Clinton Promises 500 Million New Solar Panels

An anonymous reader writes: Hillary Clinton, widely regarded as most likely to win the Democrat nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has unveiled her campaign climate plan. Speaking at Iowa State University, Clinton said she would set up tax incentives for renewable energy to drive further adoption. She also set a goal of installing half a billion new solar panels within her first term, if elected. Her plan would cost roughly $60 billion over 10 years, and she intends to pay for it by cutting tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. According to The Guardian, "Clinton has promised to make the issue of climate change a key pillar of her campaign platform."

Comments

Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[acoustix]

How about attempting to end all federal subsidies and let us keep our own money and spend it how we see fit?

Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[Maxo-Texas]

Things are so much better since we cut taxes for the wealthy.

The infrastructure is crumbling and college tuition which was free or nearly free now costs more than a luxury car at state universities.

We should have more of this dog eat dog stuff until we can share the glorious french experience of 1789 to 1799.

Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[kqs]

Sure it has; in the late 1800s and early 1900s there were almost no taxes and few subsidies. Everyone (but mostly the very rich) kept their money and spent it however they liked. The results were so unpleasant that the country decided that unions and OSHA, for all of their problems, were preferable to that state.

The problem with "spending our money as we see fit" is that we ignore externalities. I live in PA; our cheapest power comes from coal plants. Coal causes really bad health problems once it is burned and released into the air; modern exhaust scrubbers help but we still end up with lots of crud entering our lungs. But the health costs are an externality to the coal plants, so coal power's price is artificially low. I still pay the total cost in higher health care costs and a shorter working life, but it doesn't appear as a line item anywhere. By subsidizing solar panels and other less-polluting energies, the hope is to spend money now to reduce medicare and health insurance costs for the next 50 years. You may believe that this will not same you money overall, or that there is a better way to go about this, but it's not an illogical or crazy plan.

Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[Immerman]

Because market inefficiencies make certain necessary adaptations effectively impossible.

For example, if Company A decides they want to be responsible corporate "citizens" and shift their energy consumption to sustainable sources, then they increase their costs and can no longer compete effectively with Company B unless there's a mass movement to purchase A's products because of their energy policy. And unfortunately the existence of Walmart and the like is proof enough that the mass of Americans consider up-front price to be the single most important factor in purchasing decisions, even when it increases their own long-term costs (a $50 appliance that needs to be replaced yearly is far more expensive than a $200 appliance that will last indefinitely), much less indirect social costs whose full weight won't be felt for generations.

Granted, at the moment if we removed all fossil-fuel subsidies renewable energy would look far more competitive, but to really level the playing field we would have to also impose new penalties on "socialized-cost subsidies" that have long been grandfathered in: Coal for example imposes phenomenal pollution costs at almost every stage. If however we imposed well-structured penalties/taxes to reflect the actual cost of reversing that damage then it would be one of the most expensive energy sources available.

Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[kqs]

No, actually. A democracy (direct or representative) uses "voting" to collectively decide things. Which is what we are doing when we go to the polls in November 2016. We'll never get 100% agreement, so you or I may decide that our opinions were ignored, but this is how democracy works. Non-collective agreements are what you get with dictators of various stripes who cannot be removed from office.

I'd be happier if the results were less skewed by billions of dollars of legal bribery (AKA campaign funding), but we've decided that we're okay with that, unfortunately.

Re:Or let us keep our hard-earned money

[Captain Hook]

I don't disagree with you about the external costs, but I've never been able to work out why the approximate external costs of an industry isn't directly charged to that industry as a licensing fee or additional tax charge.

Effectively, you are picking a possible winner (in this case Solar) instead of making the industry with lots of external costs pay their way fully and letting the market find the best alternative to that (whether it be Solar, or Geothermal, or even tiny little fusion reactors in every electric toothbrush)

Reaction

[Anonymous Coward]

This is simply a reaction against Bernie Sanders. He is far more socialist than the original 'HIllary is a leftist (err center)' view and yet he is gaining ground (or beating Clinton in certain arenas).

I expect we'll see some republican candidates become more conservative as an action against Trump.

Also....who cares? These election promises are just hot smoke to blow up the public's collective ass. "Of course I love you, baby! No way, I'd never leave before breakfast!". etc.

And when she reneges

[MikeRT]

And on top of it, you get a level of transparency the resembles what a blackhole does to sunlight her supporters will be just shocked--SHOCKED--that voting for a candidate with her horrendous record on honesty backfired on them.

I mean FFS, I'm generally a conservative and I'd vote for Bernie Sanders in a heartbeat over her even though he's an avowed Socialist because at least the man seems to have some real integrity and respect for the middle class.

Re:Storage?

[kenaaker]

You use the electricity and solar heat to create methane with a Sabatier reaction, and dump the methane into the national natural gas pipeline system. The gas becomes part of the 7-30 day reserve supply and runs the gas turbine peaking plants. There is a German pilot plant that has been running since 2012 and further development is planned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_gas has more information.

Re:Vapor Funding

[Mr D from 63]

Cutting tax breaks sounds like a viable funding scheme on its face, but in the modern accounting regime that'll simply drive fossil fuel profits to offshore subsidiaries, with no substantial funding increase.

Cutting existing subsidies, conversely, offers real money to finance programs like this.

Its not a funding scheme. Its a get elected scheme. Net cost and cost benefit considerations are not even a part of it. The formula is "punish big evil companies, give away stuff to the masses". It works.

Re:Storage?

[Karmashock]

The only way it becomes enviro friendly is if it is distributed.

The big problem with the green power plant concept is that they are building power plants. These are distributed energy sources. Put them on houses.

Instead of giving the subsidies to corporations, give them to TAX PAYERS to buy panels to off set their energy usage.

Especially in places that are hot... because they have sun and their air conditioners will sync up with their solar power generation.

Don't even worry about other parts of the country. Hit the suburbs first. Possibly some rural communities.

here someone will say "what about the cities"... nuclear power.

For hundreds of years to come probably that will be the best answer for cities. People will say "but they're dangerous"... power is always dangerous. The first person to discover fire said "Ouch"... You make peace with the danger and you respect it. But shunning it because it is dangerous means you sleep in the cold.

Respect it. The Japanese plant that everyone is exercised about had shitty maintenance. They were doctoring their reports to make it look like they were doing their jobs but they weren't. Result? Problems. You don't follow procedure in a powder mill and don't be surprised when it explodes.

That's how this works. Nuclear power is wonderful. We could completely remove fossil fuels from our power grid with nuclear alone. economically.

No other technology will let us do that.

"green" power makes up about 4 percent of US generation minus the hydro. If you want to add the hydro that's still only 10 percent. Nuclear even though we haven't built a plant since the 1970s and many plants have closed... nuclear is comfortably around 22~25 percent of our power. Coal alone is about 45 percent of US electrical generation. And the balance is other fossil fuels.

Nothing short of nuclear is making a dent in that.

So choose. Nuclear or coal. Because unless your country has lots of Hydro like Canada... that's what you're doing. Anyone else that tells you differently is blowing green smoke up your ass.

Re:Normal human translation

[ArcadeMan]

The same could be said for the oil and gas industries. With billions in pure profits, why the fuck are they still getting subsidies and tax breaks?

Re:Hopefully the actual plan defines the terms

[Mr D from 63]

$60 Billion for 500 million panels = $120 per panel. Of course, panel size is not specified (not a needed detail when hawking votes), but the present incentives are more than that per panel if you are talking $1kw panels or larger. Is she proposing a reduction in incentives?

Re:Democratic nomination not Democrat nomination

[PPH]

unless you're a Republican

Shouldn't that read "unless you're a Republic"?

Re:How big is a "solar panel"?

[Jeremi]

I'm kind of wondering where they would all go.
If each panel was a square meter, that's 193 square miles of solar panels.

193 square miles is 0.006% of the surface area of the United States.

Or, if we wanted to only put the solar panels on existing residential roofs -- there are currently about 6184 square miles of residential roof space in the USA. (ref)

nice pivot.

[nimbius]

public: what about rampant police abuse of power?
the constant unending stream of shadow money into political campaigns?
the nearly endless war on terror and our secret torture prison in Cuba?
What are you going to do about the impending student loan collapse and the rampant US unemployment fueled by abusive trade agreements that are largely unreported?
what approach will you take to immigration reform?
How will you address the growing number of domestic mass shootings?
What is your approach to the continued neglect of social security? the highway trust? the Veterans Administration?
Clinton: Free solar panels for everything forever.

Re:She can give me 30 of them

[bobbied]

Yes, it DOES cost the power company.... Even if they don't pay you for the power you generate.

The electric grid needs to be stable, that requires that every watt of power being used, must be instantly available when the demand for it happens. When you hit that light switch, the power to run the light must be instantly generated someplace, turn that light off and the system must stop providing that power, instantly. This instant power on/off capacity is actually done using mechanical storage in the spinning parts of power generation plants.

Solar panels and inverters have no such storage capacity, they push power into the system when the sun shines, and stop doing that when it doesn't. This means that on cloudy days there is a large variation in the power available from photovoltaic solar sources. This variation can be averaged over large areas, but there remains a lot of uncertainty in how much power will be available at any instant, because it's really hard to forecast with accuracy where a cloud or thunder storm will be formed and where it will go.

So, this leads to how photovoltaic solar has "cost" for your electric provider. Because of the uncertainty of how much power your solar panels will have available, the provider must maintain sufficient margin available to handle the instantaneous load of the entire system. So they are burning fuel to be ready to produce electricity they are unlikely to use because of the unpredictable nature of photovoltaic solar and not knowing if they will get what they expect from that source or not.

In addition, there are transmission grid efficiency issues that come into play. It is really hard to keep the grid efficient when you know where and when you've scheduled power to be available and when and where it will be used. With the load variance introduced from a photovoltaic power source this problem becomes even more difficult. Power companies respond by using less efficient, but more stable configurations and power flows because of this varying load within the system. This inefficiency costs them as well.

So, I'm not saying that it's all bad for power companies. Being able to buy power from your solar panels at your retail rate during peak load where the going spot rate may be triple or more is a good thing for them, but I am saying that there ARE costs in efficiency and complexity for them.

Then there is a safety issue that's not talked about too much when the power grid goes down in local areas. Your Photovoltaic system can be pretty lethal for linemen if left connected when the power grid is down. Hopefully you have an inverter that figures out pretty quick when the line voltage and frequency is out of working range and shuts down, but there is a risk things won't work as expected and somebody gets hurt. It's a minor issue, but it does have cost for electric providers.

Is it like Romney's 2$ gasoline?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Romney in 2012 made dramatic and what he thought would create shock value by promising 2$ a gallon gasoline. Obama actually saw 2$ gasoline for a brief period! Free market has a way of doing things no one predicted.

The current trend is 500 million new solar panels without any special action by any legislator/executive. Simple market forces and trend lines. Residential solar is becoming competitive with subsidies and net metering. Utility scale solar is on track to become competitive with natural gas in a few years. It is already competitive with coal for fresh installations. No new coal plant has come on line this year and last. The pipeline is dry too. Number of coal plants have fallen from 633 to 518 in the last decade. Coal has lost 20 GW of capacity in that time, and is on track to lose another 40 GW. Natural gas providing base load and solar meeting the peak load is going to become the norm in the next 10 years. No new breakthrough in energy storage, no battery wall made by Elon Musk, no widespread investment by home owners needed. Simple existing technologies, free market forces, interest rates and world flush with 2 trillion in capital not knowing where to invest for good returns.

So half billion new solar panels might happen no matter who wins, Hilary or Jeb! or Walker or Trump or Bernie. We might even look back and see Hilary's half a billion solar panels the same way we look at Romney's 2$ gasoline.

Promises, Promises

[SuperKendall]

She also set a goal of installing half a billion new solar panels within her first term

Come on, even working four years straight there's no way she can install that many solar panels!

On the other hand, if she's doing that there's no way she has time to screw up the country like past presidents... OK, i'm in, as long as she keeps her promise to just install solar panels.

Where in the US Constitution.....

[cayenne8]

Hmm.

I"m still trying to thumb through my US Constitution and find where within the enumerated responsibilities and rights of the Federal Govt. that it is charged with picking winners and losers in industry. Also,where in there is the Fed govt supposed to figure out health costs of one industry vs another and penalize one over another?

And no, it has nothing to do with the "General Welfare" parts....

Re:Where in the US Constitution.....

[D.McG.]

It has everything to do with the general well-being of the populace. "Life" is referenced a few times in the constitution. If coal byproducts will shorten my "Life" then I'm all for the government to at least pick out the losers. Now, since we cannot be left without electricity after taking down coal, I'm also fine with folks proposing an alternative. Classic "don't complain without a solution". Clinton is proposing a solution. That's all it is, a proposal if elected.