes, IMO my opinion carries some weight here, (if not in Sacramento or D.C.)(or Jersey) I feel that society benefits when some burden is shifted from our electrical grid. If it unfairly benefits property and homeowners, that precedent was already set by the utilities cor- persons.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[conureman]

In a quest for fairness, we should subsidise the homeowners as much as we do our private utilities companies.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[tmosley]

What are you talking about? You can get a full 2 kilowatt system with a 2.5 kW grid tie inverter for about $7,500 installed. That's pre tax credit. You get the cells here. These start as low as $2/watt, but the cheapest in stock right now is $2.40 ($4800). Add the grid tie inverter, available here on sale for $1825. That's $6625. You should have no problem finding someone to instal the whole thing for $1000. That ought to be enough of a system for most people, assuming they use gas or heating oil for heat in the winter. You should build up a high enough balance over the year to run A/C in the summer without difficulty.

I'm going to be setting up such a system within a year or so, once I move into my new house.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

Sounds great. Let's subsidize home owners. We will tax every family $5,000 to provide a $5,000 subsidy for everyone. Sounds great.

Wait a minute, I think we will have some overhead in the program. Administration costs, etc... let's say maybe a 20% overhead. So, let's alter our plan. Every family get's taxed $5,000 so we give households a $4,000 subsidy.

I love your idea.

Alternatively, we might consider limiting subsidies altogether.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Red Flayer]

I think we have abstracted money (which in itself is an abstract concept) to the point that no one gets that resources are not infinite. If a project is not worth doing without government subsidy, then it is economically not viable. Sometimes, gov't should offer subsidies to kick start a program. But solar is far past that point.

So are you in favor of public funding of highways? Or do you think that this subsidy for commuters and the freight industry means that they are not economically viable?

How about corn farming? It's obviously not economically viable, since it requires subsidization.

I undertsand whre you're coming from. But out of all the screwed-up things getting subsidized, something with societal benefits like solar power (reduced pollution & dependence on fossil fuel) should be low on your list for bitching about. Bitch about corn subsidies. Bitch about bridges to nowhere. But don't bitch about alternative energy... because, ironically, eliminating alt energy subsidies because you're concerned about future generations is likely to make things worse for those generations.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

Howdy,

When one is funding the roads, one is giving a direct benefit to the public as a whole.

Corn farming should not be subsidized. It makes no sense when we have a surplus of food. Ethanol production seems like it is a lobbying group which managed to get ahold of enough congress critters.

If we were talking about subsidizing a solar power plant, that would be one thing. In exchange, I'd want tight controls on the price we get charged for the power. If my money is being used to help build it, then that is the tradeoff that must get made.

When we are talking about adding value to your personal home with me picking up most or all of the cost, then I get upset. The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule. If it the preponderance of the benefit goes to one person, then that one person should pay for it.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[mi]

I feel that society benefits when some burden is shifted from our electrical grid.

Is there a cost, which you'd agree is too high? What is it — you have not studied it, have you? Do you trust the politicians to make that determination for you?

For just one example, do you know, that the typical efficiency of solar electrical generation is only 15-20%? Whereas when used to produce heat, 80-85% of Sun's energy falling on the panels can be captured?

If it unfairly benefits property and homeowners, that precedent was already set by the utilities cor- persons.

I don't know, who "cor- persons" are. But even if it fairly benefited everyone, going through the government's bureaucracy is extremely inefficient.

It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Thomas Jefferson

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

>>>It's free money. They print it on big printing presses and everything

No wonder the dollar is only worth half a euro - our saved wealth is rapidly disappearing as more-and-more paper is printed. Keep it up Americans and soon we'll have a healthy economy like Venezuela

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[mi]

You don't understand. It's free money. That's how it works. Free. Money. They print it on big printing presses and everything. You'd better get in line or you'll miss out.

Right. And next time there are elections, be sure, your State backs the winner. Or else you'll miss out big time!

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

In a quest for fairness we should stop subsidizing. Period. After an initial period of government-promoted research and invention, devices should stand or sink on their own merits. Like the internet has done.

The Cash for Clunkers is a good example. First off, cars are a mature technology and don't need subsidization. They should have received ZERO assistance.

Second this was a FAILED program, because all it did was promote exchanging one pullutemobile for another pollutemobile that was a mere 1-2 points higher on the http://greenercars.org/ scorecard. BFD. Also it shifted future demand (people buying new cars circa 2015) to the present (2009). It didn't create any new demand, but it did put us a few billion deeper in debt to our Chinese landlords. Bloody stupid.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

For those like me who don't normally read linked articles, here's a summary:

Obama, Biden, and other executive officers have spent 75% of their time in states that put them into office. i.e. The blue states. AND these trips are publicly funded, according to this Associated Press article. They are solidifying their base in preparation for the next election. (Apparently the red states can go to hell as they get ignored.) Dubya Bush did the same thing, spending a lot of time in red and "purple" states.

Quote: "The vice president has made five stimulus trips just to Pennsylvania, a must-win state in 2008 that never faded from Obama's political planning meetings. All told, administration officials have been to the Keystone state more than three dozen times since January."

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[mi]

Dubya Bush did the same thing, spending a lot of time in red and "purple" states.

The article also alleges, that the States important to Democrats get substantially larger pieces of the "stimulus" money — an accusation, that can not be thrown at G.W. Bush if only because his stimulus consisted of tax-cuts and tax-rebates, that went to whoever paid small taxes (and some who didn't)...

But my point was non-partisan — whoever is in charge, they'll try to use everybody's tax dollars to reward their own supporters. There is no reliable stopping this, other than to reduce the amount of tax dollars at their disposal.

This is where I turn into a raging Libertarian and the audience loses interest...

The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground. Thomas Jefferson

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Red Flayer]

When one is funding the roads, one is giving a direct benefit to the public as a whole.

Oh? Are you sure about that? I used to take mass transit for everything when I live in the city. Any benefit I got was indirect. Furthermore, there is a massive downside to oversubsidization of roads and undersubsidization of mass transit... and those wo do not drive get to face part of the downside without direct benefit.

When we are talking about adding value to your personal home with me picking up most or all of the cost, then I get upset. The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule. If it the preponderance of the benefit goes to one person, then that one person should pay for it.

That's an algebra game -- and we can both play it. If 100,000 people take advantage of the subsidy, the marginal utility to you of the subsidizations may be bigger in aggregate than the cost to you in taxes due to less demand for grid electricity, fossil fuels, etc. Hard to calculate, harder to prove, but for some number of subsidizations, this may be true. Particularly once economies of scale and technological advances kick in and now you can purchase, install, and run a solar system for less than the utility you receive from it (in theory, this is the purpose of the subsidy).

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[hesaigo999ca]

I tend to agree with you that most abuse the system, but do not ever fool yourself into thinking that the US is badly off, they talk a mean game saying they are in crisis and bla bla bla, yet if you knew how much money they REALLY have their coffers. They gave out about a trillion dollars to date for incentives to stimulate the economy without even a real guarantee they might make some money back,they did not even bat an eyelash, they have very smart accountants working for the gov.

I think they might have national liquid worth in the quintillions, not that it would be down on paper, I mean all the diamonds, art, gold, etc,etc,etc...adds up their net worth, then you say that also they have an enormous debt, ...on paper only, the debt is worth nothing if the person owing does not want to pay you back, and guess what, no one has the firepower to force the US overnight to pay up what it owes...so this supposed debt, yes its very real, but it is not even associated with the net worth of the US (in negative) as they would never let someone force them to pay all now, that would use up too much of their money.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Chris Burke]

If a project is not worth doing without government subsidy, then it is economically not viable.

No.

If a project returns more than you invest, it is economically viable.

That is not the same as it being "worth" doing for any particular individual at any particular point in time.

It is the up-front cash outlay that the GP found prohibitive. They would almost certainly more than make up that investment in the long term since break-even times are well below warranted life times. However that doesn't mean it's "worth" spending that cash when your savings are low and you are worried about losing your job and having to make mortgage payments. Making that money back and more in reduced energy bills over the course of a couple decades doesn't change that. An imminently viable project, not undertaken because of temporary practicalities.

If the subsidy reduces the up-front outlay, then that means more people can take advantage. The more people who use solar energy, the less demand their is for other power sources. An extra coal plant may not have to be built, or at least existing ones produce less, reducing pollution and increasing quality of life, not to mention reducing the costs of environmental cleanup etc. The subsidy itself may not actually break even (though I bet a lot of power plants get subsidies or tax breaks too). I don't know. But it isn't changing an economically non-viable project into a viable one. It already was.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[elrous0]

I don't know where you live, but the last time I looked into it, a system installed here ran well over $20k. If there is a legitimate business that will install one for $7.5k, I'd love to hear about it.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[drinkypoo]

When we are talking about adding value to your personal home with me picking up most or all of the cost, then I get upset. The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule.

The utility to you if it happens once is basically nil. The utility to you if only homes not likely to wash away and which are grid-tied are attached to the system is enormous, so long as it is done over and over again, because that is building a solar power plant. It just happens to be a distributed one. So long as the sites are worth a damn, it should actually be more reliable than a monolithic solar plant, and produce more [constant] power on partly cloudy days, too. I don't have a problem with the people who live under the pieces of the solar plant getting free power.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[CannonballHead]

You got it wrong. People making under $70k/yr can't afford that (note to self: get past $70k/yr sometime). What we should do is take $5000 from all households making $100k or more (and an additional $10,000 per $100k after that, that sounds fair) and give $2500 to households making $70k or less. We can use the other part of the *ahem* "fee" to pay for infrastructure like roads and bridges. And turtle crossings.

No, of course this isn't redistribution of wealth! This is just being fair to people that don't make enough money and thus don't have that inalienable Right to Entertainment and a Well-Paying Job.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[CannonballHead]

It's obviously not economically viable, since it requires subsidization.

So let's pay to have them grow it for inefficient corn ethanol or pay them not to farm it (while people starve in other countries)... that will help, I'm sure.

Of course, it does help the farmer, but I'm not sure we should be taking taxes from the nation and giving it to farmers so that they are able to not do their chosen profession.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[astar]

I heard yesterday that M1, today, as compared to a year ago, has more then doubled. I call it Bernanke money. I wonder if the mass media will report this. Bloomberg? had a front page article yesterday with a title like Dollar at Red-Line. Relevantly, it reports that US Banks are dumping the dollar for Euros. I suspect the same banks that got bailed out.

Still, while Bernanke money will screw us, it is best treated as an incompetent response to a disaster. For causes, look to the repeal of Glass-Steigel in 1988 and the legalization of derivatives in 1990. Both were in response to the 1987 crisis. Oh, for Bush lovers, the last was Bush Sr's bright idea.

Actually, six factoids came in yesterday. Again, do not hold your breath to hear about them in the mass media. Together, they lead me to the conclusion that the economy is disintegrating faster than in the historical precedents. So I will venture a prediction: October is likely the end of the post-war era.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[s73v3r]

I think cor- persons is some kind of bastard child of a corporation and a person. As in, the gp was trying to say something about corporate personhood.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[s73v3r]

What do you have in state Income tax?

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Chris Burke]

The utility to me personally for this happening is minuscule.

The utility of switching a single house is minuscule, but so is the cost to you. Increase it to enough where you don't have to build a coal plant, which by the way are also frequently subsidized, and the utility to you is much more significant.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

Let's pretend that your idea is a valid one. It isn't, but we will pretend for now.

Do you think the 70k and less crowd are the ones that will get the subsidies to put solar panels on their house. If so, I have a bridge to sell you.

If your entire post was sarcastic, I apologize. I have read so many ridiculous posts, that I no longer know what is meant to be humorous, and what is meant to be serious.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

I don't have a problem with the people who live under the pieces of the solar plant getting free power.

Okay, tell ya what. Let's put it to the test.

Send me a check to cover the cost of my solar panels and installation. If you'll do this, then I will believe you.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[drinkypoo]

Send me a check to cover the cost of my solar panels and installation. If you'll do this, then I will believe you.

You are committing the logical fallacy of reductio ad absurdum. Try again? [y/N]

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[drinkypoo]

Since you will persist, I will attempt to educate you as to the difference between what is happening, and what you suppose is happening. I believe that some people, who should pass through an evaluation process, should derive some benefit from installing portions of a solar power plant which will benefit all upon their house. I do not believe that any one person should bear the cost of subsidizing any individual solar installation; it is obvious that this is neither necessary nor desirable, as not everyone wants such a system, nor is every location acceptable for such installation. Further, none of the current subsidy programs cover more than a fairly small portion of any such installation. In short, your "proposal" was ridiculous (might I say, absurd?) in every possible way. If you persist, I will have to assume you are some form of idiot.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[MyLongNickName]

"If you persist, I will have to assume you are some form of idiot."

Brilliant debating technique.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[T.E.D.]

How about this: We tax the ludicrously rich, like the options traders and bank executives getting million+ dollar bonuses, and the useless inherited riches of people like Paris Hilton and the Walmart kids. That's where all of this contry's wealth went over the last two decades anyway. Might as well go where our money is.

Funny thing is, we can make a great start on both just by repealing Bush's income and inheritance tax cuts. If we instead take the "conservative" step of going back to the tax system we 40 years ago (the last time we had middle class in this country and unprecidented prosperity), we'd have more tax money than we'd know what to do with.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[FlyingBishop]

Reducing the amount of tax dollars at their disposal just increases the number of dollars at the disposal of Wall Street. Basically you trade an imperfect democracy for a veiled oligarchy.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Attila Dimedici]

So are you in favor of public funding of highways? Or do you think that this subsidy for commuters and the freight industry means that they are not economically viable? How about corn farming? It's obviously not economically viable, since it requires subsidization. .

I am not the original poster, however, I largely agree with the point he made.

I am in favor of public funding of highways. It should be paid for with the revenue gained from fuel taxes. At this time, alternative vehicles are not a significant enough number of those using the roads to matter so, for now, they can be left out.

I am opposed to subsidizing farming, it is not necessary and leads to counterproductive behaviors on the part of farmers. Additionally, it is generally sold as going to "family farms", but the overwhelming majority goes to corporate farms (I don't have a source at the moment, but over the years I have seen several reports that indicate that most farm subsidies go to farms owned by large corporations).

The problem with alternative energy subsidies is that they tend to encourage technologies that have political favor as opposed to technologies that are likely to actually be economically viable. On the other hand, I am willing to accept a "subsidy" for alternative energy vehicles in that if they don't use traditional fuels they can avoid the fuel tax for highways (until such a time that they become well enough established that they are a significant number of the vehicles on the road). When (if) a particular alternative fuel technology becomes viable enough to be a significant player in the economy will be time enough to figure out how to tax it to pay for the wear and tear on the roads it uses.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[OverZealous.com]

"Oh no Teller, I'm out of Pie!

"You have pie, however, so give me some of your pie.

"You see, Teller, we're not taking pie from you, we're giving pie to me. That's fair, right?"

Repeats until there is no more pie left, including for Teller

"Now we have no pie! I know, let's go find someone else who does have pie, and make them give both of us some of their pie!"

-- Penn Jillette, Penn & Teller's Bullshit!

Pardon my paraphrasing...

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[drinkypoo]

Before you can become a master fisherman, you have to become a master baiter. I'm still working on the fishing part, but I do love a good masterful debate.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[moosesocks]

Obama, Biden, and other executive officers have spent 75% of their time in states that put them into office. i.e. The blue states.

To be fair, all of the states near DC voted Democratic, so this statistic isn't particularly surprising.

Similarly, pretty much all of the states with major urban centers (except perhaps for Texas) voted Democrat in the last election.

Yawn. This statistic is absolutely meaningless. (Also remember that the rural, traditionally 'red' states have always received an exceptional return on their tax dollars. States like Delaware, New Jersey, and New York get absolutely shafted, and often have to fund major projects on their own)

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[operagost]

You mean the first few years of LBJ's "War on Poverty"? When poverty got worse, and taxes were horribly high and unfair? I'd prefer going back to before 1913.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[CannonballHead]

The entire post was sarcastic. I agree with you, and sympathize with your last line, as well.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

>>>Bush Sr's bright idea.

And the Democratic Congress which was in control at the time...... and what you're basically saying is now is not a good time to buy stocks, because they are about to plummet.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

>>>Reducing the amount of tax dollars at their disposal just increases the number of dollars at the disposal of Wall Street. Basically you trade an imperfect democracy for a veiled oligarchy.
>>>

Not really. A market is as pure a democracy as you can get, since every dollar you spend is a vote for whichever company you like..... and every dollar you don't spend also has an impact, as Circuit City can attest (they went bankrupt). If you don't like Wall Street than stop giving them your money - simple as that. Or else give your money to companies you do like - like Redhat/Linux.

The power is in your hands.

If you want to talk about TRUE oligarchies, one need look no further than the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonelected - empowered for life - prescribing law based upon their own personal OPINIONS instead of what the People's Constitution actually says, or the Founders intended (small, minimalist government of limited power). Same applies to the European Union's Court of Justice, another band of oligarchs.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[commodore64_love]

>>>rural, traditionally 'red' states have always received an exceptional return on their tax dollars.

I've never understood this stat. Where do I go if I want to find metros or subways - red state Arkansas? No the blue states. Where do I go to find shiny-new museums and stadiums - red state Wyoming? No the blue states. Where do I find the best roads - red state Oklahoma? No the blue states. Is the billion-dollar I-95 Big Dig Tunnel in red Utah? No it's in blue state Massachusetts.

The blue states get FAR more federal money to build these "things" than the red states do.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Rycross]

The blue states also generate FAR more federal money, so it tends to even out. Typically the citation is this study posted by the Tax Foundation. It is old, however (2005).

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[astar]

Thank you for your reply.

You are basically right and your comments are useful.

Still, I think politics has a place in an economic discussion. After all, economic policy gets implemented by the use of some form of politics.

Another reason is a recent experience. I have pretty good dem credentials. There was a discussion of jobless rates somewhere else. I noted that during the first 9 months of the Obama administration, we lost 5 million jobs. During the first nine months of the FDR administration, we gained 5 million jobs. That was pretty much the post. Nice official figures. I got lambasted heavily by one lady for being partisan and so on. She blamed it all on Bush. Go figure.

Anyway, I knew the Bush Sr idea was passed with bipartisan support and I should have said that.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[astar]

Huh? end of the post-war era means more that. Sort of a parochial view IMO. I figure the dollar will be in free fall. Sure the stock market will crash.

Okay, physical economy is deflationary, M1 is hyper-inflationary, and financial instruments are inflating faster than M1. Pretty classic. Aside from being dumb, you cannot print enough money to clear the speculative debts. The debts cannot be repaid. Looking at everything, I conclude the best historical analogy is Weimar 1923. The last banknote the Weimar Republic printed was a 100 trillion mark note. It is only an analogy, but rather suggestive.

The process, even at this late date, can be stopped in a day. Reich, secretary of labor under Clinton, has been all over recently with two of the three things that need to happen. Even Volker has said useful things not very long ago.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[Ihmhi]

It's not bad but it's not great either. The property taxes are the real killer though.

There are plenty of people who have honestly bought their homes, no mortgage or anything like that, and they still struggle with their bills. It's insane.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[couchslug]

"The crazy high upfront costs are the only thing keeping me from installing solar panels myself."

The crazy high upfront costs of living in New Jersey easily offset any incentives towards solar power.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[moosesocks]

Although a few big cities have gotten big projects (such as boston, where the Big Dig was, in fact sorely needed), the condition of the roads and infrastructure in these areas tends to be absolutely horrible.

New York, in particular suffered from extreme neglect after the end of Robert Moses' tenure until part way through Giuliani's tenure. (Even still, New Yorkers foot most of their own taxes, receiving an insultingly low return on their state and federal taxes. The current mayor, Mike Bloomberg has actually threatened to secede from the state because of the tax situation)

Much of New York's massive metro/subway system was constructed between 1900 and 1930 by a private company. The remainder was constructed at the city's expense to keep the place actually inhabitable. The Lexington Avenue Subway line (4/5/6 on Manhattan) carries more traffic every day than the entire population of Boston. The city's roads simply couldn't handle that type of traffic. Arkansas doesn't have the population density necessary to make such a system effective.

Very few urban museums are funded using significant amounts of federal funds (the Smithsonian being the prime exception). I'm only directly familiar with New York's museums, although virtually all of them are self-funded.

Stadiums are an irritating by-product of our obsession with (watching) sports. I agree that they shouldn't be funded by tax money.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[T.E.D.]

I was thinking more of the Eisenhower era. Taxes on someone in my bracket (in real dollars), and I suspect on yours as well, were not all that different. However, there were more brackets above me, and their taxes could go all the way up to 70%.

In other words, taxes were in line with the rest of the world, and far more fair than today.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[sumdumass]

Still, I think politics has a place in an economic discussion. After all, economic policy gets implemented by the use of some form of politics.

Politics do influence policy that influences economics. However, if they are brought into the discussion, I think it's imperative that they are accurately represented. As bush had a democrat controlled congress, I saw the reference to his support a little misleading obviously because democrats did too. It really wasn't needed in it's limited presentation and I think it distorted the truth of the situation. In other words, it didn't add anything but bias to the otherwise correct statements in a conversation.

As for the 5 million jobs, Yea, there are zealots on both sides and idiots in between. It's going to get worse and you can tell because even the current president has started defending his failures by referring back to G.W. Bush. It's the "I can't admit to making a mistake" that caused G.W.'s support to drop (or his opposition to strengthen)all over again. The more it happens, the more people will start blindly following.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[datdo]

a lot of states actually spend their own money for these kind of things... blue states tend to have higher median incomes => more money paid in states taxes => more money for state expenditures... NJ is a prime example of this: they get 61 cents back for each tax dollar sent but have some of the highest property taxes to make up for it...though NJ also seems to spend money it doesn't have...

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[astar]

I think you use the word politics in a more narrow sense than I do. I think you in effect use it to refer to partisan politics.

I can say a couple nice things about Republicans. Volker a couple weeks ago said something useful about the economy. Ron Paul has a necessary bill to audit the fed with 300 cosponsors. With that number, it has bipartisan support. But he is not a fighter, so Barney Frank came up to him, put his arm around Paul's shoulder and easily convinced Paul to allow his bill to be merged with Frank's. The bill is not likely to be seen again. As it happens, the Dem leadership is greatly afraid of this bill.

I heard something today that should give you some hope. As it happens I have not watched broadcast or cable tv for 30 years. But where I am living now, Fox is always blaring. I looked at it bit for maybe a month to form an opinion and then ignored it. But I still catch snippets. I heard Dick Morris on the Factor show actually tell most of the relevant truth about the health bill. The Republicans have know this for months. What is happening that now they float it? And it actually gets reported.

But I figure congress critters on both sides are largely buckets of warm spit. I put my faith in a rare social phenomena. It was last seen in October 1989, in the DDR. In the US, Birmingham, 1963. But now it started again in the US in August 2009.

Re:Carbon emissions sleep with the fishes

[sumdumass]

Perhaps I am being a bit more narrow then you. However, I want to stress that my point wasn't about being nice to republicans, it was about misrepresenting them which left democrats looking better then they deserved. I've seen too many people want to point the finger at one party or the other when the blame squarely lays in both.

I too am without cable. I gave it up about 5 or so years ago. I watch the local broadcast news though but get a lot of my information from the internet where I can look into more of the so called facts more. I listen to the radio a bit and I know it's predominantly republican biased but I often find myself in disagreement with the hosts. Again, my point wasn't about being nice to republicans, it was about not blaming the democrats too as they clearly had control of congress and a large enough majority that could have stopped the legislation or altered it to however they felt necessary. Indeed, it was a bipartisan blunder- a failure from both sides.

Yet another generalization...

[Anonymous Coward]

Turnpike? Shopping malls? Industrial Sprawl?

Clearly the submitter hasn't been through the Pineland's or seen the beautiful farming communities in the southern part of the state.

NJ != The Sopranos

Re:Yet another generalization...

[spartacus_prime]

Clearly the subby hasn't even been down to the Jersey Shore (you know, the good parts) either. Troll summary, methinks.

So it's cheap...

[schmidt349]

And on the 4 days a year when the sun shines in my adoptive home state, you can help the environment!

Re:So it's cheap...

[afidel]

Yeah, I'm kind of wondering what the payoff is. I know that living in one of the cities with the lowest average solar insolation that I would do way more good for the environment by buying one panel for someone in AZ then plastering my entire roof with panels. Of course like Jersey we DO have a large body of water with a significant amount of available wind energy, so why aren't they building large scale wind farms just offshore instead of subsidizing inefficient use of solar panels?

Re:So it's cheap...

[NoYob]

Solar panels on roofs is an easier sell than big ugly windmills obscuring people's view of the ocean and lakes.

Now, ask yourself, who are the people that live on the ocean and lakes? What kind of political power they have?

Sounds absurd? See "Windmills Ocean Massachusetts Kennedy Martha's Vineyard"

Big ugly industrial infrastructure that benefits society has a place: near poor people.

Re:So it's cheap...

[afidel]

I don't think there are many people with beach houses near Newark. The best spots on the Great Lakes are actually on or over the horizon from shore so it shouldn't be an issue here either. Martha's Vineyard was probably a stupid place to try to spot one of the first offshore farms, next to the Hampton's it's probably got one of the highest concentrations of Billionaires and politicians on the east coast.

Re:So it's cheap...

[Algan]

I don't think there are many people with beach houses near Newark.

Maybe because Newark is nowhere near the shore.

Re:So it's cheap...

[Ihmhi]

why aren't they building large scale wind farms just offshore instead of subsidizing inefficient use of solar panels?

NIMBYs and HOAs, my friend. NIMBYs and HOAs.

Re:So it's cheap...

[Scyber]

In New Jersey, 45 minutes away is "no where near".

Considering the poster was talking about the likelyhood beach houses, I don't think Newark Bay or Port Newark qualify for Algan's interpretation of "the shore". Newark Bay and Port Newark aren't exactly known for their beach houses.

Re:So it's cheap...

[tmosley]

Those are weirdos. I always thought windmills were rather beautiful, so long as they aren't close enough for you to hear the *whoosh* *whoosh* *whoosh*.

Re:So it's cheap...

[pablodiazgutierrez]

Now, ask yourself, who are the people that live on the ocean and lakes?

Spongebob Squarepants?

Re:So it's cheap...

[mqduck]

Why do so many people think windmills are ugly? I think they're quite charming.

Re:So it's cheap...

[DaveGod]

You're not spinning this right.

Big industrial infrastructure benefits poor people with cheaper housing and job creation.

There, I fixed it.

Solar Power

[mfh]

I would love to see new forms of power generation that catch all the hot air we get from websites like Digg.

Re:Solar Power

[Choad Namath]

You're not missing anything. If Slashdot is "news for nerds," Digg is "news for people who think they're nerds just because they know how to use the internet."

Making the most of it.

[Flowstone]

If N.J. can make solar panels such a big part of their state, you'd think the sunnier southern states would catch on. I'm sure texas could make a killing in alternative energy if they put some incentives behind it.

Re:Making the most of it.

[Shag]

I'm amazed by this, having grown up in New Jersey and moved to Hawaii. Props to my home state.

Re:Making the most of it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Solar panels in Texas?

Why are you trying to help the environment? Why do you hate America?

Re:Making the most of it.

[Rtech]

Sunnier? Down here it's rained more or less constantly for the past 30 days, with maybe two or three days of sunshine mixed in. And it's supposed to keep raining all week. Bah. At least it's stayed cool enough that the humidity hasn't sucked.

Re:Making the most of it.

[CraftyJack]

you'd think the sunnier southern states would catch on

Bingo. Worldwide, you'd think Australia would be leading the way, but instead it's Germany.

Re:Making the most of it.

[StonedYoda47]

Props for getting out of Jersey, more like it.

2% by 2012?

[andy1307]

Seriously...WTF is wrong with people...why don't they consider nuclear power?

Re:2% by 2012?

[characterZer0]

Because they do not understand it, and people are scared by things they do not understand.

Re:2% by 2012?

[Bandman]

You know, very technically speaking, solar power IS nuclear power...

Re:2% by 2012?

[Unoriginal Nick]

New Jersey already gets 50% of its electricity from nuclear.

Re:2% by 2012?

[cryptolemur]

Because they do not understand it, and people are scared by things they do not understand.

Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much, operating costs thrice as much and fuel costs infinitely more. And that was 6 years ago, wind has come down since, while nuclear remains the energy of the future...
Oh, and besides high costs and 8-12 years of construction time, nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation. Somehow it's just not what investors are looking for right now.

Re:2% by 2012?

[rah1420]

And me here with no mod points. Hah.

Actually, if you take that argument reductio ad almost-absurdum, almost EVERYTHING (solar, oil, wind, etc.) is more or less nuclear.

Maybe geothermal isn't. Unless you go far enough back up the energy "food chain," I suppose.

Re:2% by 2012?

[Unoriginal Nick]

Replying to myself because I was still looking for this when I posted. Year-to-date (to June), there have been 16,920 thousand megawatthours of electricity from nuclear out of 29,244 - almost 58%.

Re:2% by 2012?

[DirkDaring]

How much would that have cost to put on his roof?

Re:2% by 2012?

[harperska]

Well, actually geothermal is nuclear. The reason the core of the earth is still molten is because of the energy released by radioisotope decay in the rock.

Re:2% by 2012?

[selven]

Nuclear fuel is actually quite cheap, especially if you use a proper fast breeder reactor (which also solves the waste problem).

Re:2% by 2012?

[richiem]

You do realize that New Jersey already gets more than 50% of its electricity from nuclear. http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesnj.html The national average is 20%. BTW, largely as the result of nuclear we have some of the highest electric rates in the country. Why then does NJ have an air pollution problem. Well it seems our neighbors to the south and west like to burn coal and get really cheap electricity while we get to breathe in what those plants belch out.

Re:2% by 2012?

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

You know, very technically speaking, solar power IS nuclear power...

And, as we all know, being technically correct is the very best kind of correct.

Re:2% by 2012?

[vertinox]

Seriously...WTF is wrong with people...why don't they consider nuclear power?

I don't see anything wrong with it, but Uncle Sam won't let me build a breeder reactor in my back yard and go off grid.

I think the real benefit of solar power is that it removes you from the already over taxed grid which is more likely to still fail even if we have more nuclear power in place.

If power is produced locally then you avoid having to use the grid and paying the power company in the first place.

Re:2% by 2012?

[smitty777]

Come on - seriously? Haven't we covered this in /. before?

http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/09/08/1746226/US-Nuclear-Power-Industry-Poised-For-a-Comeback?from=rss

Re:2% by 2012?

[Tweenk]

Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much

But it works 3-5 times as often, regardless of weather, and can be built almost anywhere. The only required condition is geological and hydrological stability of the area. Oftentimes existing sites can be used to build extra capacity. Wind farms have an actual mean power output of about 20-30% their peak power output, and of course they are intermittent.

I once saw an article saying that with a lot of intermittent sources the probability of all of them being out at the same time asymptotically approaches zero, but that would be true only if the works/doesn't work state of the sources was uncorrelated. Unfortunately it is to a very large extent (e.g. there are significant periods of time when 100% of the area of US is not insolated at all, and for smaller countries the situation is even worse).

operating costs thrice as much

See above. Moreover this cost could be brought down a lot (probably 2- or 3-fold) by creating a few standardised designs, or better yet a single modular design of nuclear plants, that would be used nationwide for all new deployments.

and fuel costs infinitely more.

That doesn't mean they are high. Actually they are less than 1% of operating costs.

nuclear remains the energy of the future...

Nuclear power still generates more energy than wind power in the US.

There some people that say otherwise, but it's a myth; they talk in terms of peak power output, which wind farms cannot realistically achieve for any sustained periods of time. On the other hand, nuclear plants are entirely capable of consistently running at 100% of their rated capacity, sometimes even more (power uprates).

Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms. On the other hand, there are several countries which get more than 30% of their electricity from nuclear plants, and at least 3 (France, Belgium and Slovakia) that get more than half.

nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation

Safety: No civilian killed in nuclear power operations since 1986.
Waste: The idiots from environmental groups keep saying it's a big problem, and at the same time keep attacking all the reasonable solutions that could be implemented to solve it (underground burial, reprocessing, breeder reactors, etc).
Proliferation: Nuclear fuel in conventional reactors is only slightly enriched and not suitable for making nuclear weapons. There are breeder reactor designs that make extracting plutonium from them highly impractical.

Re:2% by 2012?

[khallow]

Also, you have the heat of formation of the Earth and tidal forces. So you are technically a third correct (using the WAGs that each source of heating contributes about a third).

Re:2% by 2012?

[Yvanhoe]

Because you don't want your neighbor storing uranium in the same way mine stores coal ?
Because you don't want people who still put old batteries in the trash to dispose of nuclear waste ?
Nuclear has some advantages, solar has others. First of them, having your own generator at home.

Re:2% by 2012?

[SatanicPuppy]

The thing that pisses me off is people who think that there is only room for 1 energy solution. If we can get wind and solar up to 10% of the whole, we'll be doing very nicely, and there will still be plenty of room for nuclear power.

Right now 50% of our power generation is fricking COAL. Coal plus petrolem, plus natural gas...that runs about 75%! Anything we can do to lower that will be a good thing.

Re:2% by 2012?

[GodfatherofSoul]

You want to talk about subsidized power...

Re:2% by 2012?

[Phyvo]

I thought that nuclear power was limited mainly by fuel. That is, there simply isn't enough uranium to power the US. At the very least, uranium isn't exactly renewable, is it?

Am I wrong?

Re:2% by 2012?

[HanClinto]

Yes, you are wrong.

The only reason we are tied to Uranium-235 is because of restrictions that make it illegal to recycle (reprocess) nuclear fuel in this country, hence we have a surplus of "waste" (that can still be used in a breeder reactor -- we're just legally prevented from doing so) that we either bury (stupid) or sell to France (who isn't so ignorant when it comes to nukes).

In short, there is plenty of nuclear fuel -- we're just not allowed to use it because Carter thought that recycling nuclear fuel could lead to proliferation of arms-grade plutonium -- we of course have long since now known that it doesn't, but that hasn't done anything to remove these laws outlawing nuclear fuel recycling.

Here is a link for further reading.

Re:2% by 2012?

[apoc.famine]

See NMRI for details. Irrational fear is what's wrong with people.

Re:2% by 2012?

[jhol13]

There is exactly one problem with nuclear: it does not scale up.

Do the math: find out the chance of a nuclear reactor catastrophic accident and multiply that with the number of reactors needed (either for USA or whole world). You'll end up with a number which is "not nice".

You, of course, did remember to add preprocessing and postprocessing of the fuel, transportation, etc, didn't you.

Re:2% by 2012?

[rossdee]

"and can be built almost anywhere."

NIMBY

Re:2% by 2012?

[mcbevin]

Finally, there is no country in the world that gets more than 10% of its electricity from wind farms.

What, except for Denmark which is over 20%? And Spain which is slightly over 10%, with a few other European countries such as Germany expected to pass 10% in the next few years.

I don't have anything against nuclear power, but obviously wind has its very important place in a sustainable future making up 20%-30% (up to eventually potentially around 50% as the grid becomes able to support it) of all power generation, while leaving the rest for nuclear, solar, etc. Wind has competitive cost comparable to nuclear however you spin it, and obviously less risks.

I could agree that nuclear still has a place in the near to medium term future if you consider the risks of nuclear to be in any case preferable to burning coal (as I do), but I don't follow why your support of nuclear has to translate into criticising (somewhat inaccurately) the very valuable place of wind power in our future.

Re:2% by 2012?

[mqduck]

Can we not have yet another round of everybody agreeing with each other that nuclear power is awesome and popular opinion is woefully ignorant? It's been beaten into the ground around here and I doubt anybody has anything new to add.

Re:2% by 2012?

[Solandri]

Or perhaps because they do understand it? Compared to wind energy, the initial cost are twice as much, operating costs thrice as much and fuel costs infinitely more. And that was 6 years ago, wind has come down since, while nuclear remains the energy of the future...

In a global survey of energy costs (PDF warning) looking at construction, operating, and fuel costs; nuclear costs about US$31-$53 per MWh. Wind ranges from about US$45 in the US to over $140 in the Czech Republic, about $65 per Mwh overall. The U.S. figures are lower because the U.S. amortizes wind farms' construction costs over 40 years, while the rest of the world does it over 30 years. So $60/MWh is probably a more realistic figure, putting Wind at about twice the cost of Nuclear.

Oh, and besides high costs and 8-12 years of construction time, nuclear energy has to deal with safety, waste and proliferation. Somehow it's just not what investors are looking for right now.

Most of these concerns are entirely political. The huge construction time is due to excessive regulation due to (mostly) unfounded fears over nuclear power's safety. Nuclear power is the safest form of electricity generation man has invented (PDF, page 240-241). Even including Chernobyl, it has the fewest number of fatalities per GWh of electricity generated. (The most dangerous widely-used power source is actually hydro, with large numbers of fatalities associated with dam failures.) In 50+ years of commercial nuclear power generation in the U.S., there has not been a single fatality despite providing ~20% of our electricity. There have already been a few wind power maintenance-related fatalities despite their almost non-existent contribution to the power grid.

Nuclear waste is also a red herring. A 750 MW nuclear plant (about the electricity needed to power a city of a half million) produces about enough spent fuel in a year to fit in one or two bathtubs. Add in incidental irradiated material (concrete, etc) and it's about enough to fill your bathroom. That's all the waste there is for providing electricity to half a million people for a year

In comparison, a 750 MW coal plant will burn about 3-5 million tons of coal a year, producing 5-10 million tons of CO2, and releasing about 20% of the particulate matter into the atmosphere including a lot of radioactive trace elements. In fact, these trace radioactive materials contain more energy than the coal itself (that is to say, burning coal automatically produces more radioactive waste per MWh generated than nuclear). If you're truly worried about radioactive waste being released into the environment, you should be screaming for all the coal plants to be replaced by nuclear plants ASAP so at least the radioactivity is contained instead of released into the atmosphere.

Furthermore, a great deal of the spent fuel can actually be reused. Conventional nuclear plants only use about 5% of the energy contained in the fuel. The rest is treated as waste because...

Proliferation is the only real concern. Extracting the remaining ~95% of the energy from nuclear fuel thus far requires the use of breeder reactors, which unfortunately produce weapons-grade plutonium as a byproduct. There are some new reactor designs which try to minimize this (as well as an old design canceled in the 1970s).

Re:2% by 2012?

[spidkit]

You know, very technically speaking, solar power IS nuclear power...

Yeah, and the reactor is pretty much in the right place too.

Re:2% by 2012?

[rdnetto]

That's slowly changing. I read an article yesterday that asserted that the percentage of people (here in Victoria, Australia) in support of nuclear power had reached 49%. Admittedly still not a majority, but it's growing. Apparently most of the opposition comes from people who lived through the cold war, Chenobyl, etc.

Tax dollars

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

The real question is:

Would it make more sense to subsidize options like small scale solar in order to encourage homes/businesses to "go greener" and to take some load off the central grid?

OR

Does it make more sense to spend that money fixing the current rickety grid and then put all that green capacity in places that actually get a lot of sunlight all year?

Re:Tax dollars

[benjamindees]

Here's a novel idea. How about we create some sort of system whereby individuals choose for themselves which of those options is more beneficial to them. A market of some sort, perhaps.

And then, instead of endless hand-wringing over what might be the most efficient way to build things, government can stick to easy things like breaking up monopolies and eliminating negative externalities such as pollution, force, and fraud.

Re:Tax dollars

[JLavezzo]

I'll answer both questions with one word and a link to Wikipedia:

Yes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy

Re:Tax dollars

[CaptSlaq]

The real question is:

Would it make more sense to subsidize options like small scale solar in order to encourage homes/businesses to "go greener" and to take some load off the central grid?

OR

Does it make more sense to spend that money fixing the current rickety grid and then put all that green capacity in places that actually get a lot of sunlight all year?

Transport losses suck. I only have a loose grasp of the physics, but basically power/voltage loss gets pretty insane when you start moving large amounts over large distances. Perhaps someone who has more knowledge in the area can speak to this.

Re:Tax dollars

[benjamindees]

Um, how is that a false dichotomy exactly? Both options can be viewed in terms of raw materials (silicon, copper, steel, energy, etc) and labor, each of which has a certain cost relative to each other. If the object is to minimize cost, or resource usage, or labor, then it should be obvious that putting fewer panels in an area with more sunshine could be cheaper and easier than installing more panels in a place with less sunshine, depending on the relative costs of the labor and materials required.

Re:Tax dollars

[Yvanhoe]

To answer this you have to put a value on individual independence toward energy generation.

Kills so many birds with one stone...

[Covalent]

Everyone is waiting for the silver bullet to fix our oil addiction, global warming, and our fragile electric grid. This kind of approach does all three of those things. By "incentivizing" solar power, you can make it cheap enough for John Q. Public to build you a distributed power grid. Keep this up and you can start decommissioning your dirtiest power plants and use the funds you were going to use for new power plant construction for improving the grid or additional incentives. The third aspect (global warming) doesn't get solved by this, but it gets reduced, and in theory if you do this enough you can start doing sequestration to actually reduce CO2 levels in the air.

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[NewWorldDan]

No, this is absolutely retarded. They're not "incentivizing" solar power, they're subsidizing it. Heavily. You and I are paying for it. That's money that could be doing a lot of actual good if put to better use. We've been waiting 30 years for the solar industry to develop an economical product and it hasn't happened yet.

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[Burz]

Bitter much?

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[StikyPad]

We've been waiting 30 years for the solar industry to develop an economical product and it hasn't happened yet.

And subsidizing creates incentive, which hopefully leads to economies of scale. It's not the development of solar that needs a push; it's the adoption. The problem is that people either don't consider the value of solar, or else they only consider the *immediate* benefit of solar, which isn't as great as the long-term benefits. Increasing the immediate benefit, through subsidies or anything else, leverages people's short-term thinking to accomplish long term goals.

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[atamido]

I don't know about this particular program, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were federal funds involved. If there are federal funds involved, all tax payers are paying for the systems.

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[atamido]

Would you provide links to solar panel projects that are net energy positive (have provided more energy than they took to produce and install). Heck, link to projects that are at least half way to paying off their real (un-subsidized) price.

There are good solar projects out there, but solar panels are far from efficient. Solar panels are a great way to get electricity in remote locations. For supplementing grid power, they are poor at best.

I think (hope) that some day this will change, but we are not there yet. And at the current speed, we won't be there for decades.

Re:Kills so many birds with one stone...

[Mr. Arbusto]

If there are federal funds involved, all tax payers are paying for the systems.

Actually, the residents of the state of New Jersey (like many states) pay more in taxes to the federal government than it receives in federal funds. So any federal funds paid to New Jersey can technically be considered a return of their own taxes.

That is a load of crap. There would be no point in pay taxes to the federal government if they just gave it back with strings attached. There are other things taxes get you at the federal level....like a standing army to protect your state from Canada.

No, it's very, very expensive...

[tomhath]

FTA:

The savings is what got New Jerseyans Bob and Mary Keppel to install a 6-kilowatt solar system on the roof of their Cinnaminson, N.J. home this past summer.... The full price of the project, including installation, came to $48,000. Right away, the state sent a subsidy check for $10,500 that the Keppel’s signed over to the contractors to buy supplies. Using computer software, their contractor estimates that they will get a $11,250 federal tax credit this year. That would cut the total cost to $26,250, a 45-percent reduction.

How do rebates "cut the total cost"? The system cost was $48,000 for a mere 6kw of capacity. It doesn't matter if the homeowners or the taxpayers foot the bill, it's still $48,000, that's not cheap by any measure.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[DirkDaring]

Yes, and they obviously don't see into the future when the system pays itself off and actually begins to save money...

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[tomhath]

Just the interest on $48k is probably twice their monthly electric bill. No way this is ever going to pay off the investment plus interest.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[Foolicious]

And yet others obviously don't see how long it would actually take to actually break even on it -- especially if you're financing the cost of putting it up with borrowed money, your own or somebody else's.

If you want to make it about cost savings, put 27000 USD into your favorite low-risk savings vehicle. Then wait the estimated amount of time it would take for you to break even on the 27000 you spent for the 6kW solar rig. Compare your cost savings from the solar rig vs. the investment. If you put your dough, for example, in a 10 year CD at 3.25%, you'd come away with ~10000. Then subtract what you (supposedly, by estimate) would have saved with the solar setup. Or...what if you invested half of that 27000, and spent the other half weatherproofing your home (also tax benefits there)?

A local guy put a 2kW rig on his roof. He was proud of his work, which is fine, but admitted it would take him 53 years to break even on the cost of the materials and install. I don't know how much maintenance is involved in solar configurations.

It wasn't about cost savings. That's fine if you have money to spend on the cause du jour. I just don't have that kind of money and my state doesn't either (Michigan). Truth be told, my country doesn't either.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[Jared555]

Depending on the person they may not be paying interest on it. Also, eventually (there may be some already) there will probably be ultra low/no interest loans for people installing solar.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[Burz]

It shows how banks have failed us by ignoring the push for domestic solar energy. This type of renewable energy has proved an excellent (low-risk) investment so you'd think that banks would be eager to offer financing at low interest rates.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[mengel]

Hmm.. $48k at 6% interest is $2800/year or $240/month. That's a pretty good electric bill in a lot of places. Now whether it's sufficient to get rid of their electric bill altogether, I can't say.

And of course, once you pay off the loan (5 years?) you're ahead of the game.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[tomhath]

There is always an interest cost on an investment. You pay it or you sacrifice the opportunity to earn it. http://www.answers.com/topic/opportunity-cost And please stop trying to use subsidized costs (after rebate, after tax incentive, low interest loans, etc); those don't change the cost, they only shift the burden of paying it to someone else. How about if the Federal government subsidized 100% of the cost of a nuclear reactor, would that make the electricity it generates free?

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[GodfatherofSoul]

From TFA:

Considering all three sources of funding, their contractors estimate that it should take the couple a little under five years for the solar panels to pay for themselves.

So, they'd pay for themselves in 10 years in gross.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[Mr. Arbusto]

To put it into prospective, I have 80KW 3 Phase Natural Gas generator that at full load takes about 200 cubic feet of Natural Gas an hour.

Current rates for residential Natural Gas are ~14.20 dollars per thousand cubic feet. At full load producing 80KW it costs about 68.20 dollars to run for a day producing enough electricity to power the neighborhood. So, we have an 80KW generator for $10K, another $10K for installation, the remaining $28K can run it for another 400 days.

There aren't any economics of scale for this pricing either. residential rates are about 2x that than commercial rates for gas and efficiencies power generation increase with larger scale.

So yes, a mere 6kw of theoretic peak power creation for 48k. That doesn't include the maintainence required for the installation, nor the reduced winter power nor the diminished output over the life of the system.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[AshtangiMan]

You're forgetting the cost of the utility. In the investment case you have a recurring monthly cost (the electric bill) that offsets the investment income. In the solar case, the whole point is that you are (hopefully, if you sized the system correctly) ending up with a $0 per month electric bill. If you include that as part of the financial analysis it comes up a bit differently, though it is still an expensive endeavor and one that takes 15-30 years to payback. There are other incentives for the solar case. My electric company will pay me $.13/ kWh of electricity produced (that is whether or not I use it) and will also run my meter back for excess production. Factor that in and installing the system results in a net cash flow immediately, and takes the payback (for my case and a 3kW system) to about 8 years.

Re:No, it's very, very expensive...

[Foolicious]

Good point. You are right about the cost of utilities as well as selling back to the utility, but I did mean to include said costs, albeit I didn't explicitly focus on compounding savings associated with it.

Essentially, however, (and I say this very respectfully) your pointing this out is nitpicking because the 10 year CD I used as an example is practically ridiculous; your use of 15-30 is much more accurate. The longer it takes to recoup the cost of the solar investment, the more money you can make via an financial investment, even one that earns less than 5%.

My point is that if you're looking to save a butt-load of money, adding solar isn't the way to do it even if your fellow taxpayers are footing half the bill and especially when you live in a place where good "solar days" are, for all intents and purposes, few and far between. Ultimately, the only way to settle the "discussion" would be for you to keep track and check back in, in 8 years and see if your estimates proved true.

Furthermore, it doesn't matter how much money you may save in the long run if you can't handle the upfront costs. That's the spot I'm in.

Also, something else I am curious about it the maintenance of solar rigs. This might factor into things more than people think...or maybe not. I just don't know.

Nonsense, the endgame is the same though . . .

[228e2]

Would never happen in Maryland . . . BGE enjoys fucking me sideways every month. Why would states like mine, who dont charge you by kW used, but instead average your usage with everyone in your apartment complex and bill you all the same, do this?

Re:Nonsense, the endgame is the same though . . .

[mspohr]

In California it is illegal to do this... you should check with your state consumer protection organization. You should be able to demand that you get a bill for your individual usage.

Re:Nonsense, the endgame is the same though . . .

[228e2]

Well, I just moved here from Michigan, the land of the normal where you got an individual bill. Ive been told that we can do what I am on now, which is the 'average' plan, or pay a flat rate year round. Ofcourse both cases are pure bull, but I really dont have the time to be given the runaround which all this would entail. Sadly, i've almost accepted my fate (pretty much because im just surprised no one in this lovely state has tried to challenge this) :(

Financing

[bkaul01]

Wouldn't it be great if someone came up with a way to take advantage of the value of your house to allow you to pay for improvements over time? We could call it a "home equity loan" ... Seriously, I don't see the need for the state to subsidize home improvements, especially ones that will provide an economic benefit to the home owner over time.

What I don't get is why these features aren't more popular on new builds: at that stage, the added cost is minimized and will naturally be included in the buyer's mortgage and thus paid for over time. Maybe not always solar per se, but new homes built with insulated concrete forms and having geothermal-heatsink HVAC systems installed when the foundation is dug are becoming quite price competitive with traditional "stick-built" homes (dramatically reduced labor costs offset the increased material costs, or so I hear from a friend who's a home builder). The solar roof would still be a bit of an upgrade, but the energy bills are so much lower that the extra cost of such houses can be quickly recovered.

Re:Financing

[commodore64_love]

>>>"home equity loan"

Upgrading your house with a solar roof only makes sense if you're going to stay there for ~20 years, and few people do. Americans are very mobile, and even if someone does plan to stay in one place, oftentimes economic reality (layoffs) force them to leave before they had a chance to payoff their solar roof. Therefore people choose the path of least risk - don't invest.

As for New Jersey providing incentives to install these solar panels on electric poles, I think they'll find the longterm maintenance cost will be far higher than planned, and those panels will eventually be removed.

Re:Financing

[AvitarX]

Except the 4% HEL cost is going to dramatically cut into the savings from the solar power (perhaps this means the tech isn't ready).

If the state has the premise that they benefit (perhaps less capitol investing in infrastructure for example), it makes sense to subsidize to increase overall efficiency in the state (after-all the bank profit is likely far less local than saved money in state. I am not saying it is right, simply that there are situations where the HEL is too expensive to allow for community good to be done. If the solar is not a community good, then the subsidy is un-ethical.

Re:Financing

[MyLongNickName]

"Upgrading your house with a solar roof only makes sense if you're going to stay there for ~20 years"

Untrue. That may be the payoff point, but the other factor is that the value of your house increases. This means if you move out in five years, you recoup part of the sunk cost in the sale price.

Re:Financing

[drinkypoo]

Good luck with that; the housing market in America is going to keep falling until most of the baby boomers are dead. The crash should crescendo around 2025, although various factors could kill them off earlier I suppose.

Re:Financing

[gander666]

Furthermore, the actual cost of a complete system is quite high.

This year, we took the plunge, and installed a 7.4KW system. Total system price $49,000. Fortunately, my neighbors subsidized it through a fee in their monthly utility bill to the tune of $23,200. Add in another $8,400 of state and federal tax credits, the net out of pocket (and covered by refinancing my home and extracting the capital) was $17,400.

Living in a high sunlight state like Arizona, I produce, on the average $4.50 worth of electricity a day, roughly 50KWH at $0.08 per KWH.

At this rate, it will take roughly 12 years to pay for itself. If there weren't subsidies, then it would take roughly 30 years to break even.

Yes it is getting less expensive, and we have high quality panels (SunPower 225 watt panels) and a matching inverter, but even going bargain basement, the financials don't work until fossil fuel costs triple. Our system was $6.62/watt, installed. Some of the large fields being done (grid connected) are approaching $3/watt installed, but they don't scale well to residential. They use thin film PV, and the energy density in the panels is much less ( less than 1/2 the watts per panel, so you need 2X the panels to compare ).

It will get there, but it isn't imminent, and unless the government subsidizes the installations, it will die.

Re:Financing

[gander666]

Sadly, a nice kitchen is worth more than PV or all the green you can install on a house.

Re:Financing

[commodore64_love]

>>>the other factor is that the value of your house increases.

By ~40,000 dollars? I doubt it.

Re:Financing

[MyLongNickName]

Well, then, it obviously not worth spending 40k on the system in the first place then. It ain't complicated, folks. Basic present value math.

Re:Financing

[commanderfoxtrot]

If the taxpayer wasn't funding your solar panels, it would be financially unviable.

Sadly, solar power at this level will always be pointless- far better to spend our taxpayers' money on something meaningful (e.g. a good power station) than waste time and money on subsidising PV panels on individual houses.

I wish you well with your payback in 12 years!

I hope governments (US and UK) stop subsidising these panels and let them succeed or fail on their merits, instead of an opaque quasi-benefits system.

Is solar power a viable power option: 1000km x 1000km of Sahara solar power is enough to power the world

Re:Financing

[Retric]

They are assuming 4.5% efficiency and electricity as a 1:1 replacement for all energy needless to say their numbers are totally wacked. Average power per square meter is around 1000W * 8 hours / 24hours a day * % efficiency. So at 10% you get 33W/M not 15 but we already have 30% efferent solar cells. Beyond that using sunlight to generate electricity to heat water is stupid. Directly generating hot water from sunlight produces an average power output of around 300W/M which is 20 times higher than their estimate. Toss in some wind turbines and the amount of land required continues to drop.

Also electric cars require far less energy than gas cars so that 15TW figure is going to drop even more.

PS: The world's total supply of energy extractable from fossil fuels (Oil + Coal + Natural Gas) is less than the amount of energy extractable from renewable sources in one year. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption)

Ze Germans

[buback]

Germany is at a higher latitude than New Jersey, and so gets less solar radiation per square meter, yet they produce more of their energy from solar then the whole of the USA.

The only problem with NJ is that they require you to be a licensed electrician to install the systems. I can understand having an electrician inspect your work, and doing the actual tie-in to the utility, but this shuts out many DIY projects. and since labor costs amount to about 50% of the total cost, DIY can save you significant money. Imagine if you needed an electrician to inspect your self assembled computer before you plugged it into the wall.

That being said, I'm taking an installer class in NY state (where the requirements for installing are different for each municipality). Properly sizing and planing a rooftop solar array is not something that can/should be done solely by a layman. In fact the first thing we learned it how to inspect a roof structure to determine if it is suitable for installing panels. If a homeowner needs to spend $15000 on a new roof, there goes the budget for solar panels. Also, in order to get the incentives states offer, you'll need to strictly follow their rules, which few layman will be able to wade through.

BTW everyone should check their ACTUAL $/kWh on their electric bill. do this by diving the kWh used by your bill total. you'll find that it is more than the advertised rate, because it includes infrastructure costs and other stuff. Most electricity around NJ/NY will cost about $0.18-0.40/kWh, which is much more than the $0.04-0.08 that you usually hear about in the news. At 40 cents per kWh, Solar can become very economical.

Mod Parent Up

[rwv]

Correct. NJ gets 1914 MW from 4 Nuclear Power reactors, which is about 50% of the state's power. They get 30% from Natural gas and 15% from Coal, and 5% from alternative sources.

Source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/page/at_a_glance/states/statesnj.html

Technically...

[jmerlin]

wouldn't it be out-absorbs? Or out-sucks? Or just.. sucks more?

Re:That's great to hear

[GameMaster]

Well, it would make sense that America would have two armpits. j/k

I'm From NJ...

[smitty777]

...I guess this article explains why my electricity bill is so high. I pay 10 time more here than in any other state I've lived in. Perhaps having so much free energy requires a lot of paperwork.

Macro economics not micro economics

[James McP]

You realize that all states subsidize businesses and utilities already, right? Low interest loans, access to the bond market, tax deductions, heck, some companies get to keep all the sales tax they collect.

These kinds of things make sense at a scale that most people can't (or won't) think about. You can get an infrastructure built for less if you are willing to commit to funding a larger system over building multiple small systems. Suppliers will lower prices on bulk orders or provide long-term price guarantees, much fewer lawyer fees from repeated negotiations, less time lost in negotiations which allows inflationary forces to increase costs, etc, etc.

So yes, the cost of this installation is subsidized by everyone else in NJ but everyone else will ultimately benefit by reductions (or lack of increases) in their power bills when infrastructure improvements are deferred or canceled entirely due to reduced load on the power system due to those subsidized installations.

This program is actually a "triple threat" scenario. It 1) stimulates the economy since in general every $1 spent on a project actually gets spent multiple times. 2) It is a Capital improvements that lower costs and 3) it benefits the overall environment by lowering hydrocarbon emissions from coal plants.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[MyLongNickName]

Slight problem. If I am paying to put a solar panel on your house, I am giving you reduced rates AND making the value of your house go up by a significant percentage of what I am giving you. There is very little benefit to the public as a whole.

If you were talking about government subsidizing a solar power plant, that would be an entirely different scenario altogether. The public as a whole would be getting the benefit.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[careysub]

Slight problem. If I am paying to put a solar panel on your house, I am giving you reduced rates AND making the value of your house go up by a significant percentage of what I am giving you. There is very little benefit to the public as a whole. If you were talking about government subsidizing a solar power plant, that would be an entirely different scenario altogether. The public as a whole would be getting the benefit.

Bigger problem with your analysis. You are claiming that 4.5 KW of solar capacity added to a centralized power plant benefits the public, but the same 4.5 KW of capacity on top of a private residence does not? Can you explain how this is? Both capacity increments feed their power directly into the grid, and in both cases the private residence draws its power from the grid.I can't see how one is a public benefit yet the other is not on this basis.

Is the claim then that the fact that a private individual owns the solar system rather than, say, a private company deprives the public of a benefit? Don't follow that logic either.

And you do realize that a private household is kicking in most of the money to build the power system right? That the subsidy is mobilizing private capital to invest in power production, just as it would in the centralized power plant case? And that the space devoted to power production is not taking up any new land do so?

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[khallow]

This program is actually a "triple threat" scenario. It 1) stimulates the economy since in general every $1 spent on a project actually gets spent multiple times. 2) It is a Capital improvements that lower costs and 3) it benefits the overall environment by lowering hydrocarbon emissions from coal plants.

1) is a bogus point. That money could have been spent some other way, without government involvement, and probably have a greater effect (since the initial spending would coincide better with the interests of the person with the money and there'd be less government overhead) as a result. As for point 2), I don't believe the current slightly lower ongoing costs of solar power systems justifies the high initial costs. Point 3) has dubious value since no one can seem to put a rational number on how much hydrocarbon emissions really should cost. And it distorts the economy, by encouraging what would otherwise be unsound investments.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[MyLongNickName]

Bigger problem with your analysis. You are claiming that 4.5 KW of solar capacity added to a centralized power plant benefits the public, but the same 4.5 KW of capacity on top of a private residence does not? Can you explain how this is?

Short answer: The subsidized person gets the benefit of the electricity production. He is not putting a public solar plant on his private residence. He controls the solar, and can use it for his own uses or sell it back to the grid. How can you possibly say that you get all the benefit of a public electric grid and the private homeowner reduces his personal load and can sell back to the grid? Somehow, you are pulling a benefit out of thin air.

Long Answer
Okay, let's say in both cases the 4.5KW solar capacity would cost $10,000, regardless of whether it is centralized or not. We will assume this thing last forever with $500 per year maintenance. Let us assume also that regardless, it will produce $2,000 worth of electricity I suspect that it would be cheaper per KW to centralize, but for the sake of this argument, I will concede this point.

Joe Subsidized gets this thing added to his house on the public dime. Each year he personally pays $500 for $2,000 worth of electricity. What do I get out of it? Theoretically, a slightly reduced demand should drive costs down a miniscule amount. IN practice, though, we are simply saying that we will not build more plants to keep up with demand, so I get nothing except for the $10,000 bill

Now i use that $10,000 for a public plant. No different than the scenario as before. Except now, I get the benefit of the cheap electricity to me. Sure, I have to pay maintenance on it, but that is outweighed by the cheaper electricity. Now, my $10k will not build a plant, but pooled together it would. If it is a viable choice, then that is the way to go.

In your model, the solar panel on the private residence would have to be used strictly for powering the grid, or the homeowner himself would have to pay market rates for the electric generation from his solar panel.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[commodore64_love]

The 4500 watt only benefits that ONE homeowner who is getting $0 or near-zero monthly bills while us poor slobs still pay $300 a month. I frankly don't see why I should have to pay higher taxes to fund the subsidy for your $0 a month privilege. Sorry if that sounds selfish but it's also honest.

Whereas a 4500 watt installed at the central plant or other company-owned property benefits ALL the citizens with reduced bills.

The latter example provides for the improvement of the general welfare... all benefit, not just one.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[commodore64_love]

>>>Is the claim then that the fact that a private individual owns the solar system

But in New Jersey the individual only pays around 50% of the cost, so I would argue he is only entitled to half the generated electricity. The other 50% should be split off the solar panels and dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires for the benefit of other neighbors who paid the other half of the bill. That would be fair.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[drinkypoo]

I don't think subsidies are the answer to all economic problems or anything, but there is another benefit to putting the panels on top of people's houses; we don't have to put them somewhere else. The homeowner is motivated to maintain the system, so no public utility has to bear the cost of maintenance. You also get any unused peak power, which is when we need it most. I'd like to see the subsidies restricted to installations which are estimated to produce more power than will be used.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[Coren22]

If the plant is a central plant, who gets paid for the electricity production? Often times a corporation. When you distribute the power plant among people, the people make the money from it, not the corporation. Would you rather the money go to a corporation or a lot of people? This is where the real difference lies. Personally, I would rather it went into the person's pockets, because then there is less waste then with a corporation.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[Coren22]

When a subsidised power plant is built, who do you think makes the money from the power generation? In your example, it should be the government in proportion for the amount paid in. Do you really think this is how public funded power plants operate? I highly doubt it.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[atamido]

Two problems:

1. You are still paying a lot of money so that one person has their utility bill drop to almost nothing (and no, almost all funds for this come from taxes). And your bill will never drop an appreciable amount.

2. Scales of efficiency. You spend a lot more dollars per watt to install a dinky solar panel on one person's house than you do building a solar plant. They only make sense as a personal investment, but solar panels are still a terrible investment due to production costs.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[careysub]

... But in New Jersey the individual only pays around 50% of the cost, so I would argue he is only entitled to half the generated electricity. The other 50% should be split off the solar panels and dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires for the benefit of other neighbors who paid the other half of the bill. That would be fair.

Actually all of the electricity is dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires. The homeowner actually only gets an offset for the electricity that is consumed from those wires, down to $0. Any excess production is free electricity for the utility, and it turns out the utility is getting a good deal on the offset cost as well - all of the solar generated electricity is valuable peak power, but offsets one-for-one electricity use of which is only partly peak power. And then there is the savings on the capacity that would have had to be added at a central power plant instead (an expensive an inefficient peaking plant at that), the cost of which otherwise would be charged to all ratepayers.

You need to look at the whole picture, not just part of it, before declaring what is "fair".

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[James McP]

Your math is flawed. Let's start over.

In the article 45% of the install subsidized. So in your $10,000 install Joe pays $5500. The article states a 5-year return period. For simplicity we're going to say that the solar panels produce $1100 of electricity per year. There are some issues with inflation, opportunity cost of investment, maintenance, etc but we'll assume the $1100 reflects those adjustments.

So that means over the 20-year life of the solar panels, Joe gets $22,000 worth of power from a $5500 investment. That amounts to a 8% annual return on investment which is about the median for a 20-year stockmarket investment after adjusting for inflation (http://www.investmentu.com/IUEL/2005/20050509.html). Obviously, Joe's payout is not a spectacular government bailout.

While you're right that centralized power generation is cheaper, distribution eats into that. Miles of copper, substations, control systems, and raw distribution losses are a pain. Plus there's the discussion of buying/retasking land for singular megawatt solar arrays.

The government investment has the immediate advantageS of:
*stimulating the economy with construction
*contributes to the overall health of NJ by *reducing coal fired coal emissions (coal was 50% of NJ's power in 2005 http://apps1.eere.energy.gov/states/electricity.cfm/state=NJ) with the associated reductions in healthcare/medicaid costs
*reduces the need for additional distribution system
*doesn't require additional land acquisition *doesn't adversely affect the ecology
*convinces average people to invest at a time they might save

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[commodore64_love]

>>>When a subsidised power plant is built, who do you think makes the money from the power generation?

Stockholders of course, but as I said before, if my taxes are going to go up to build solar, I'd rather see the solar be in a government-regulated monopoly (like BGE) because then I gain some benefit from the free solar electricity and reduced bills. In contrast if my taxes go up to buy my neighbor a solar roof, he gains a $0 monthly bill, and I gain nothing but the higher taxes. Screw that.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[commodore64_love]

>>>Actually all of the electricity is dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires.

This is false. Based upon researching and talking directly to solar owners, 100% of the solar gets eaten by the home with the panel and never goes anywhere. Your statement is more accurate if it reads: "0% of the electricity is dumped directly to the publicly-owned wires." It's the rare house that generates more electricity than it consumes.

I'm sorry but this is a shitty deal for me. I'm paying higher taxes to subsidize the solar panel cost, my neighbor's getting $0 or near-zero monthly bills, and I'm getting nothing in return. PASS. Locate the solar panel(s) at a central point with the electricity distributed equally amongst all neighbors, then at least I'll get a few dollars off my bill each month instead of getting nothing.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[commodore64_love]

>>>You need to look at the whole picture, not just part of it, before declaring what is "fair".

Yes indeed. The big picture is that the government is acting like a thief in the night, to take my money from my wallet and give it to someone else. I don't mind helping feed the poor, or giving them shelter, but when I have to pay for my neighbor's new Lexus, or home improvement projects, or healthcare to liposuction their fat legs, that's going too far. Pay your own damn bills with your own damn money; stop raiding your neighbors' wallets.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[Coren22]

You mean the greedy bastards with the acronym BGE?

You won't get lower bills, they will continue to charge whatever the government allows them to charge, and the profit goes into their pocket. I would rather see a distributed system where the reliability is gained from having it massively parallel, then in one spot. It is much harder for a cloud to cover an entire state then a single location in the state, as well as with a centralized plant, there is rarely going to be redundancy.

When your neighbor is subsidized for the solar roof, his electricity prices go down by just as much as the power he produces...think of it as rent on his roof.

When a power company (BGE...) gets a subsidy to build a new power plant, they get to charge for the power whatever the government allows them, which will be more then it costs to run the power station, so you are paying rent on the power station that the gov already paid for.

So, as you may have noticed, I also live in the BGE area, I know exactly what has been happening in recent years, and I have seen my electric bill double, even after replacing my water heater and AC unit with higher efficiency models. I am still left wondering why we don't have more nuclear, and why we are still running on a natural gas power plant.

Re:Macro economics not micro economics

[mydots]

If you look at my previous post above about my solar system that NJ paid for almost 65% of the cost, I was only able to get that rebate by having my system connected to the grid which means anything that is generated that I am not using at that moment goes directly into the grid to all my neighbors. Since I keep detailed stats on everything, I can tell you, depending on the month, I put roughly anywhere from 25%-60% of the electricity I generate back into the grid. June through August are the months i put little back into the grid because of air conditioning and the pool pump. If you want to look at my yearly totals, in 2007 I generated about 9590kW and put 3670kW back into the grid which is about 39% to my neighbors. For 2008 I generated about 9596kW and put 4010kW back into the grid which is about 42%. You will notice that I had a 3% increase back to the grid due to me starting to become more energy conscience. I know I probably use more electricity than I should, but I have been trying to make more of an effort to reduce my carbon footprint and not just with electricity. While its not 50% (or 65% in my case), I am still putting a decent amount back into the grid. So anyone claiming that its rare a house generates more than it consumes is probably false. You have to remember that its only the electricity the house uses during the day that will come from the electricity generated by the panels. Anything used at night comes from the grid. Most people are not home during the day which means less electricity is used during the day because tv's, stereos, appliances, possibly computers and whatever else that someone would use while home that consumes electricity are turned off, which means more electricity back into the grid. Lights which are also another electricity hog (unless you are using compact florescent) are mostly used at night so none of that comes directly from the panels.

Solar on my NJ house

[mydots]

I live in NJ and have a 7.8kW solar system on my roof. I purchased it through Home Dept/BP Solar. The state rebate covered about 65% of the cost. I only had to pay the other 35% of the cost up front. I applied for the system in 2005 and about 6 months later in April 2006 I had a working system on my roof. I have been extremely happy with its performance especially since my roof faces pretty much directly south. Not only do I save in electricity, I also get Solar Renewable Energy Credits that I can sell to help pay for my cost of the system. An SREC is received for every 1000kWH of electricity generated. My system generates about 9 SREC's per solar year. The solar year begins in June and ends in May. After it was installed I immediately purchased RS485 communcation boards for the two inverters and an RS232 to RS485 converter for a PC and runs the SunnyData software that continuously monitors the system. It reads various data every 8 seconds and I use ssh/rsync to push it to a linux server every minute where I wrote some scripts to parse the data and create almost real time graphs of its performance. For anyone interested, I setup my own domain mysolarenergysystem.com where you can view all the details about the system. I also had the electric company replace my meter with a net meter, so each month on my bill I can see my exact in and out usage. The net meter has what looks like a phone jack that can be used for remote monitoring. I asked them about it because I wanted to connect it to my computer, but unfortunately they didn't give me much of an answer except that its not used, but would have been nice to monitor and graph daily statistics for that as well.

Re:Solar on my NJ house

[MosesJones]

You sir deserve the green geek badge.

Brilliant, especially the complaint that the utility company couldn't give you the answer on the meter connection. You can imagine the conversation

"He wants to do what?"
"Err connect to the meter to get daily statistics"
"Errr why?"
"Don't know, he already has a website monitoring the solar panel"
"Err why?"
"Don't know and to be honest he scared me somewhat in actually being interested in this stuff"

The sad part is that as this is rolled out more widely you just know that people will start banging down this sort of stuff and stopping you doing your own monitoring and forcing you to buy the "latest" MS Energy Meter 2012 application which "helpfully" outputs to Excel.

But again that is a brilliant bit of geekdom.

Re:Solar on my NJ house

[QuantumRiff]

Your site is very interesting, thank you for the link. I wish more people/sites had this kind of data. In my area, solar is not nearly as "incentivized" and I keep wondering if it is doable. Unfortunately, I have had a hard time finding real world data from people in my area, I would love to see what a 2KW array would actually produce, over 1 year in my part of Wisconsin.

I know there are lots of variables, but it would be nice if more people had a site like yours. (I know google is working on smart meters, but that is really limited on where it works)..

bad for the environment

[mikeee]

Right now, every solar-panel production facility on the planet is supply constrained. Therefore, what NJ is doing is paying extra money to ensure that solar panels are installed in NJ, rather than in, say, Arizona, where they actually make sense without massive incentives and produce three times as much power.

Why does New Jersey hate polar bears?

NJ nicknames

[becker]

I think that some people do not know why NJ is called "the armpit of America". It's not just the smell of its refineries and chemical plants along the coast. Look at its position on the map.

Most visitors just see the part of NJ along I95, missing the sections further inland which gave it the name "The Garden State".

You've made an error here

[sean.peters]

You realize that there is an upfront cost whether the state kicks in or not, right? Basically your argument is "this is not worthwhile for me to do, but it is worthwhile for other people to do it for me". If the overall cost of solar isn't worth it to you, then it is likely not an economically viable project.

"The upfront costs are too high" != "this project is not economically viable". There are plenty of activities (including solar power) that pay off in the long term, but are nonetheless too expensive to pay for upfront. Did you get a degree? Did you pay for it all upfront or did you get loans, Pell Grants, or cash from mom and dad? Did it pay off in the form of higher lifetime income?

Getting a subsidy to overcome this kind of thing, particularly in cases like this where there are substantial positive externalities (pollution reduction, energy security, etc) is EXACTLY the kind of thing the government should be doing.

Re:You've made an error here

[MyLongNickName]

Sean,

Yes, the two items are equivalent.

If it is too big a chunk, you point out the solution. For my education, I did take out a loan. The homeowner can do the same thing with a home equity loan. Having the government tax me to provide a private benefit is ridiculous.

In certain cases (like the Pell grant), I can see where this is necessary for lower income folks. However, someone who owns his own home should not get money from me for a home improvement that benefits him exclusively.

$1000 for installation?

[sean.peters]

You should have no problem finding someone to instal the whole thing for $1000.

You're kidding, right? Around here, getting a contractor to install a asphalt shingle roof, with labor provided by illegal immigrants, costs $5000. I got two quotes for getting a 3 KW system installed on my roof and they both ran almost $30k. I appreciate the links to the low cost parts, can you provide a similar link for the installation?

Re:$1000 for installation?

[moosesocks]

with labor provided by illegal immigrants

RACIST

Did you check their papers yourself? If you care so much about this to post about it on slashdot, why didn't you report it?

Stop equating 'foreign' with 'illegal.' It might be the case sometimes, but certainly isn't always.

Re:$1000 for installation?

[tmosley]

Sorry, I should have qualified that: $1000 for an electrician to wire them to your pole. I would suggest installing them yourselves, as you are apparently getting your labor from a pool of union workers. $30K to instal a few panels on the roof? That's ludicrous.

I live in Texas, and got my home re-roofed a few years ago and it only cost about $12K for 1600 square feet. More than likely, the quotes you are getting contain markups on markups on markups for the materials, with contractors subcontracting to subcontractors who subcontract to subcontractors for the labor. What you should do is go to a job site where some guys are working on something similar, and see about hiring them directly. It'll wind up being a LOT cheaper.

But it is doing actual good

[sean.peters]

No, this is absolutely retarded. They're not "incentivizing" solar power, they're subsidizing it. Heavily. You and I are paying for it. That's money that could be doing a lot of actual good if put to better use.

These kind of arguments always ignore externalities. There are two payoffs to the use of these sorts of alternative energy sources. The economic payoff goes to the people getting the subsidies (obviously). The external payoff goes to others: society in the form of increased energy security (i.e., we become less vulnerable to oil shocks), the power companies, in the form of lower loads on their grids (they spend less money on upgrading capacity), society again in the form of lower pollution (everyone is healthier, we spend less money on health, etc). So it's perfectly reasonable that the taxpayers subsidize this kind of thing - there is a payoff for them. Whether these subsidies are the BEST use of this money is another question, and obviously opinions will differ on that.

Re:But it is doing actual good

[atamido]

The dollar per watt on nuclear power is significantly lower, and also increases energy security. Also, when the solar systems stop working correctly in a year due to bad wiring, they will be worthless. There are solar panel systems all over the place that aren't hooked up due to them breaking and no one wanting to spend the money to fix them (one of the big problems with lots of small scale energy projects).

This is a very dumb argument

[sean.peters]

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that all these solar panels being used up by NJ would actually be put to use in AZ? Given that AZ doesn't have these incentives and solar panels are therefore very costly there, I think it's far more likely that they would just go unused, and solar panel production would just stabilize at a lower level (and higher cost per KW).

Re:This is a very dumb argument

[Mr. Arbusto]

Given that AZ doesn't have these incentives and solar panels are therefore very costly there,

Wouldn't a subsidy increase the real cost by make people less sensitive to it?

Re:knotbeerdan

[jhfry]

where solar or wind were the only power options that did not require fuel to produce power

Other than perhaps tidal/wave energy, aren't solar or wind essentially the only power options that don't require fuel?

First in graft!

[nelsonal]

So we're wating cells that could be put to more productive use, because it allows connected people to cut their energy bills or gain status. Sounds like NJ continues to lead in graft.

+1 insightful

[HanClinto]

Great post -- wish I had mod points.

One issue in NJ

[The Second Horseman]

We have a few towns with municipal power utilities - you generally pay less for electricity, but the local utility run by the town doesn't really want to buy power back from you, nor do they want to make it easy for you to not buy power from them. It's a way of defraying municipal expenses and (in the case of not-for-profit institutions like churches and schools) a way to generate revenue from tax-exempt organizations that wouldn't be paying property taxes. Basically, they buy power in bulk with long-term contracts and then mark it up, but not as much as the larger utility companies do in the rest of the state.

[cough]Recycling[/cough]

[Mr.Fork]

So, who's going to recycle the thousands of tons of outdated and broken solar panels? Currently, there is 0% recycling of these devices - they're pretty much garbage dump fodder right now. Not to mention the tonnes of emmissions used to make these solar panels vs other conventional methods - I think per KW produced to make a panel, isn't it still better for the environment to burn coal?

It really ticks me off that there's all these incentives for alternative energy sources when the manufacturing of these devices and then the landfill waste they create when they're done is never really brought into the equations. Is it a push just for business to buy more junk?

Louisiana has a 50% Refundable Tax Credit

[Yoda2]

Louisiana also has a very aggressive tax credit program. It is capped at 50% of a 25k system (12.5k), but you can install multiple systems to offset your average usage.

More info at the Louisiana Solar Energy Society.

We just installed a 4.6kW grid-tie system using Enphase microinverters. Its the 2nd "working system" shown on the LSES site.

I'll probably regret sharing this on /., but a group called RBS also filmed a short "documentary" of us installing & explaining the system for the local public access station. If you really have nothing better to do for the next 17 minutes, it can be seen on the Rural Broadcasting Service site under "Solarcentric" Be forewarned that it was very much unscripted.

incentives

[Brandybuck]

If solar was efficient, there would be no need for incentives. The power itself would be an incentive. No way in heck am I spending tens of thousands of dollars on something that won't pay off for ten years or more. Even hybrid autos are better than that. Just say no to any technology that needs more lobbyists than engineers. Solar will be great in the future, but right now its just not ready for wide scale deployment.

NJ is famous for

[DaveGod]

"New Jersey—known more for its turnpike, shopping malls and industrial sprawl

Well yes that stuff is in the intro but NJ is most famous for the Sopranos.

Red States get all the Federal Spending.

[FatSean]

These states, full of right-wingers who decry 'wealth redistribution' rely on Federal Tax Money to exist. My state of CT gives alot in taxes, but the Fed only spends 60 cents on the dollar on us! Compare to the 'Red States' who receive far more Federal Tax Money then they contribute. See: http://www.taxfoundation.org/research/show/266.html

Location of the Pres is one thing, but over the last several decades, it has been the Red States that mooch off of the Blue States while their residents bitch about taxes. At least the Red States are the ones that provide cannon fodder for wars of choice, but that's a different discussion.

Re:Red States get all the Federal Spending.

[benjamindees]

These states, full of right-wingers who decry 'wealth redistribution' rely on Federal Tax Money to exist.

Hardly. Those states would still exist. They just wouldn't be filled with welfare queens, immigrants, and the aforementioned cannon fodder, all on the federal rolls.

Has it never occurred to you that perhaps the red states complain because the effects of that "Federal Money" are so bad that they'd be better off without it? States don't get to decide what 90% of the money is spent on. The Feds just hand it directly to the dumbest citizens and encourage them to reproduce.

Don't pretend that Federal spending is redistributing money from wealthy states to poor ones. It's redistributing money from wealthy people in all states to poor people in all states. The states where those poor people tend to migrate are the ones getting shafted on the deal, not rewarded.

Not that bad

[zogger]

It will level out sooner than that, because the US wouldn't exist if they had ten to thirty million people out homeless on the sreet, there'd be violent revolution well before that, so the fatbankcats and politicians will come up with a way for people to stay in their homes to avoid that "social unrest" scene, which will stabilize prices faster. Stroke of the pen, law of the land deal. I have no idea what form it will take, but it is *going* to happen.

  Housing is one of the few things in the US now that is not totally dependent on imports, so the dropping dollar won't completely impact it as bad. It is way more a domestic and more controllable (and fixable) economic issue than say an external deficit causing expense like price of oil or imported manufactured goods and gadgets that will become more expensive as the dollar drops.

    A lot of some anticipated upstream megaprofits on sliced and diced and repackaged mortgages will vanish, but really, they were unsustainable in the first place, to even think that you could lather on (quite literally) 20 layers deep of profit skimming off of one mortgage, that was just nuts. My guess is those speculators will be forced to eat it eventually (which should happen anyway just for being greedy tards about it).

  So the houses will get used, and the prices stabilize faster, albeit still well below the real estate tulip mania bubble prices, which about anyone who wasn't totally deranged *knew* were bloated in the first place and were bound to crash.

  And that doesn't even count the several million a year new immigrants, both kinds, who will need housing and will spur demand and price stabilization. They'll be a several year shakeout, we are still in the beginning of it, but housing is a *necessity*, not a luxury, so a way will be found there to get it back to affordable levels.

And besides, there's nothing wrong with more affordable/cheaper housing. We need it as a society, it is way over priced now in a lot of places from that dumb house flipping nonsense, and in a global economy with shrinking middle class pay and jobs, people need to start thinking differently (so they will, and are right now), including every two year job hopping. It might not even be possible for a lot of people to do that much longer, they are going to hang on to ANY job they got and any house they can get into, because the alternative will be *quite sucky*. Using your house as some sort of "stock" and ATM machine is lame, it's your home first and primarily, or the next guy's home, that is what a house is "worth" more than just the dollars and cents figures.

    Now we'll be seeing less new housing based on the "SUV model" type Mc Mansions and more reasonably sized and equipped for energy savings instead of energy waste and priced units, but that will be the larger overall difference.

Great - another US-centric post

[Kittenman]

What would be the response if I posted something about, say, Eketehuna?

In other words - why is NJ outshining most others in solar energy news? New Jersey's famous for not doing this sort of thing?

Oh, please

[sean.peters]

The fact that local contractors in our area are using illegal migrant labor is common knowledge - it's been reported in the paper. It's hardly racism to repeat that.

YHBT;HAND

[conureman]

I wasn't being (totally) pointlessly evil, thank-you for getting it. I should do a journal instead of this passive-aggressive shite. Community efforts are good, collectivism is not. It is a slippery slope and far too easy to sling darts at the various actors in the comedy. Many do mean well, I'm sure.
Cash for Clunkers is a a good example, for the reasons you state, plus it benefits people with enough liquid cash to get a new car more than thrifty people saving up for a used car, or folks too hard-pressed to be buying a new car at all. Nice targeting, Herr Tell.