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Solar Panels For Every Home?
Hugh Pickens writes "David Crane and Robert F.Kennedy Jr. write in the NY Times that with residents of New Jersey and New York living through three major storms in the past 16 months and suffering sustained blackouts, we need to ask whether it is really sensible to power the 21st century by using an antiquated and vulnerable system of copper wires and wooden poles. Some have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing portable gas-powered generators to give themselves varying degrees of grid independence. But these dirty, noisy and expensive devices have no value outside of a power failure and there is a better way to secure grid independence for our homes and businesses: electricity-producing photovoltaic panels installed on houses, warehouses and over parking lots, wired so that they deliver power when the grid fails. 'Solar panels have dropped in price by 80 percent in the past five years and can provide electricity at a cost that is at or below the current retail cost of grid power in 20 states, including many of the Northeast states,' write Crane and Kennedy. 'So why isn't there more of a push for this clean, affordable, safe and inexhaustible source of electricity?' First, the investor-owned utilities that depend on the existing system for their profits have little economic interest in promoting a technology that empowers customers to generate their own power. Second, state regulatory agencies and local governments impose burdensome permitting and siting requirements that unnecessarily raise installation costs. While it can take as little as eight days to license and install a solar system on a house in Germany, in the United States, depending on your state, the average ranges from 120 to 180 days."
For my house in NJ, we got a quote for about $30,000 (of which we would pay $10,000 out of pocket) to put solar panels on our roof. We also were being asked to cut down 4 trees in order to get optimal sunlight. After hurricane Sandy, we instead bought a $450 3270 watt generator which is portable, won't be damaged outside, and can be shared with neighbors if need be.
Note also that if you want to make your house off-the-grid (as option) with solar, that requires much more expense. Batteries, inverter switches, etc.
Housing and condo boards will also be total assholes about this. I've had them browbeat me about satellite dishes even after showing evidence that there's a federal law that says they can't tell me how many dishes I'm allowed to have (I had 2). All they care about is that every house looks the same and their devotion to local housing politics pays off in the form of pushing people around.
Sure solar panels have gone down in price. I put a 9kW solar array on my roof 2 years ago, using grid-tied microinverters. The catch is that if the grid power goes out, the microinverters shut down so they are not putting juice onto the grid and zapping linesmen. This means the solar panels are not able to do anything during a power outage. If you want the panels to run, then there will be a huge investment in a battery system with a charge controller, load shedding and rather expensive batteries, along with an auto transfer switch to cut you off from the grid... these things easily make the solar panels the cheap item in the system.
I like solar and geothermal energy sources for home based power. I am also a pragmatist that realizes simply legislating that everyone install solar panels for a wide scale would be financially ruinous. I think you could go about this with a hybrid approach that could allow the market to do what it does best while steering people to a greener future.
Start by saying that all new (and remodeled) buildings must includes support for 10% of their anticipated energy needs from a renewable source (let the source be up to the customer) and the switching equipment required for the grid. This will be a small enough amount that it can be met with a minimal number of solar panels or other sources. Importantly this will allow time for electricians, home builders, retailers and the like to start getting to understand renewable energy without being overwhelming. It will also allow for things like the switching equipment for the grid to start getting put in place.
Every four years after this starts you increase the amount of energy required by 10%. The increase is slow enough to give the market time to react and bring products, expertise and the like to bear. This is also slow enough to allow competition to build and for prices to benefit from economies of scale.
By the time the rate increases from 10% to 20% the market will have had time to develop skills, materials and everything else that is needed. This avoids a crisis that would come from simply mandating a significant amount come from renewable energy to begin with when the present market can't possibly meet that demand. This also allows for retrofitting with additional capacity by owners that want to ramp up from 10% to a higher percent.
We have 35 panels on our roof. We lost nine trees during Sandy, but there was no damage to the solar panels. We also have solar canopies and things like that all over town, and I only saw minor damage in one installation. Our only real vulnerability is if a tree falls on the panels themselves.
It destroys all.
Here's the thing: As bad as government with bureaucracy is, a government without bureaucracy is even worse.
A real-life example:
States in the US have laws to require that gasoline pumps actually dispense 1 gallon of fuel when they register 1 gallon of fuel on the meter. There are bureaucracies set up for inspectors to go around and check on each pump periodically to ensure that the owner isn't cheating their customers.
Now, you may be wondering what the possible value of having and enforcing such a law is - after all, if a gas station cheats its customers no one will go there, right? But what actually happens is that each gas station is motivated to cheat its customers just a bit so that they won't notice right away, and meanwhile it's basically impossible for drivers (especially those from out of town) to price shop because they don't know how much gasoline they'll actually get for the listed price per gallon.
So, for, say, a city or county of 40,000 people, it's advantageous for everyone but crooked gas station owners to pay $3 in taxes annually for a bureaucrat to spend time testing all the gas pumps in the area (in unannounced visits of course), because they'll save more than $3 in not getting cheated by the crooked gas stations. And this also helps the honest gas station owners, because they know that they aren't going to be out-competed by crooked competition. This math works even if the bureaucrat in question is the mayor's no-good brother-in-law who's getting the $105K + benefits to do this full time: The only people who are harmed by this policy are crooks.
I am officially gone from
Ours were fine, even though the wind took out nine trees.
[Citation Needed]. From my personal experience, my solar panels make my energy bill a net zero from Spring to Fall. I don't have a previous comparison, as my house had solar panels when I moved in, but by my estimate, it's putting the break-even point at about 10 years tops.
No, you shouldn't invest in solar panels if you're in Chicago or even Seattle. But in a nice and sunny place, like the entire southern half of the US, solar panels can pay off in less than ten years. What's also being missed is that they reduce overall consumption of gas, coal and oil, which lowers prices overall, makes them more available in other industries, and generally contribute to massive efficiencies in energy distribution.
All in all, I don't know why anyone with the capital handy wouldn't do this. On the other hand, for those without the capital handy.... well, there's a reason why it is so hard to move out of the working poor class. It's hard to save money when you don't have the capital on hand to invest in durable goods that are cheaper over the long run.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
"In the case of my parents' house (southern Germany, pretty high electricity prices of ~0.25 Euros/kWh), I think a small photovoltaic installation might amortize itself within a few years."
So, the solar panels are cost effective because the cost of electricity is high. The next logical question is, why is German electricity so expensive?
In large part, because of Solar power feed-in tariffs which German utilities are required to pay people who generate surplus solar power with their power panels (so, yeah, it's cheaper to buy your own solar power, than buy solar power from someone else's roof or solar farm, and pay a middle man to markup the power and transmit it).
If they had planned to build a few more nuclear plants a decade or two ago, instead of planning to shut down their existing nuclear plants in a few years, they'd likely have cheaper power by now.
But, yes, if cheap power isn't available from the grid, then you may as well generate your own expensive electricity instead of buying someone else's expensive electricity. Grids make sense only when the power the grid can provide you is cheaper than making your own, or you can get it in quantities larger than you can produce with reasonably priced equipment of your own.
It's fun to bash bureaucrats, but every now and then it's necessary to remember why they're there.
A few years back a co-worker was griping about the septic inspector, and why there was this guy whose whole job was to occasionally drop by and watch the septic system getting put in. The unfortunate reason is that without that inspector occasionally dropping by unannounced, some unscrupulous contractor would cut corners and skip the installation entirely. They'd just dig a hole, throw in a small load of gravel, run the pipe into it, cover it, and leave - calling it a "septic system". The homeowner would get stuck with the mess - 5 or 10 years down the road. By that time the contractor would have dissolved the company, reorganized as a new company, and still be pulling the same trick.
I don't know how this applies to solar panels, but I'm sure that there's plenty of room for abuse by unscrupulous contractors and suppliers. I'll agree that sometimes (frequently?) regulation goes wrong. But the goal shouldn't be to eliminate it - it should be to make sure it serves its purpose, while getting in the way as little as possible.
The real problem with regulation is that generally those who are supposed to be regulated get their fingers into the pie, to try to make sure that regulation inconveniences them as little as possible. Then there are others involved trying to stop that process, and others who are just plain control freaks. The result is sausage, and not particularly good sausage.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There are lots of very prolific posters on Slashdot (and the Internet in general) who think that "Caveat Emptor" should be our national motto, and that because you could become an expert on everything, information imbalances in our economic system aren't a huge problem, or, indeed, a problem at all.
Most of these people call themselves libertarians. I call them dipshits.
We had a problem with this in Idaho in the 2008 time fraim
They discovered that the digital gas pumps were crooked. The inspectors used to check them at 5 gallons and 10 gallons and they were always right on.
Someone noticed that the gallons didn't always appear to be measuring at a consistent speed. So they started doing additional testing. The pumps were rigged so that if you bought any amount that wasn't exactly 5 or 10 gallons, you were going to be overcharged. The change was variable, the closer you got to those exact numbers, the closer to exact you total was going to be, but if you dispensed somewhere in the middle, you would pay extra. If you dispensed 7.5 gallons, the pump would charge you for 8 gallons. And over 10 gallons was always going to read high.
Most of the pumps in the State were accurate and honest, but there were several stations rigged like this. The Bureau of Weights and Measures had to switch to a system where the check the pumps over a range of values for accuracy not just specific targets.