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California To Become First US State Mandating Solar On New Homes (ocregister.com)
OCRegister reports that "The California Energy Commission is scheduled to vote Wednesday, May 9, on new energy standards mandating most new homes have solar panels starting in 2020." From the report: Just 15 percent to 20 percent of new single-family homes built include solar, according to Bob Raymer, technical director for the California Building Industry Association. The proposed new rules would deviate slightly from another much-heralded objective: Requiring all new homes be "net-zero," meaning they would produce enough solar power to offset all electricity and natural gas consumed over the course of a year. New thinking has made that goal obsolete, state officials say. True "zero-net-energy" homes still rely on the electric power grid at night, they explained, a time when more generating plants come online using fossil fuels to generate power. In addition to widespread adoption of solar power, the new provisions include a push to increase battery storage and increase reliance on electricity over natural gas.
Pretty easy to enforce when you don't allow new homes to be built anywhere.
I get it, in your religion, solar panels are free. Hate to break it to you, but your religion is fake.
Nobody claimed they were free but dude, solar panels are cheap as hell now. I mean, have you even looked at the price per watt in recent years?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Toilets aren't free, but they require every home have one of those, too (except in West Virginia, I think). In Texas, the state mandates that every house have heat, and furnaces aren't free.
You're not happy about solar energy. We all get that. But don't act like renewable energy is some kind of pie-in-the-sky myth. It just makes you look ridiculous. We've passed the point where solar panels now pay for themselves. Having one on a house actually brings down the cost of home ownership over time.
You are welcome on my lawn.
From the article:
- Exceptions or alternatives will be allowed when homes are shaded by trees or buildings or when the home's roofs are too small to accommodate solar panels
...
- Builders installing batteries like the Tesla Powerwall would get "compliance credits," allowing them to further reduce the size of the solar system.
And that literally has nothing to do with the cost of the houses themselves but rather their scarce availability.
Why do you suppose that is? Is there not enough room for housing in California? What makes California so different from other states that housing is so expensive?
The reality is scarce availability is a direct result of out of control NIBYism implemented by those with power over the states regulatory regime. This solar thing is just one more drop in California's massive over-regulation bucket that is hurting real people in order to protect those with money/power by erecting even more barriers.
One need only look at the epidemic of "illegal" additions where single family dwellings are being converted into mini-apartments and the growing homelessness epidemic (Home to 1/4th of the countries homeless population) to see that California's legitimacy has been eroded by insane racist policies that disproportionately disadvantage the poor.
This is required for the basic habitability of our planet.
Since when has decentralized generation ever amounted to anything other than inefficient token gestures? Has always been the case much better results and higher efficiency are realized with large scale industrial production. Edison lost this fight a century ago.
It would be better policy and more environmentally sound simply to levy some kind of tax on power consumption to support large scale solar projects vs piecemeal rooftop installations operating at low efficiency power conversion that won't be professionally maintained or tracked. It isn't like there is no space in California for solar farms. Mojave desert by itself has more than enough land area to supply the energy needs of the entire country.
Sure you can... you can move to one of the republican paradises like Kansas, Wyoming, or Oklahoma where low regulation and and taxes have produced places where everyone wants to live.
The trendy thing for Californians to do these days is move to Phoenix and drive up our housing prices. It's so rare these days to find another person besides myself who is actually from this area.