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California Gives Final OK To Require Solar Panels On New Houses (npr.org)
Solar panels will be a required feature on new houses in California, after the state's Building Standards Commission gave final approval to a housing rule that's the first of its kind in the United States. From a report: Set to take effect in 2020, the new standard includes an exemption for houses that are often shaded from the sun. It also includes incentives for people to add a high-capacity battery to their home's electrical system, to store the sun's energy. "These provisions really are historic and will be a beacon of light for the rest of the country," said commissioner Kent Sasaki, according to The Mercury News. "[It's] the beginning of substantial improvement in how we produce energy and reduce the consumption of fossil fuels."
The rule marks a new phase in California's environmental policies, which have often set trends and established standards nationwide. The state has set the goal of drawing 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources and sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The solar panels rule was initially endorsed as part of the state's Green Building Standards Code by the California Energy Commission back in May.
The rule marks a new phase in California's environmental policies, which have often set trends and established standards nationwide. The state has set the goal of drawing 100 percent of its electricity from renewable energy sources and sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The solar panels rule was initially endorsed as part of the state's Green Building Standards Code by the California Energy Commission back in May.
To be fair, the middle class was already priced out of buying homes in CA thanks to capitalism and property investors.
You misspelled government regulations and overreach.
I can see the utility letter now. "Our costs are rising due to less profit from solar, we will be raising your electric bill to be more in line with your mortgage payment"
To be fair, the middle class was already priced out of buying homes in CA thanks to capitalism and property investors.
Care to explain what community based zoning boards, requiring solar panels on new homes, size regulations, density requirements, and arbitrary building restrictions have to do with capitalism?
I am actually designing a house to build in California Desert. Good design and energy efficiency dictates sloping roof inclines in a northern direction. So how is this new requirement to place solar panels on a roof going to effect building design?
Government overreach just serves as a proxy to corporate interests these days.
Or, since they would all look similar and not stand out from the norm, you'd probably not even notice.
Unless they also start making grid-tie optional state-wide, what is the incentive here? And while we are at it, what is the minimum capacity? Can I put a single 300 watt panel on my roof plus a grid tie and call it a solar roofed home? Does it have to be a whole roof fixture? What about houses at elevation where the panels may be more likely to fail under snow weight? Will it become mandatory to repair the solar system when it fails? What about reporting your available solar capacity to the government so they can scrutinize your energy use in case it fits the patterns for suspicious activity?
Having looked around, just building permits in California range from 30 to 100k dollars, even in regions that are rural and were in the past not heavily scrutinized.
Yeah, adding 10k to the cost of a 550k home ( https://www.zillow.com/ca/home... ) is going to be the tipping point to price the middle class out of homes in California. You're a frick'n genius.
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That's because they look better on actual houses, rather than in trailer parks. You need to get out more.
in 2020 I'd go to the coal miners (who are likely to swing the election) and offer them jobs in gov't run factories building solar panels. That's the kind of infrastructure spending and green jobs that would make a real difference.
It's all well and good to see what California's doing, but getting onto renewables should be a national effort. Not just to Shave the Whales, but because I'm tired of my country being OPEC's whipping boy. And I'd like to breath cleaner air. My family is prone to lung cancer from smoking, and while I don't smoke I get a lung full of carcinogens every time I go outside.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
According to the article, it increases the initial cost by $10,000 ($50 per month on 30-year loan) but decreases overall costs by $19,000 over 30-years of ownership ($52.78 per month over 30 years). So even if you finance the whole additional amount, you end up in the positive by about $33 per year, not to mention the health benefits of less pollution.
(In addition, poor people tend to face more negative health affects from pollution because they tend to live in more polluted areas, so they will likely experience more of the benefits as well.)
That's a bunch of bullshit. It'll cost less to install them while the home is being built versus installing them afterwards, and a company building an entire tract of new homes will buy the panels and other specific materials for less because they'll be buying them in quantity. The addition to the price of a new home will be negligible and new homeowners won't even notice since they're on loans paid over several decades anyway. Meanwhile there will be immediate monthly cost savings to the new homeowner in reduced electric bills. The solar installations might even be more efficient and higher capacity overall since how the house is built and situated on the lot might now be optimized when they lay out the tract, so even more value added for the homeowner.
Really?
How much does a full roof of solar panels cost? Maintenance? Repair after storms?
I'm not saying it isn't a good thing to have them....however, right now I hear nothing buy young people complaining about the cost of housing, and mandating solar panels on all new homes, will add a not insignificant amount of extra money on top of the already $$$ new home.
And it isn't just going to be the cost of the panels and labor to install, the builder will also write in some profit on top of that.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Uh, we do not get as much fog as everyone thinks. Maybe 7-10 days where there is fog for more than 8 hours during the day. And it's just in the northern section of the city, by the bridge. We have microclimates here, it's a thing. I would guess daytime fog is closer to 3 days. Regardless San Francisco is only about 800,000 people in a 7x7 mile section of the state, in a state that represents about 65% of the west coast and 40 million people.
Most of the bay sees 280-300 days a year of sun.
Also most of Oregon is desert, and very sunny.
Also, most of the central valley of california is flat and dry, and blisteringly hot.
Please reference a map. Thank you.
p.s. Germany has way worse weather conditions, like snow, and being way further north, and they have more installed solar than we do and produce more solar power than anyone else in Europe.
Given how cheap solar is, there are few places in the world where installing solar is not a net positive. Even in as you say "foggy" san francisco. Get out more dude.
moox. for a new generation.
$10k seems low for a 5-6kw system unless they're still being subsidized.
I assume they still are. . .
Solar panels don't pay off in many locations, even in CA. Good luck getting that exemption approved!
Further, the environmental cost of producing solar panels is huge. As is the environmental cost of producing large batteries to store energy (not to mention the safety issues of having one on your property for decades). At least the battery is only currently being "incentivized".
The cost of putting solar panels on a house and connecting them up is pretty big, and the cost will skyrocket now that it's required. For reference, see health insurance. The payback period was already measured in decades when including government incentives/rebates, the utilities being forced to buy the electricity back at a given rate, and a specific cost for panels and installation. The incentives/rebates are going away, the cost the utility will pay to buy power from people will go down, and the cost to buy and install panels will go up.
If we had better solar panels, or at least equivalent panels that weren't so nasty to produce, I'd be for buying them for myself, but not for requiring them.
From an environmental perspective, the best modern options are nuclear and hydroelectric, by far. From an economic standpoint, those are near the top if you consider a free market. Coal, oil, and natural gas win out in a world with no regulation. If you consider a sane market, with some regulation (emissions controls for coal, safety and transparency requirements for fracking and mining, safety and security standards for nuclear, environmental assessment and protection when building dams, etc.) hydroelectric is the winner in places that have it as an option, and nuclear is the winner elsewhere.
Solar roofs are looking better and better. All While blending into your neighborhood.
It doesn't take much research to find far better options to the bulky solar panel design.
Is the State going to pay the removal and re-installation every time you need to get roof shingles or a leak repaired? This is going to add thousands to a almost every roof replacement or repair.
"According to the article, it increases the initial cost by $10,000 ($50 per month on 30-year loan) but decreases overall costs by $19,000 over 30-years of ownership ($52.78 per month over 30 years)."
You're a moron Cayenne. An ideological moron.
It doesn't need to be traditional ugly rectangle solar panels. Take a look at solar roof tiles, some of those designs actually look quite nice.
That's nonsense.
1) The cost of solar panels includes all the costs associated with making them, including energy. If it took more energy to make them than they would ever produce, then they would never pay for themselves. Even without incentives, that's no longer the case, so obviously this is wrong.
2) Solar panels stand up to extreme weather just fine, excluding things that destroy your home. They will still be producing plenty of power after twenty years. The question isn't when they will stop working, but when it will make sense to replace them with newer panels.
3) In the short-term these regulations will increase house prices, but they will also lower utility prices, so the total cost of ownership may go down. I believe some banks take into account expected utility costs in determining mortgage qualifications, so this may not impact the ability of people to buy homes.
4) Companies have always been motivated to use the cheapest tech, and existing solar installations have been extremely reliable. Regulations like this won't change that.
4 [sic]) Lithium Ion batteries are easy to recycle. Also, like solar panels, they don't typically just fail; they degrade in capacity over time. Battery systems being installed today will likely stay in use for a decade or longer.
The tech does meet real criteria: efficiency, longevity, and safety -- you just don't want it on your rooftop.
For a single individual it would be too low. For a major home developer buying in bulk and likely doing the installation themselves it's probably about right even without subsidies.
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I'm from southern New York, which is about as far north as northern California. We also get lots of snow. Like actual snow, not just at ski resorts.
The largest PV installation in the US is the Long Island Solar Farm, which is slightly farther north than Redding, CA.
Our solar panels work just fine.
=Smidge=
I'm being serious. I had solar panels installed on half my roof a few years ago. They completely cover the shingles and when it rains, barely any rain/water ends up on the shingles. It just sheets away on the panel itself. Same for snow.
I bet, in 30 years time when the shingles on the other side have to be replaced, the ones under the panels will be pristine. There's still a 2" gap between the shingle and panel so airflow can evaporate any moisture but the elements aren't beating down on them.
The cost of replacing shingles should probably be factored into the overall cost of the panels - which are coming down in price year over year.
So in other words it costs money. If I invested 10K one time and never made another contribution, over a 30 year period I'd have about 43K. That's assuming a modest 5% annual return. Last time I checked 43K > 19K.
So what's going to happen when the utility companies start losing revenue and going bankrupt? Higher taxes, as usual. So you're still supporting the utility companies and were forced to buy an expensive add-on to boot.
Have we investigated who is funding these politicians? How are they profiting from requiring homeowners to buy things? Because you know this is the case.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Batteries are stupid. You're plugged into an electrical grid which can shift the load wherever is most-efficient. You're producing 2kW more than necessary? The laundromat down the street is getting 2kW from you, with lower transmission distance, thus lower loss.
You're hooked up to battery power instead of the grid? You lose 10% to 30% of your energy to charging (in the ideal case, with voltage just slightly above battery voltage, Li+ can charge at 99% efficiency; but you don't have a choice, you have electricity NOW and you're shoving it into that battery as hard as it will go).
They're a nice home backup power strategy, but not a great energy storage solution. Off-grid in general is a huge waste.
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A remodel can be regulated under the "new construction" standard if you change enough of the structure.
To be fair .. that's a pretty broad assumption. There's plenty of people taking $600k mortgages and paying them quite comfortably.
Taking a $610k mortgage isn't going to hurt you in terms of monthly payments spread over 20 years.
We have extreme weather -- shorten lifespan.
Hey Anonymous Coward - Other than the occasional heavy rains, and very hot days, what "extreme weather" does California have?
Hurricanes? Nope. Tornadoes? Nope. Blizzards? Nope. Ice Storms? Nope. Sandstorms? I guess maybe.
Net savings is about $30 a month, maintenance in the first 10 years is usually less than $1000, storm damage isn't really a thing, people have been mounting these things on ocean going sailboats for almost 20 years with no issues. Generally the mount wears out before the solar panel does. All these things were solved almost 25 years ago, it mostly sounds like either you are spreading FUD, or you don't understand solar, or possibly both.
moox. for a new generation.
Property taxes are completely artificial. The city wants homes/land to cost more. They collect more tax dollars and are just as greedy as those evil capitalists.
> Imagine what it would be like with nothing *but* solar panels everywhere! Disgusting.
Imagine what it would look like with electric utility poles and telephone poles and cell phone towers everywhere! DIsgusting.
We must BAN ALL Electric Utilities, Telephone Companies, and Cell Phone Towers! The more quickfully this happens the more gooder it twill bee.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
The cost is about $10k on a house that costs $550k. That $10k is not going to be the tipping point.
The costs for complying with the earthquake protection parts of the building code are much, much higher.
I'd like to see your math on the solar nonsense you just spewed. I looked at my electric bill very carefully, looked at 5KW system cost, and figured out my break-even point would arrive in 8 years. Since panels have a 20 year warranty, everything after the 8-year point is gravy. Beyond that, the major utility of Northern California (PG&E) has been steadily eroding the number of KWh for Tier-1 pricing, meaning that each year, more people are spending more money more quickly as they get pushed into Tiers 2, 3, and 4. A minimalist solar install can get people out of these higher tiers and save tons of money in the process.
And no, nuclear and hydroelectric do not "win out" environmentally. No solar panel ever made the news for spewing radioactive waste after a critical failure, and damns are actually creating huge problems for people living down river with damaged fisheries, reductions in fertile soil, and ultimately suffer from sedimentation.
This kind of thing interests me in how and when a government needs to push their people to make a change for their own good? Take the example of mandating energy efficient appliances that cost more now but save people in the long term.
The laissez-faire in me says that people should be allowed to do what they find most economically rational and desired, within the rules of the market and forecasts of costs that they believe.
On the other hand, most / many people will not do something unless required to, and then later they get mad when energy costs (for example) suck 50% of their paycheck. cf. Paris riots right now.
So what is a government to do? Act in its (society's) long-term interest and piss some people off who think it's not in their short-term interest? Or act in government's short-term interest to help people now, but face long-term costs that they didn't act deeply enough to address?
I think in democratic govts, it ends up being the 2nd choice. That is one shortcoming of that way of governing I suppose...
Also most of Oregon is desert, and very sunny.
Nope.
Maybe you should actually try visiting places instead of just looking at maps.
I have travelled quite a lot through Oregon, and the actual desert area is kind of a small corner compared to the rest of the state. if you actually DO look at a map, which it seems you did not, you'd see an awful lot of forest in your "desert state". A small part is desert, at least a third is coastal region, and the rest semi-arid (which is descent for solar but also not as many people live in those areas).
My point stands that the more Northern ranges of California still to to make sense to mandate solar. Yes the Central Valley is OK and will work well, but northern coastal areas? Come on.
I see you totally ignored my very insightful point that requiring houses to have solar panels even where it makes less sense will drive up the cost of panels for everyone everywhere... Would you say more people tend to live near the coast, or in the dry barren valleys? HMMMMM.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The US is the only sovereign nation which allows non citizens to own land.
Except of course for Argentina, Australia, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic. All right, I got to C. You can read the rest at https://internationalliving.co...
Every end has half a stick.
Also the California state capital, where this was decided, is actually north of San Francisco by ~45 miles. it is remarkably sunny there, despite, as you point out, being far north of palm springs
moox. for a new generation.
I'm seeing $6,000 for 6,760W of solar panels (assembled in USA), or $8,000 for 8,190W (Canadian-made). Around $3,300 for a 10,000W power optimizer kit or $2,000 for 26 microinverters. Looking at about $2,000 of installation materials. The labor costs are negligible at home-build time, since you're basically bolting them to a roof and running electricity--you're already building the roof and running power anyway, just slapping in another $200 circuit breaker set.
So around $13,500 for an 8kW system, no subsidies. Getting down to around $10k for a 6kW system.
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How much does a full roof of solar panels cost?
That isn't relevant, since the regulations do not require a full roof of solar panels.
To comply with this change, TFA says it would cost about $10k, on homes that cost on average $550k.
Also, if you're concerned about cost, complying with the state's earthquake protection parts of the building code cost several times more.
Maintenance?
Solar panels don't require much. The occasional washing which generally happens via this thing called "rain".
Repair after storms?
Nothing in the building code requires the solar panels continue to function after the final inspection. So, if you can't afford to fix the panels after a storm, don't. Also, CA doesn't tend to get too many hurricanes or that much hail.
The ROI is like 6-8 years.
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We have some people around us that have a large range of solar panels on the roof, like yours they cover most of the shingles... however I've always wondered if that many support struts being attached to the roof did not create a lot of opportunity for leaks over time.
That's why I've been kind of waiting for true solar shingles, which would act like real shingles and be more durable also. They seem to be coming along really slowly though in terms of wider adoption, and it seems like they would probably be less efficient.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Let's mandate cars to have air quality standards, emission control systems and fuel efficiency standards. OMG!! This could increase the cost of automobiles! The US would never do such a thing!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I'm not sure you reviewed the link you posted, average annual rainfall in the eastern two thirds of the state is well under 24", which would make sense if you've been there before... regardless, with that little rain, as you pointed out, makes eastern oregon an ideal location for solar.... as does most of california, except for the 10 miles closest to the ocean. That nullifies your weather point.
BrSolar install cost is far less than 1% of the total cost of the house, and begins paying for itself on day 1, which nullifies any kind of cost point.
moox. for a new generation.
When you agree with it, it's a good thing for one state to dictate to the rest of the nation such as how California required DVD players to use less than a certain amount of power which forced it on the whole nation.
Somehow, I don't think requiring solar panels on all houses will be such a great benefit for Alaska.
Am too typical stereotypical Californian. Name is Rex Doobieson and live just south of San Francisco in Los Angeles. In mornings surf in Pacific Ocean before going to day job as rookie cop with mismatched partner. In evenings eat tacos like all good Californians. Too am against solar panels on house. For one, panels too easily damaged by vodka. For another, too easily broken by bears. Repair costs would be many hundreds of dollars (thousands of rubles.) Why use solar when can use good clean energy like oil products from Gazprom?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Set to take effect in 2020, the new standard includes an exemption for houses that are often shaded from the sun."
I'll be forming a company to plant full sized shade trees in new developments so they can be exempted. /s
They are subsidized, often as much as 50%.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Also the California state capital, where this was decided, is actually north of San Francisco
Way to cherry pick a dry valley for your one-off example!!
Sacramento is way inland, I wonder if all of the people with houses around Eureka and similar areas will see the same benefit.
Also, did you factor in weeks per year of smoke reduced power generation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> Off-grid in general is a huge waste.
Difficulty: The laundromat down the street is busiest after 5PM when your solar panels aren't producing as much. You're probably also home at that point, using more power yourself.
Now, there is a LONG WAY TO GO before energy storage becomes necessary, but there's no reason there can't be benefits to it now. Especially for solar, where peak production does perfectly not coincide with peak consumption.
That said I think energy storage is better handled upstream at the utility side of things, but batteries for home use are not "a huge waste" IMHO.
=Smidge=
You don't need much rain to wash the dust off the panels. And the horrible consequences of not doing so is they make less power. Since it's your house and not a power plant where you are banking on a particular generating capacity, that's not exactly a horrible consequence.
There really aren't many people inside or outside of CA who buy homes with saved up cash. Unless you have rich parents, the only way to do it is to spend 20 years or so saving up, while living with your parents or otherwise renting a room and minimizing the amount of money you spend on having a home. That also effectively means putting your life on hold.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Now require California to make and use it's own water...
Being that this is part of a New House build. Adding Solar panels would be a drop in the bucket compared to all the other costs involved.
And I don't see many Middle/lower class people buying new homes. If they are a home owner they will buy an existing home, or a fixer upper.
As well the savings of lower power bills may compensate for the extra costs.
It is more expensive for those you need to add solar panels to existing homes, as their infrastructure may not be suited for them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I live in lower Alabama, and we get a LOT of storms. Actually during certain parts of the year, it's common to have storms every day. A guy from California moved here and we became friends. The first storm that came through had heavy thunder. That guy didn't even know what thunder was, or that it was that loud. He ran down the street to his neighbor's house to ask them what he was supposed to do.
...probably why there are so many people in Cali - the weather's nice.
Yeah, California does NOT have storms.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
We are at the tipping point already. Solar is 1.25 $/watt installation cost at utility levels. Battery is 125 $/kWh at pack level already. We consume 11 Terra Watt hours a day. Making that much at in 8 hours of sunshine would need 1.4 TW of installed capacity, costing 1.75 trillion dollars. We need to store half that energy in battery for night use, so at 125 $/kWh we need 750 billion in battery. Works out to 2.5 trillion dollars. Interest on that investment would be 100 billion a year at 4%. This cost needs to be added to annual production 11 Twh /day * 365 days, 4 billion kwh, works out to 2.5 cents per kWh. Electricity retails for about 6 cents/kWh, not counting distribution. Fuel, the sunlight, is free. So only other cost is maintenance of equipment. It is far simpler to maintain solar panels than powerplants. So the economics will work out.
The existing power plants all have life running into decades. But as they die off, replacement will be solar panels and batteries.
It makes economic sense to use solar, wind and batteries. Whether or not you believe in climate change or environments, pure economics is going to drive this industry.
Soon the traditional fossil fuel companies and powerplants will come with hats in hand begging for tax payer assistance.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Zoning laws, density/size restrictions and the anemic permitting process definite affects housing prices. When you have more people moving into an area, that increases demand. All of those local policies restrict supply.
What do you get when there's more demand than supply? Higher prices.
Panasonic gives a 25 year warranty on 80% panel efficiency compared to date of install... panasonic will likely still be around in 25 years to honor that warranty. They're in deep with Tesla. Their engineers are claiming closer to 92% efficiency after 30 years.
Even older poorer technology solar panels from the 90s are doing better than 80% after 25 years.... durability is not especially a factor in purchasing solar.
moox. for a new generation.
Here we are a century and change later. People are apparently still confused about efficiency and economies of scale. Apparently way too hard to grasp increased efficiency and less environmental impact is achieved when done at scale rather than thru piecemeal generation.
But this is California the land of bureaucratically imposed artificial scarcity whether energy or housing the state does its level best to fuck over its citizens for no reason.
What is wrong living in California? You don't need to live in the Cities. They are a lot of wonderful rural areas available.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I've discussed this at length with people before .... but there are many reasons your statements aren't quite accurate.
1. The costs of many of the cheaper solar panels in use absolutely did NOT take into account all of the associated costs of producing them! One of the problems the industry has struggled with are all the cheap Asian panels on the market, often sold at below cost, thanks to government subsidies from China. They were willing to fund these losses at the government level, to help destroy the competition and gain a secure foothold selling them in places like America.
2. As far as I've seen? Solar panels do stand up pretty well to the weather. But they won't work in the normal configuration, supplying AC power back onto the grid to earn your credits on your electric bill, unless you have expensive inverters attached to them. My installation has 2 inverters -- one for a set of panels on my roof, and a second one for a set of panels on my detached garage roof. The inverters generally only get a warranty for about half the length the panels are warrantied, and they're more likely than the panels themselves to have a failure.
3. I've never heard of these banks you speak of, who would allow a person to take out a larger home loan if they felt the person might use less electricity thanks to solar panels (or anything else)? That would be risky on a lender's part, especially not having any guarantee the new homeowner wouldn't just use additional power, knowing some of their bill was supplemented by solar.
4. As for battery technology? I looked into that, but it's really too costly to make much sense in many situations. When the financials work out on it? It's usually only because that person's utility company decided to arbitrarily give discounted electric rates for power used at night ("off peak"). If you're able to time-shift your power consumption via battery storage, while making the power during the peak period when the sun is out -- that saves you money. But again, that's just an artificial construct the power company decided to put in place. My power company bills the same amount for my electricity, no matter when I use it. I'd hate to invest a lot of money in battery storage for PV solar on a home, only to find the power company decided to change the billing around shortly after that and eliminated the only reason it made financial sense!
As an overall thing? I can see how solar does pay for itself in the sunniest parts of the country. Nevada, California or Hawaii? Yeah ... probably a good investment. In much of the country though? You'll really not even do better than possibly breaking even on them. Here in Maryland, for example? A solar system installation similar to what I've got (a 7.64Kw sized setup) will typically cost a person around $34,000 to install. You can shave 30% off of that with a Federal tax credit, for now -- but that's still money you only get back a year after you have to buy the thing. But ok -- you're at $23,800 after said credit. Most people don't have that kind of money just lying around to pay up-front, so now you're looking at some kind of loan to cover that $23,800. Interest on that is going to chip away at the monthly electric bill savings the system makes, until you've got the thing paid off. Meanwhile, given our power rates out here? I'd say at BEST (only a few summer months out of each year), my panels make enough energy to shave about $100 per month off the bill. In months like December or January, it's likely the panels will generate as little as maybe 800 watts of power total on a snowy or rainy/overcast day. Enough of those, and you're looking at a month where the panels only saved you $20-30.
The people out here who brag that their solar panels make their monthly power bills 0 are usually living on farmland where they put rows and rows of panels up on metal frames or poles, taking up a big chunk of land. Not only did that probably cost them FAR more money than they'll ever recoup -- but it means they
Regulations and Taxes are not bad. However something that is missing is the ability to objectively evaluate the effects of the actions.
I would be find paying Taxes for an idea that didn't work. However if shown it doesn't work, it needs to stop.
Both political sides love to point out how their idea often many decades old, is better then the other, however with little showing on what works and what doesn't
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If solar is so wonderful then why does the government have to force people to have it on their homes? Why do taxpayers have to subsiduze the installations?
Name one california regulation or government over reach? Name one? Waiting?
Requiring solar panels on new homes.
California energy policies are penny-wise and pound foolish. The unwashed masses cannot think for themselves, so... mandate!
This same mentality didn't work out so well for French President Macron. What's truly ironic is that a band of miscreant French in Paris helped a young Ceasar Julian overthrow his uncle - Byzatine Emperor Constantius II, because Julian lowered taxes, closed loopholes, and reduced corruption. Left to his own devices, Constantius would have continued taxing the shit out of everyone. As a result, Julain's overall tax revenue went way up, as did his popular support, which helped fund his little military escapade back to Constantinople to take over the empire. To bad he got speared to death by a Scythian right when the empire needed a strong and insightful leader. Oh well, at least the western world still celebrates the Roman December Festivities.
You'd think modern politicians would learn the difference between a mandate and an incentive. A poor incentive largely gets ignored and goes away, but heavy handed mandates lead to revolutions like the Boston Tea Party and the French Yellow Vest riots.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
...and no incentive for landlord to install panels since the landlord doesn't pay the electricity bill.
Lol, you think solar panel companies can outbid oil companies?
You might want to look into how the California "energy crisis" was completely, purposefully engineered by power sellers. They literally shut down and sold off plants, it's a matter of public record.
It it wasn't for the Oil Iobbies putting doubt in Green Energy, Solar Energy would seem to be a Conservative dream.
Take your homes off these Highly regulated and expensive infrastructure, allow you be independent and generate your own power for your own land, with less government control on the power you make. In case of war the American Power infrastructure would be resilient. As there would be less of an infrastructure to attack, and every self sufficient citizen could carry one and endure.
If you want less government, green energy is a good solution, because you yourself can make your own power.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You can have all those things, but if you didn't also have movie millionaires and tech billionaires bidding up real-estate prices, you would still have rock-bottom prices. Maybe regulations don't help, but they are not the driving cause of lack of affordable housing in California—at least around Hollywood and Silicon Valley; you can find plenty of affordable housing "in the middle of nowhere", even in California.
This is one reason why property taxes should be replaced with a fee that covers only the property's actual burden on the city. For example, a property with a longer street frontage costs the city more in street and sidewalk amortization and maintenance, tree trimming, emergency response, etc. A property with more impermeable surface (roof, driveway) costs the city more in sewer amortization and maintenance. And so on.
The way property taxes are normally assessed transfers wealth from poor neighborhoods to affluent ones, and then we wonder why few people are able to pull themselves out of poverty!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Your English is too good to be a surfer dude!
Like water, which is 11% via home use "requiring" tiny toilets and limit discs. These are literally an old psychological tool to ready you for bigger intrusions.
This is a textbook example of innumeracy.
The rest of the nation thanks you for kicking yourselves pointlessly in the nuts so you can water a desert so we can have winter vegetables and avocados.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So, here's what's interesting. The new autocratic dictates...er...breakthrough regulations don't require you have the panels on your house. TFA mentions you can pool together and install the panels somewhere else if you'd like.
What I don't know is how far away those panels can be. Can I put them 100 feet away? 100 meters? 100 miles? Because what I'd like to do is buy a 5 kW share of a solar farm in the middle of the Mojave desert. I expect that will be, by far, the cheapest way to install and maintain "my" panels, and keep them upgraded as solar technology improves.
Of course, this begs the questions of why couldn't I buy a share of a wind farm instead but I guess the fine people on the building codes committee thought about that and realized there is no doubt that solar panels are and always will be the most economical and effective approach. Wow, I wish I was as smart as they are! I can't even tell what the price of eggs will be next week let alone the relative price of solar vs. wind 20 years from now.
Not necessarily. Artificial scarcity only increases prices if demand is constant. If you have artificial scarcity in housing only, but not in commercial construction, then demand remains constant because of people wanting to live near their workplaces. However, if you have artificial scarcity in both commercial and residential construction, then commercial prices may go up because of companies desperate to locate here, but housing prices will not necessarily go up, because there will be a limited number of businesses, and therefore a limited number of people who will want to live near those businesses.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's if you took the $19k in energy savings and hid it in your mattress. I think you should invest it.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Only if you average it over an entire year. If you average it over a day at a time, the sun in Alaska ranges from a lot more to perpetual twilight.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Isn't California trying to mandate gender quotas on corporations? Didn't California mandate pro-life agencies had to post info on how women can obtain abortions?
ya, storm damage isn't a thing at all...: https://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/da...
Considering the average price of a house in California is already $440K, an extra $10K for solar panels really isn't that much. Anyone that can afford a home at that price can afford the solar panels to go with it. At least solar panel give some return on their investment, and as long as they are installed properly they should be as durable if not more so than any regular roofing tiles and require little to no maintenance.
I'm not "anti-gov't", but trust me, you don't want the gov't running factories. I'd estimate they are only about 60% as efficient as the private sector in manufacturing, based on experiments in other countries.
Solar panels mostly pay for themselves over time. (There may need to be minor subsidies, but worth it to get off oil.) The gov't could essentially require panels but issue the home-owner and/or builder a loan which is paid off via their power bill just like regular power utilities. The owner or builder would buy the panels on the private market made by private industry.
Whether those panel factories are in the US or elsewhere depends issues that are probably outside of this topic.
Table-ized A.I.
I thought I'd read, at least in the past...that in CA they had laws/regulations against even watering your yard, due to rain shortages out there. If this is still true, have they provided exceptions for using your water hose to go up and wash your solar panels?
If not, I can just see the "to collect and serve" police guys out there catching people washing their mandated solar panels.
Not trying to be funny, I'm serious.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Improve the environment by destroying the middle/lower class's ability to buy home. How about just tax rich people and force out coal and oil companies? The difference in benefits is several orders of magnitude, but no, we can't harm our generous donors.
I don't think that's the right way to look at it. There are lots of building and zoning codes for various reasons. This isn't that out of line.
I am wondering about the details though, the article didn't provide any
Well, there's the thing.
A home owner, that wanted to install solar panels, would likely do research, find the best ones they could afford, with best installer, they could afford.....and have a useful home addition.
But a new house...well, the builder is going to go with the cheapest version they can, and add profit on top of it, so it may not be the best system and not last as long as a quality system a home owner might install himself.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If they didn't change the mandate, but last i heard a house needed a net 0 energy cost over a year. I doubt an 8kW system is gonna come close to getting that due to 8kW is on a good sunny day, with sun at prefect angel to the panels. So 8kW probably gonna need a bit more then that for most homes.
92% efficiency could be possible with optical rectennas. PV-tinted class could also be done with it.
You might actually start to see practical solar cars at 80+% efficiency. Not "drive continuously forever", but "drive with extended range, park all day, then drive again".
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
Schools should be funded by the state so poor school districts don't suffer.
Libraries should be funded by the state so poor cities don't suffer.
Streets should be funded by the adjacent property owners because they are the ones who benefit.
Non-street roads should be funded 100% by the drivers instead of less than half. (Remember, streets are the places at the beginning and end of your journey, roads are the connections between places.)
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Naw, it's pretty sunny everywhere except San Francisco. The fog mysteriously vanishes at the city's borders on some days, and this is most often during mornings and evenings. But you do not need direct sunlight to generate electricity with solar panels. The days with the most electricity consumption are inevitably hot sunny days when the air conditioners are on.
Or the State should provide such a service. If some product or service is mandatory, then the government should provide it. I'd rather pay into the budget of my country than into the pockets of some already-rich shareholders
You don't have to buy insurance; you only need it if you plan on driving on public roads.
Rather than require a set size of solar, they need to instead require new homes to install enough UNSUBSIDIZED AE (likely solar) so that the energy => the energy used by HVAC. By doing this, it enables developers to figure out how best to build things. In addition, utilities that will fight solar, will not fight this. After all, they will technically have to buy the extra energy. This approach makes a winner of all.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bastiat tackled your claim in 1850:
I'll add to that: The smart people in society don't aspire to become governmental paper-pushers, making your point even dumber.
Name one?
Every fucking product I've bought in the last few years has a slip of paper that says something like "this product contains chemicals known to the state of CA to cause cancer". Totally worthless regulation, as it clearly does not harm the sales of said products and creates extra waste.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I thought I'd read, at least in the past...that in CA they had laws/regulations against even watering your yard, due to rain shortages out there.
No. They have pricing structures on their water bills to make it very expensive to use a lot of water. Use a little, pay X. Use 50% more, pay 2.5X. Use 100% more, pay 10X.
You'll find that all of the 'extreme' stories about CA are primarily about convincing non-CAians that they're better off not being in CA, not about reality.
I am surprised at how many people instantly like to disparage solar power based upon temperature or amount of direct sunlight. If solar can pay for itself for even 3 months out of the year then it shouldn't matter much. Also, for alternate or traditional forms of electricity, having storage capability greatly increases the benefit.
The solar in California makes great sense because the peak electrical usage corresponds to hot days where the sun is out in full. Back in 2000-ish when we had rolling blackouts because of lack of capacity, the problems were the afternoons and not in the middle of the night.
Irrelevant. You do not need 365 days of sunlight to make solar power useful. What is your proposed alternative here, to double down on coal? Perhaps mandating is not a great idea, but the idea of solar is good.
That soot does not come off as easy as you think. If a little rain washed everything off why are there so many window washers around?
It's a testament to how deeply repugnant the Left regards Conservatives, that they can make such an attractive idea seem like a terrible abomination. Unfortunately these schemes always serve to increase government control over our lives, because that's what the Left loves. Like here, being forced to buy something. If it was economical and made sense, you wouldn't have to force people, they'd do it with a smile on their faces. But that's not what it's about. It's about control and despising the outgroup. Read this link, it explains the situation I'm talking about.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But, in my scenario, you don't have $10,000 (which is why you are borrowing it as part of the mortgage, which most lower- and middle-income people would do). And, you have to remember solar panels would likely increase the value of the home by some amount as well (this will vary depending on the age of the panels) - it is also an investment that could produce earnings (depending on the local housing market) when the home is sold to someone else. What's the average return on real estate, 3-5% or more depending on market?
Instead of merely bumping energy efficiency requirements on houses to something like Passive House?
Because building houses to a better standard, so they use a fraction of the power would be a Dumb Thing.
Just keep building shitty homes that guzzle energy and offset it only partially by slapping on $5-10K in solar panel bling that increases the cost of the house, doesn't REALLY offset most of your power bill, and has to have components replaced over time...
And, as others have pointed out, there are going to be places where slapping on solar will net you NOTHING, as you may not be optimally placed for solar production.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You aren't even talking about the same type of "efficiency" while also talking about technologies that are not likely to be practical until 20 years after cold fusion.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Almost 2019: Not using an APPITY APP APP APP to help you pay your mortgage
You're such a luddite.
I think any real estate agent who was told "okay, I'll write you a check for that" would probably fall over dead, just as soon as they stopped laughing and realized you were serious.
Also that being said, and knowing little about finances myself, I think there's probably some advantage to taking out a mortgage even if you could pay for it in cash, probably something about being able to make more money by investing all that money in something with a higher yield than the interest on the mortgage, am I right?
File that under 'growing pains'. The world is changing, this is a sign of it, electric utility companies have already been whining and crying about this for at least 10 years now, they're going to have to change the way they do business is what's going to happen, and they'll just as likely as not go kicking and screaming the whole way.
Meanwhile shitty irresponsible companies like PG&E are letting their infrastructure fall apart and mismanaging it all, causing entire neighborhoods to explode from gas line problems, and massive wildfires like the Camp Fire in the Paradise area destroying entire communities and many thousands of people are now homeless because of it. Believe you me shit's got to change anyway. Electric companies need to just STFU and roll with it.
Solar energy is a conservative dream. Problem is, it's not a capitalist dream because a) most countries missed the boat on panel manufacturing to China and b) constant consumption is more profitable than efficiency and self-sufficiency.
...get rid of plastic straws...
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Have gnu, will travel.
Forcing corporations to enforce sexist policies of having a woman on their board of directors.
Forestalling the birth of the electric car industry by demanding manufacturers sell a certain number.
Requiring solar panels on homes.
I'm sorry. You said just one, didn't you.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It's not quite as large a difference as you suggest. Assuming a 5% rate of return on the market, if you invested the $10k you would indeed have about $43.2k at the end of 30 years. However, if you spent the $10k on solar panels up front and invested the $52.78 you're expected to save in energy costs each month at that same 5% rate then you would have $43k at the end of 30 years, plus some 30-year-old solar panels which may or may not be worth something. Disregarding any residual value in the used panels, that means buying solar panels only costs you about $200 after 30 years compared to investing the same money in the market, which is practically zero given all the approximations and unknowns involved.
Of course, the expected market rate of return makes a huge difference. At 4.75% APY the panels come out $950 ahead; at 5.25% the investment wins by $1400. The 5% rate used as a baseline is very nearly the breakeven point (~4.96%). Similarly, a 5% variance in the energy savings (~$50-55 vs. the estimated $52.78) would shift the balance by around $2100.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It seems like installing solar panels effectively lets you wrap your monthly electric bill into your mortgage (along with a net profit for you). Mortgages are low interest loans because they're secured by the physical property. That could easily reduce the month-to-month expenses for someone who has enough money to buy a house.
If you're actually poor, don't buy a house, never mind building a new one. Except in distorted markets, renting is cheaper.
Density restrictions, so long as they are applied similarly to commercial construction, just increase sprawl and commute times, rather than driving up pricing. Any claim to the contrary demands evidence.
Wait ... what? You think that you get to make a claim and then demand that others provide evidence to prove you wrong?
Don't be a jackass.
Of course sprawl increases prices. Look at any major city. The closer you are to the center of it, the higher the prices. Those who don't want to commute for 4 hours every day will pay top dollar to be closer to work. Any claim to the contrary demands evidence!
This assumes you have $10k cash to invest, rather than adding $10k to a long term loan (mortgage).
Obviously if you do have $10k then you can still invest it and still add $10k to your mortgage and still make a profit on both.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't know about that. It's about to snow this weekend, and the stores are packed with generators. People are already paying over $600 for a generator that will keep their fridge going and maybe a few lights (or their TV). I've never bought one, but know several people who have, and once it sits for the 6mos to a year before it is needed the next time, it rusts out and won't start. And that is even if you've kept gas around to put in it.
I like the idea of a small battery bank for that reason if no other.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Solar PV will democratise power generation, moving power away from too-big-to-fail energy companies to individuals and communities. Big centralized energy generation is going away no matter what, the only question is now or later.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Isn't California trying to mandate gender quotas on corporations?
Nope. California is considering requiring a percentage of board members to be female. Less than 50%.
Didn't California mandate pro-life agencies had to post info on how women can obtain abortions?
Nope. California required "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" to disclose they do not provide abortions and abortions are available elsewhere. Apparently, having to tell the truth violated the religion of the people operating these centers.
Last time I was in Scotland, hill walking north of Glasgow, there were home solar installations. In Scotland.
How much does a full roof of solar panels cost? Maintenance? Repair after storms?
I can add some personal experience.
Cost: Very little in comparison to the power it offset. Admittedly there were good incentives at the time which caused the system to pay for itself in well under 2 years but now with those incentives gone I see systems cost less than what I paid for for my 10kW setup.
Maintenance: $0. I mean when it doesn't rain for a long time the power output goes down but a good storm sorts that out. Once I washed them. Waste of time, next time I'll just wait for another good storm. My inverter has only been running for 7 years so I expect it it about half way through it's life but effectively this system has paid for itself over many times.
Repair after storms: Not sure what you mean. I mean the last big storm we had damaged roof tiles, wrote off two cars, and I had to replace 3 windows thanks to first size hail which was about at round as a tetrahedron and just as sharp on the edges. My neighbour was hospitalised because she was out at the time both her cars were written off too, but the panels? Zero damage. I mean they are made of tempered glass mounted against a rigid metal structure. I highly doubt I could break them if I attacked them with a hammer. During the 2013 storms we had the area of my roof with solar panels was the only area which didn't need repairs.
right now I hear nothing buy young people complaining about the cost of housing
Now imagine if they had solar panels to reduce their utility costs. I drew on my mortgage to buy solar panels. Best investment I ever made.
Because without significant wind, not much rain hits the windows.
Should I stand up for the applause?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So what's going to happen when the utility companies start losing revenue and going bankrupt?
The utilities will be starting less fires, since they're no longer being operated by MBAs.
And environmental studies. We have an office in San Mateo, and our main investor decided to develop a dozen townhomes to replace two houses. The environmetal study cost more than the townhouses cost to build.
Why do taxpayers have to subsiduze the installations?
For the same reason taxpayers subsidize the installation of every nuclear plant. And most coal plants. And a good chunk of gas plants.
That 10k would only result in a few extra hundred up front on the down payment. After that, on a 30 year loan the savings on the electric bill would very likely cancel out the extra costs associated with the higher monthly mortgage payment.
If you're concerned about people of lesser means ability to buy a house, California's local governments being massively anti housing growth contributes infinitely more to that problem then anything the state has done.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
They have pricing structures on their water bills to make it very expensive to use a lot of water. Use a little, pay X. Use 50% more, pay 2.5X. Use 100% more, pay 10X.
Would suck to be the poor bastard who has a wife and 6 daughters.
2) Solar panels stand up to extreme weather just fine, excluding things that destroy your home.
Not quite. I have first hand experience with this and I can tell you with great certainty that solar panels survive just fine when things destroy your home. During a major hailstorm in 2013 (where the panels sustained no damage) I paid a hefty price to repair damage to my roof... except the part covered by panels.
Hmm, $43,219 vs. $41,786 after 30 years. I suppose you're right.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
And last I checked my solar panels paid for themselves in just 1.5 years and that was many years ago (though we do have higher energy prices here than in the USA). So you're right 43K > 19K I bet you you'd still come out on top over 30 years if you had solar panels though.
So you're still supporting the utility companies and were forced to buy an expensive add-on to boot.
Yeah a horribly expensive addon that pays for itself and then reduces your living costs thereafter.
I don't know who's paying those politicians but they should do more of it.
My roof is terracotta tiles. The area covered in solar panels is the only area that hasn't been damaged by hail (the solar panels survived the hail).
File that under 'growing pains'. The world is changing, this is a sign of it,
Citation needed. All I see if Californians getting dumber and spending more money while the rest of the world scoots along fine with out all the bullshit. Sorry but "the world is changing" is so fucking cliche at this point it's laughable.
It's almost like freedom is a good thing or something.
NEWS FLASH: Every place on the planet spends half the year in darkness. It's called "night".
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Could you try reading all the way through TFSummary next time?
Set to take effect in 2020, the new standard includes an exemption for houses that are often shaded from the sun
Instead of merely bumping energy efficiency requirements on houses
They already did after Enron fucked the state over. New CA houses are more energy efficient than any other building code in the country. Also, much of the concepts and technologies in Passive House does not work well in places with earthquakes.
And, as others have pointed out, there are going to be places where slapping on solar will net you NOTHING, as you may not be optimally placed for solar production.
Could you actually read all the way to the third sentence of TFSummary next time? There's an exemption for houses that are shaded.
So I guess your power company is going to let you hang on to that 19k for 30 years and not actually pay for the electricity? Thatâ(TM)s neat
What happens when something better comes along, or if I want wind energy instead of solar?
Wind requires scaling up very large for efficiency. A single-house wind turbine isn't that good an idea.
And if something better comes along, they'll change the building code again. It's not permanently etched in stone tablets.
What happens when fusion is ready and I want that instead?
Fusion is 1) not going to be ready in your lifetime, and 2) not going to be single-house-sized.
What if I can't afford a house with solar panels?
Does that mean I can't live in a house?
It means you buy an existing house instead of building a new one.
Though the cost (estimated $10k on a $550k house) is small enough that if you can afford the mortgage on the house, you can probably afford the very slightly higher mortgage. Especially with the reduction of your electricity bill more than offsetting the increased mortgage payment.
Or you build somewhere that qualifies for the exemption mentioned in TFSummary.
Most houses do not cost *anywhere* what they sell for to make
The mortgage is not based on the cost to build the house, so for virtually everyone buying the house the value is the relevant metric.
It could mean the difference between getting an nice insulation system vs solar panels.
Good news! Thanks to Enron's fucking over of the state, the building code was changed and you have to put in that nice insulation system anyway.
You're one of those idiots who thinks Alaska spends half of the year in darkness, aren't you?
You're one of the idiots who think that it's feasible to drive solar panels whenever there's daylight, no matter how low the sun is in the sky, aren't you?
Name one california regulation or government over reach? Name one? Waiting?
Prop 65 warnings. Seriously, toast and prune juice are on the Prop 65 list as "dangerous items" for human consumption. If that's not a regulatory overreach - prune juice and toast, for crying out loud - then I don't know what is. And if you don't label something with a Prop 65 warning - you open yourself up to massive litigation.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yes, yes they did. Interestingly, it is now explicitly legal to discriminate on boards of directors against transsexual and intersex folks, because the law only states that women must be included. Since there is now a defined list of who must be on a board - men and women - it implicitly means you do NOT have to have anyone else, so feel free to discriminate as you like!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You can figure out the impact of weather on PV panel production via something called capacity factor. That's the percentage of the panel's rated capacity it can actually produce over a month or a year. The NREL put out a website which incorporates weather data to calculate your expected capacity factor for any zip code in the U.S.
Solar sucks in Germany because of its latitude. Germany spans from about 43 to 53 degrees latitude, which only yields a capacity factor of around 0.11 (take the actual GWh generated, divided by installed MW * 8766 hours/year / 1000 MW/GW to skip over all the marketing BS). The continental U.S. spans from about 27 to 48 degrees latitude, and has an average capacity factor of 0.145.
The costs of many of the cheaper solar panels in use absolutely did NOT take into account all of the associated costs of producing them! One of the problems the industry has struggled with are all the cheap Asian panels on the market, often sold at below cost, thanks to government subsidies from China.
These circumstances applied only to panels from specific manufacturers for a fairly limited period of time. Most solar panels are not "dumped", not even from China.
I've never heard of these banks you speak of, who would allow a person to take out a larger home loan if they felt the person might use less electricity thanks to solar panels (or anything else)?
You may be unaware of it, but all banks consider the monthly expenses of every prospective loan recipient. Power very much factors in to their loan-making decisions, varying only by the demands of the local power company for money.
As for battery technology? I looked into that, but it's really too costly to make much sense in many situations. When the financials work out on it? It's usually only because that person's utility company decided to arbitrarily give discounted electric rates for power used at night ("off peak").
Which applies to quite a few people's houses. You may not be one of them, but millions upon millions are, including all of California. Even I am subject to time-of-day billing here in the Midwest.
A solar system installation similar to what I've got (a 7.64Kw sized setup) will typically cost a person around $34,000 to install.
That is indeed a stupidly high price, and it's largely an artifact of yesteryear's panel prices. When a solar panel cost $5/watt, installers could demand premium prices and know their demands would be lost in the noise. Now that panels are right around $1/watt (post Trump tariffs), installers charging double or triple what the equipment costs is really noticeable. It will change. It will obviously change. There were a whole helluva lot of people clambering around on my roof when I replaced my shingles after the last hail storm made a hash out of them, and it didn't cost me any $20,000. It cost half that, including the price of shingles. So $28,000 to install less than $8,000 of panels is ludicrous, and can't last.
Not only did that probably cost them FAR more money than they'll ever recoup
They didn't. Ground-mounted solar panels are far cheaper to install, even in this over-inflated installer market, and as stated above, installation price is the expensive part right now. Installing on the ground is incredibly easier than a roof-mount install. There's zero money or effort required to evaluate the load-bearing capabilities of the roof, since there's no roof. The insurance costs are dramatically lower since no one is climbing around on a roof. Even the time required is much lower since there are no logistics of dragging heavy, awkward panels up onto a roof to worry about.
It would be a really BAD idea to mandate solar panels in our state, and even worse for Missouri, where I was born and raised. They get less sun than we do.
Fact checking you, I see that NREL shows that Missouri is at least one category better than Maryland in almost every month of the year for solar insolation.
All of your opinions seem to be informed by your personal experience, which is obsolete or inapplicable. A decade ago, you were suffering early adopter tax, and definitely paying more for the non-financial benefits than any financial benefit you could hope to gain. Today and in the coming years, things are different and will become still more different. It will be (and already is) considerably easier to buy solar panels for the financial benefits, as well as the quality of life benefits.
You should definitely buy the geothermal heat pump system though.
To comply with this change, TFA says it would cost about $10k, on homes that cost on average $550k.
At least in my neighborhood (selling prices around $700K), $10K would be a solid 7-8 years of electricity costs. Add in additional taxation and insurance costs, and it's probably going to be 9 years to break even. Opportunity costs of investment of that $10K make it, at best, a push over a 20-25 year timespan (typical quote for solar panel lifespans).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Those start shipping right after the $35K Model 3, right?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Don't worry - that initial $10K estimate from the State is rock-solid! After all, we were told the $100 billion, 100 MPH high speed train from Bakersfield to Modesto is only going to cost $16 billion and it runs from LA to San Francisco in just 2 hours!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
She didn't even offer to pay them for it. She offered to give them slightly better terms on student loans. To people in their 30s and 40s that couldn't make it through college when they were in their 20s and didn't already have kids to watch.
The problem with Hilary is she's one of those people who found school easy-peasy and can't understand why everyone else isn't just like her. Romney had the same problem. It's that whole "Why can't the poor just buy more money?". When you say it like that it's a joke, but what it really means is that for some people life is just easy, and all they have to do to get rich is reach out their hands and take it. Those folks can't comprehend why those of us who are struggling don't just do the same thing. I don't even mean that as an insult to them. They're not immoral, they're amoral. They literally don't understand.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
to build factories. The government runs the bloody factories. Like the Post Office. Otherwise it just turns into corruption.
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the way are, not the way you want them to be. Is it crazy to transform our entire civilization for 70,000 coal miners? Maybe. But it's either that or they vote another 4 years of Trump. And nobody wins then. Trump will screw them and us over.
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Yes, yes they did. Interestingly, it is now explicitly legal to discriminate on boards of directors against transsexual and intersex folks, because the law only states that women must be included. Since there is now a defined list of who must be on a board - men and women - it implicitly means you do NOT have to have anyone else, so feel free to discriminate as you like!
You do know that "female" is a sex classification, not gender, right? You can chop off or sew on or use hormones to grow whatever you want to in order to change your gender classification, but it still doesn't change your chromosomes.
Homes in Paradise were "often shaded from the Sun"--by dry pines. I wonder what kinds of unintended consequences will be wrought by this, aside from the obvious ones of placing more restraints on development when there's a housing supply shortage. You see, building on the north side of a hill surrounded by grass and oaks in a virtually indefensible space is going to look like an attractive option... sigh.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I see what you're saying. Making the land in a neighborhood artificially cheap by not allowing more density helps to keep home prices low in that neighborhood in spite of pent-up demand. Keeping trendy businesses out of the neighborhood and keeping jobs as far away as possible also help to depress home prices.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
It was created by the plaintiffs' attorneys to make money, not to provide safety or alert you to things that may cause cancer. When you view it that way, it's a very successful regulation.
Home solar is stupid in general for CA, but if you're going to do it, at least batteries make sense. CA already has days where it has to pay Arizona to take its excess power, because there's too much being produced in the middle of the day from solar, but power usage peaks at 6pm.
I'm talking in regards people shopping for a home. They can buy an existing one, or foot the bill of solar for a new one. If existing home owners come out of this with a slight win, then that might help explain the lack of enough resistance to the law compelling solar. Sure, some home owners will buy new, in California down the road, but but then the cost of solar will have come down, and it likely will blend in better to the home's look. Other home owners will sell, and then move out of state. Though if they move to a state on the southern extreme, or near to it, solar would be a good idea there. Building costs in general, and solar in particular, might be less expensive though. Most of California has pretty high costs, relative to sun belt states, afaik.
Nope. California required "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" to disclose they do not provide abortions and abortions are available elsewhere. Apparently, having to tell the truth violated the religion of the people operating these centers.
The applicable provisions in that law were struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the free speech of non-medical clinics and putting an undue burden on medical clinics.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
They do teach that stuff in US schools. Maybe they didn't in yours.
Because it's not that simple and clear cut. There are many things that the invisible hand and free markets don't want to take risk in or are not equipped to assess or are too big to venture into (reverse lottery). These things need a society level entity to kick start things.
All the things people complain about governments can be laid against any large enterprise... free or regulated. The old academia used to say, atleast the enterprise can fail and only impact their shareholders. This isn't really true. Small governments fail all the time and large enterprises are quite frequently backed up by taxpayer funds.
Where would that NOT suck?
1. Using the mentioned $10000. Thats $10000 lost to education, health care, transport, a holiday, payments, important maintenance, lifestyle, shopping, a hobby that year.
2. The payback time works if the gov keeps ensuring the energy out of the solar system gets a good export payment as cash.
3. Smart people with a free "$10000" can work in other parts of the USA and then walk away from the new "$10000" solar they put in years early. A loss to them.
4. Price uncertainty a year later? The gov lowers the payments of exported energy from the 'solar" and allows steep new price rates for energy used when the sun is "down".
A power company does not need to pay anything extra for solar power and can set a new price at night.
Solar on the roof all day pays nothing in "cash" all day, every year. Energy at night suddenly costs a lot more.
The "solar" earns nothing all day and energy usage prices go up and up every night.
The "$10000" solar system gives energy away all day and energy use costs more at night.
Cooling, heating, cooking, a swimming pool, entertainment, work all add to energy costs that solar will not pay for and then new energy prices increase.
Plans to force a solar system use would need the gov to pay for all exported energy all day and regulate a low price for energy use at night.
Want the gov setting a price on solar energy all day and how much energy will cost at night?
A large new battery would then be needed to balance day generation with night use.
Have a US state force a new battery and a new solar system be installed as part of every new approved plan?
Have the state demand the battery has to be replaced when it cant be used to a set rate again?
Gov inspections of solar and battery use? People told to upgrade their big battery by a gov when it gets "low"? A state solar and battery permit system?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You are comparing apples to chairs? Why are you comparing operational ROI rather than resale ROI? Most people don't look at the house value ROIs based on how much they would save against renting. They compare it to the resale value.
You put 10k into a house, sell it at 10k plus. If you can't, then neither could the builder to you.
I don't need to 'cite' anything, the evidence is all around you, right under your nose, but you don't want to see it, don't want things to change. Doesn't matter, they're changing anyway, and if you can't keep up then I suggest you get the hell out of the way, because none of it is going to stop just because you don't like it. Non-renewable resources were always a limited supply, and were never good for the environment, and now we're starting to pay the price for it. Fossil fuels are not king anymore so get used to it, they have to go the way of the dinosaurs that helped create them in the first place, and renewables and nuclear are going to take their place or our civilization will fail completely at some point, and you can take that to the bank.
You would think that, but you still can't find a house in San Diego county for under 500k. Don't want traffic? Expect to pay damn anywhere from 800k - god knows how high.
I'm thankful to own my condo and bought at the best possible time, but it is quite frustrating to know that I would need around $1,800 more a month of net income to get into a house.
Sure, I could sell my place and make $100k, but that only saves me $500 a month. This doesn't even account for the fact that maintaining, let alone improving, a house cost more then a condo. My utilities would probably double. My property taxes would probably triple. The homeowner insurance would also go up, though probably not anywhere near as bad as the other things.
All and all I would likely need another $2,000 a month to maintain my current lifestyle and move into a house. That's about 30k (24k + 6k taxes).
I'll just get right on that. Right.
what "extreme weather" does California have?
You really haven't been watching the news lately.
There is plenty of money to be made with Solar. Mining of materials to make them, setup and installation, and even manufacturing as the US does seem to excel in efficient manufacturing when given the opportunity. The main issue is too many people fell for the propaganda.
Now with that being said, Solar isn't free or have no environmental impact. It needs rare earth minerals, and will work mostly when there is little overcast so trees will need to be cut down. However it does solve the current first problem is about carbon polution
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Toxic industrial processes, such as carpentry, require a Prop 65 warning label:
https://www.p65warnings.ca.gov...
Sometimes.
Partially.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
From the article:
The state predicts that mandatory solar panel installations and other new improvements will add nearly $10,000 in the upfront cost of a home â" a cost that officials say will balance out over time, due to lower electricity bills.
A homeowner will save $19,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage, Bohan said at Wednesday's meeting of the building commission.
So the mortgage payment for a middle class home goes up by 1-2% but their electric bill goes down by 2-4%. Seems like a good deal for the middle class.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
The issue that always comes up. The individual will normally go for the short term gain, while the government when working properly is looking at the bigger picture. The government will imply rules intended for the greater good to follow even if we do not necessarily want to follow them.
Speed limits, product safety requirements, environmental regulations... Normally the laws in a free society are designed for cases where liberties are in conflict must be determined.
My freedom to live in a safe environment vs my freedom to build a house any way I want.
Now this isn't Left wants to increase government control vs Right who wants to reduce it. The American Right has a reputation of being very heavy handed in enforcing laws, and will often make laws just as restrictive as well. Which is the point of my original statement. Solar Panels is something that conservatives would support if the idea wasn't tied to Hippy Greenies,
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Thanks for the minor clarifications. Unfortunately putting 'nope' at the start of both sentences makes it sound like you don't think that these are examples of government overreach. Also, "having to tell the truth" makes it sound like they were lying, and it violated their freedom of speech, not religion.
NEWS FLASH: Every place on the planet spends half the year in darkness. It's called "night".
NEWS FLASH: That "half the year" you're talking about is spread out evenly over the whole year, meaning that THOSE SAME PLACES SPEND HALF THE YEAR IN A THING CALLED "day"
Halfwit
Imagine the unholy slaughter if you were making wooden benches for a beer hall and eating a piece of toast! Damn near nuclear-level, extinction event!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yes - and? Somehow the GP thought that Alaska wouldn't spend half the year in darkness, when in fact every place does.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Around here (Ventura area, near the beach), solar doesn't add any ROI to the resale. Most people don't have AC systems, let alone solar because it doesn't pay off. Put a $10K solar system on your house, you'll be lucky to get half that as value. And probably less, as most roofs are tiled, and in an earthquake bolts through tiles are the first things to cause roofing failures (which is why pretty much everything up near the top of a house, like a satellite dish, is installed on the eaves or sides of the home, into wood - not roofing tiles).
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Presidential Candidate Liz Warren is proposing something similar at the national level, although it's not purely gender based. I expect to see this idea emerge as part of the 2020 Democrat platform.
Where do you get the electrician to visit your installation for $100/year including cleaning, maintenance and parts?
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It must not rain very much where you are.
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People generally always look at both short and long term gains. If we all lived for short term gains, we would not have such things as banks, savings or investment accounts.
Governments are the ones on a 4 year cycle (at best) and have to make short term gains in some particular area or risk being overthrown. If solar added incredible value and eliminated utility prices, we'd all have them by now, people aren't stupid (that's what the left and the government seems to think), actually landlords and corporations would be the first to have them.
The problem with government is that it's effectively limiting freedom. They are putting a gun to your head and telling you to install solar panels, whether it makes sense or not. If 5 years from now some new innovation gives us personal fusion reactors, solar panels will still be required in CA - at gunpoint. When solar panels will skyrocket in price because war with China, CA will at gunpoint require you to obtain them anyway. Even though solar hot water makes more sense, is ecologically better and is cheaper both short and long term than solar panels, CA will at gunpoint require you to remove that hot water boiler and put up a solar panel.
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What is wrong living in California? You don't need to live in the Cities. They are a lot of wonderful rural areas available.
But you still live under the same state government that caters almost exclusively to the interests of the coastal cities, which is where the votes are.
Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, a coastal city.
Alaska has many hours of summer sun, but the sun is low in the sky and attenuated by the atmosphere, and travels along the horizon up to 360 degrees, so not much of the sunlight would reach a fixed angle PV panel.
There are plenty of windy areas in Alaska, especially along the coast, which is also where the people are. So wind turbines are likely a better investment than solar panels.
You know what has the biggest effect on house prices? Credit availability. Do you think house prices could climb if people couldn't borrow money?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Texas buys textbooks as a state, not as a school district, and as a result holds great sway over the textbook publishers... If you want to overcome that influence, just have your state buy textbooks state-wide.
Ken
You're an idiot. You buy insurance on a car to cover liabilities, you know, to fix things you break when you drive a car into them. If you can't pay for things you hit, you shouldn't be driving.
If you finance your car, the lien holder requires you to carry comprehensive cover so their car gets fixed when you hit something.
Ken
Are abortion centers also required to 'tell the truth' and explain that there are centers that will help care for them if they choose to keep the baby?
Ken
You don't need to alter your body to claim an alternative gender.
Ken
When you reduce density you drive up home prices. In New Jersey they tried to slow development where I used to live by declaring 3 acres the minimum buildable lot... then the neighbors were all upset when McMansions popped up on those 3 acre lots.
Ken
Oh look, a leftist who is in favor of more government control over our lives, and has no problem with corrupt officials as long as they advance the control agenda. How unusual.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Power in the hands of the people? The same people who have proven they can't be trusted with power? We need to keep it centralized and away from their hands, because they're morons. Did we forget this?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I don't think my experiences are all that obsolete or inapplicable, considering my own solar system is only a few years old now -- and much of what I've cited are just facts that you've brushed aside as irrelevant, since "they don't apply to a lot of people".
That $34,000 price estimate is for name-brand SunPower panels and inverters ... which do cost a premium over getting any old Asian made panel or no-name inverter. I've heard a lot of horror stories already about the cheaper panels having drastic dropoffs in power output after they've aged as little as 5 years though. So that doesn't sound like much of a bargain.
I'm surprised that survey shows Missouri as getting more sun than Maryland does. I can tell you that relatively few people I knew there were too excited about the prospects of going solar, though. I have one friend who did, but he admits he was only driven by the desire to say he had a more "Green" home, and didn't care if it saved him money or not. Maybe it's more a combination of people tending to have properties with more trees shading things and utility rates that are relatively cheap? But I just knew at least in the St. Louis area, PV solar was a tough sell compared to up here.
As far as ground mounted solar panels go? Maybe there's an issue with installers who are only trained to do the roof type installations? I actually had a chunk of space by my garage in back where I wanted to ground mount a row of panels to get more power generation. I couldn't get the installer remotely interested in entertaining doing it! I was told things like, "Those have to take things like high winds into account more than a panel firmly affixed to a roof, and there's extra work involved burying the cabling for them."
Honestly? I suspect with many power companies in America, you're getting billed at a rate that nicely averages the cost to generate each kilowatt during the day and at night, so you just pay one flat rate and they make the profits they're seeking, while keeping the billing from getting more complex.
Also, as more people install grid-tied solar, there's a lot of surplus energy getting fed back into the system during most of the "peak" hours when the sun is shining. I've heard where as a general rule, the power companies start having problems when more than about 15% of the homes in a given neighborhood install solar. The grid can't efficiently transmit power for miles and miles. So a lot of energy generation from say 10AM to 2PM in residential neighborhoods means there's more power on that part of the grid than they have customers wanting to use it. (A lot of people are away at work during the week during those hours, don't forget.)
So what happens is that excess power generation just goes to waste, but the utility company is still required by law you pay you back for it by way of discounting your bill at the same rate you normally pay for it.
This does not follow. Cities with the largest sprawl almost invariably are cheaper than cities that are constrained from sprawl by geography. This strongly suggests that sprawl lowers prices, not raises them. Therefore, artificially encouraging sprawl should have the same effect, barring some unexpected market force.
That explanation also makes no sense. It requires a provably false assumption that all businesses are located in the city center, whereas in practice, we know this to not be the case. In fact, in the Bay Area, most of the biggest businesses are nowhere near San Francisco. Yet large numbers of people pay exorbitant prices to live up there, and then a decent percentage of them commute AWAY from the city down to the South Bay where they work.
No, all indications are that pricing is higher in the middle of the city principally because people want to live in the middle of the city, rather than because of commutes to work. And housing prices in California are high principally because people want to live in California.
I'm not saying government interference can't have any impact on the prices, but I'm not convinced that it is a significant factor when compared with other factors, like the lack of unbuilt land, the crazy number of people who want to move in, and the insane salaries that many of those people earn.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Credit availability and/or cash availability. High salaries, in turn, drive housing prices higher, which means employees demand higher salaries. It's a vicious circle.
The only real solution, believe it or not, is more commercial zoning regulations. The best thing we could do for the Bay Area would be to create a regional zoning commission that could do things like create tax incentives for tech companies to locate further inland in places like Salinas, Gilroy, Sacramento, Watsonville, etc. There's plenty of room to expand towards Monterey, and if companies build their headquarters down that direction, instead of everybody commuting into the South Bay, lots of folks will commute out of it, traffic will balance out more, housing prices will start to increase in the southeast and decrease in the South/North/East Bay/Peninsula, and so on.
And it needs to start with places like Cupertino, Mountain View, and Menlo Park saying "no" when companies like Apple and Google and Facebook ask to build new giant mega-campuses. The desire to centralize your employees in one place is strong, and the only way to combat that is with significant financial incentives to spread out, and significant financial *dis*incentives to centralize operations in one city.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Put a high maintenance fire hazard everywhere in the state. That is a fantastic idea.
What in gods name are you running? We have barely touched US$10000 and have two fridges, a deep freeze, two computers and a NAS running permanently.....perhaps you have an electric stove?
I reserve the write to mangle english.
True. But, the savings - which starts from month 1 - also has to be calculated with interest component then.
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
Oh look, a leftist who is in favor of more government control over our lives
You're right, we should not have the government control anything about buildings. No regulations what so ever. Let's see how you go. Or maybe you can pull your head out of your arse and realise that government regulations are almost universally the result of market failure having a negative impact on society and lives in general. This very much includes building codes that put no emphasis on reducing America's ridiculous energy consumption per household figure (almost double that of the rest of the west).
and has no problem with corrupt officials as long as they advance the control agenda
I know good english isn't spoken in America so let me help you understand what I said:
facetious: (/fsis/)
adjective
treating serious issues with deliberately inappropriate humour; flippant.
It seems small compared to the absolute price, but that is incorrect normalization. It should be normalized to the typical rate of price change
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The applicable provisions in that law were struck down by the Supreme Court for violating the free speech of non-medical clinics and putting an undue burden on medical clinics.
Well that's inane for different reasons.
I don't see why people should be able to get free speech while under limited liability protection. Anyone should be able to speak freely as a private citizen.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The rest of the nation thanks you for kicking yourselves pointlessly in the nuts so you can water a desert so we can have winter vegetables and avocados.
The rest of the nation seems to thank California by paying it lots of money. that's why it's rich and lots of people want to live there.
Whether it's popular despite or because of the regulation is left as an exercise in political dick waving.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If not, I can just see the "to collect and serve" police guys out there catching people washing their mandated solar panels.
Not trying to be funny, I'm serious.
I am sure you are. It's something that seems to go on a lot with wing-nuts here. Invent a wild scenario then get angry about it. You demnostrate your wingnuttery by doing that.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
https://www.marketwatch.com/st...
Instead of that subjective link you gave here is one with real data.
https://www.marketwatch.com/st...
Housing is one reason and they are making it even more expensive now.
Do you imagine that there is some kind of tree limbs that can damage a solar panel but would not damage the roof anyway? Plus, thatâ(TM)s not maintenance, thatâ(TM)s an insurable risk
We have these things called batterirs. Good for storing power.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's not always even, but between hydrogen storage, vanadium high power batteries and other contraptions, the total energy is important but the distribution is not.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Solar panels work fine in England, at 55' north.
That's not Alaska, true, but it's Canada.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Whatever is ok for Republicans (one state setting the textbooks, rejecting the Supreme Court over gay marriage and desegregation, the Confederate government) to do, you ipso facto make it ok for everyone else.
Doesn't matter what you think is right, as soon as you make it acceptable, it's acceptable for everyone.
Don't blame others for following your example. Neither kids nor adults will do as you say, they'll do as you do.
In this case, California is not pushing other States. And if it were to push them into compliance with international law, what's wrong with being a nation of laws?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Chronic exposure to wood dust is a very serious thing.
What has a 10 year life? Not solar panels, they're much much higher. A recent study on individual solar cells, not entire panels, is that around 90% of used solar cells from 20+ years ago are still above 90% of their original fresh from the factory rating, and a substantial portion are above 95% of their original rating. What does drop over time is the entire panel for many panels, but not all. All it takes is one cell in the entire panel to make the output low and one low panel in a group to make the entire group low. But it's easy to swap out panels, less so individual cells. Even at the panel level, the 80/20 rule still applies. About 80% of panels are perfectly fine even after 20 years. The trend towards smaller panels with many micro-inverts is making this issue less of an issue.
I think battery banks for load shifting will probably be a better investment for areas where it doesn't get crazy hot. I live in the Midwest with $0.10/kwh flat rate or $0.05/offpeak and $0.15/onpeak. And I calculated that it would take about 8 years to pay off a $5,000 simple "just plug it into a general power outlet" programmable load shifting battery pack that even doubles as a UPS for all devices on the same breaker.
I only recently learned about these and they're pretty sweet. They come out of the box with a preconfigured charge timeframe, idle timeframe, and discharge timeframe, along with a rate of charge and discharge. You can configure these values yourself. It also has an option to monitor some energy site that has "current rates" for energy where it applies. Then the device and charge and discharge based on dynamic pricing. You can set high and low dynamic charging levels. It also works as a UPS by triggering your breaker when an outage is detected, then continues to supply power to the circuit. From what I've read, you don't need any professional installation at all, just plug it into any outlet in your house. You can have more than one in your house. Not sure if on the same circuit. I assume you can because it's meant to be brain-dead easy to use safely without any knowledge of your house.
They can still buy homes but they are slaves to the bank and thier employer.
I already have a connection fee. It pretty much has never changed for my entire life. It has technically changed, but at less rate than inflation. The grid is maintained by a company independent of who generates the power and gets paid entirely by the connection fee. Some energy companies even have negative margins for power sold. They're encouraged to reduce grid consumption.
Our energy companies make most of their profit from connection fees, energy consulting and energy services, but not almost nothing from energy sold. They're loving house level renewables because of the up-tick in demand for consulting and services.
if you were using what should be a short rinse of your panels as an excuse to dump a few hundred gallons of water on your lawn.
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So that violates the free-speech rights of the centers to say they don't provide abortion services, but it is perfectly Constitutional to force medical doctors to lie to their patients about the risks of getting an abortion. Thanks for yet more hypocrisy Conservatives.
What if I think that centralized energy production - using wind or solar - by a power company is the way to go? Why should I be forced to produce energy on my own?
> Non-renewable resources were always a limited supply
You do realize that those solar panels and windmills use a lot of those "non-renewable resources", right?
Until we get out into the solar system of course. There's a nigh infinite supply just waiting for us Out There....including hydrocarbons, by a quirk of fate.
Ferret
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
You mean me? Where do you get that I oppose residential zoning laws? And I'm pretty sure no free market Republican would be in favor of more commercial zoning regulations.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
You really should not be surprised. More songs have been written about California than about Toronto.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This standard is for new homes. How on earth will it result in a loss of business for power companies? A loss of growth, sure. A loss of current business, not at all.
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I don't think that's an incorrect normalization but let's humor you.
Zillow predicts housing prices in California will rise 7.7% in the next year ( https://www.zillow.com/ca/home... ). That comes out to an increase of value of $42,049.70 for the average house in the state. Adding an extra $10k that will result in the increases in mortgage payments being offset by a lower electricity bill is relatively meaningless.
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Desperately hanging on to the past
We live in a 2,400 square feet, 2 story house that was built back around 1905. It's been renovated several times over the years, with the most recent rehab done around 2012 when the owner installed 2 electric heat pumps; one for downstairs and one for upstairs. We don't have natural gas here, so everything in the home is electric including the stove, electric dryer and water heater.
I do have an HP Proliant server that runs 24/7 as a NAS. It runs Plex and NextCloud, as well as serving as a Time Machine backup destination. We have several other computers in the house that are running pretty often. Also have an electric car that I charge from a regular 120 volt outlet out in a detached garage.
In the coldest winter months, an electric bill can easily get up in the $500-600 range for a month, WITH the solar panels I've got in place.
Thanks for posting the data. I would leave to people to decide whether 20% is a big deal or not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Knowing a few current and former CA home builders, I'll point out:
Building permits regularly take 13-15 months to get approved. This raises costs as builders carry the financing much longer than many regions, which is reflected in new and rehabbed housing prices. You know why. That's where that problem lies, and the solution is both obvious and impossible.
Codes and ordinances raise costs and prices also. This of course is the refrain you hear everywhere. Mandating solar power will change housing design and construction, and will increase costs and prices. This is a code and ordinance problem. One of many in CA.
Many builders have left the market because they believed their contributions were no longer desired by government. And government rules in CA. Lots of them have gone to other states and are doing fine.
Arizona just rejected a Proposition that would have mandated 'clean energy' , as it stated in the proposition, 'regardless of cost...'. Thankfully. Since this California requirement will add at least $20,000 to the cost of a new house, and probably similar costs per unit for multi housing, and likely more as the market figures out they can charge more for mandated solar than they were for optional, either houses get smaller and 'less', or they price more buyers out of the market. And in case you hadn't figured this out yet, the powers to be in California do not care. Not one bit.
Not one bit.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Another complication is that "savings" are tax free, whereas investment income does create a tax liability. Avoid paying $1000 in electrical costs and you have an extra $1000 in the bank, but if you invest and get $1000 of dividends or capital gains, you will be owing somewhere between $100 to $400 in income taxes depending on your marginal tax rates.
I expect costs to increase after the mandate both increases demand and justifies higher prices.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
What the hell are you going on about? A 10k increase on 550K is less than 2%.
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It seems like that place has much bigger problems than busted solar panels. All things considered, it looks like overall the solar panels did better than the buildings themselves. I think a better example is from Hurricane Maria.
I am talking about your number: $42,049.70. 10k to that is, again, 25% (I miscalculated it as 20%).
Again, thanks for information.
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Eh.,, Sure, 25% sure seems big when viewed on it's own. Putting it into some proper context and it's barely anything. A guaranteed one time spike in housing prices that results in less then a 2% increase in the value of the average home is barely anything.
Your 25% percent statistic would only be worrying if it looked like it was going to be a permanent increase in housing price inflation. It's not though, so the metric you're pushing is meaningless in the context of this conversation.
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What I am saying, thank you for your data, because people now can decide for themselves what data is more convincing.
Personally, I actually do not have an opinion of 10K is a lot or not. I am not on the market and I am not actively thinking on this subject.
Again, thanks for the data!!
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Because some one other than us will see a thread this deep...
Thanks for clarifying I'm not talking to a person, I'm talking to a robot.
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I did not know being overly synthetic is a requirement of passing Turing test :-)
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I wonder how much it will cost to add bushfire requirements to the building codes.
Difficulty: The laundromat down the street is busiest after 5PM when your solar panels aren't producing as much. You're probably also home at that point, using more power yourself.
Is everyone and everything self-sufficient during the day? Have we eliminated all utility power?
Now, there is a LONG WAY TO GO before energy storage becomes necessary, but there's no reason there can't be benefits to it now. Especially for solar, where peak production does perfectly not coincide with peak consumption.
Is 100% of our energy solar at any point during the day?
batteries for home use are not "a huge waste" IMHO.
If it's less-efficient than the alternatives, multiplied by the size of the entire frigging grid, yes it's a huge waste. Batteries are, at best, a back-up power solution for when utility power fails. Batteries as a broad grid storage solution or an off-grid home are a waste.
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The OP said $20k for a 6kW system, no subsidies.
An 8kW system is around $13,500, no subsidies.
That's private, no government mandate. You're not spending $20k on 6kW. You can buy a bigger system--say, 12kW--and it won't cost you $40k for 12kW.
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Wouldn't Arizona pay CA to take its excess power? Otherwise, why doesn't CA just make e-diesel, sucking carbon out of the air to make liquid fuel oil?
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> Is everyone and everything self-sufficient during the day? Have we eliminated all utility power?
Of course not. My point is unless consumption coincides with production, "The laundromat down the street" is not getting 2kW from you, ever. The grid does not store energy (yet) in any sense; it can sink and source power, but you're just offsetting other production.
> Is 100% of our energy solar at any point during the day?
Not yet, no, and that's exactly my point. Because it will take a long time to transition to renewable energy that requires storage, it's okay for storage deployment to lag behind renewable deployment.
> If it's less-efficient than the alternatives
The grid is not an alternative to storage. They are two different things that work well together, neither being a replacement for the other.
This has nothing to do with back-up power either. It's about taking excess energy that's abundant at one time of day (e.g. solar) and storing that excess for use later. Batteries are merely one of many options to do that. "Stocking up while it's cheap" is such a no-brainer strategy it's amazing people can't understand it with respect to energy.
=Smidge=
Of course, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Solar shingles have significantly lower power production per square foot than real panels (currently about 12 W/sq. ft. versus 22 W/sq. ft. for panels) and much higher cost per watt than real panels (about 3x as much as panels alone, and about twice the cost of installing standard shingles plus panels). The warranty is about the same (25 to 30 years, typically).
And solar shingles heat up your attic, which means that during the hot summer months, your cooling energy use is going to go up when you use solar shingles. By contrast, PV panels are air-gapped, which means they actually reduce the power you spend on cooling by keeping direct sunlight off your roof.
And for all that extra expense and reduced efficiency, the solar shingles still don't match the rest of your roof. No thanks.
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You really haven't been watching the news lately.
So enlighten me.
...and no, a fire isn't "weather."
What "extreme weather" does California have?
Of course not. My point is unless consumption coincides with production, "The laundromat down the street" is not getting 2kW from you, ever.
True, with reframe: if there is ever a time when production exceeds consumption, there will be loss. If there isn't, then storage is loss.
Not yet, no, and that's exactly my point. Because it will take a long time to transition to renewable energy that requires storage, it's okay for storage deployment to lag behind renewable deployment.
That's what I've been saying: if you're never able to run the whole surrounding grid on pure clean-renewable, then any storage is a waste. We accept the waste for back-up power (i.e. "cost"); that doesn't make it efficient.
The grid is a replacement for storage when there is always demand exceeding supply, since storage is more-wasteful than use. So long as there isn't excess clean-renewable energy (i.e. zero non-clean energy in use), storage is a continuity measure to protect against grid failure.
My local college has 5MW of generating capacity and supplies about 1/4 of its own electricity needs.
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> The grid is a replacement for storage when there is always demand exceeding supply
Except this may very well be the case; As the percentage of renewable energy to the total grid supply increases, it rather quickly reaches a point where you are producing more than you are consuming, if only briefly. The only reason is doesn't happen in the US that often is a relatively low percentage of renewable energy so far, which lets the grid compensate by throttling down conventional power plants.
But that luxury is quickly coming to an end.
So when you say storage is "inefficient" it's a bit of a head scratcher... inefficient compared to what? If your choices are running a combined cycle gas turbine on non-renewable and carbon-emitting natural gas that costs money at 60%, or taking excess solar or wind power that's essentially free and storing it for later at an overall efficiency of at least 60% and rely even less on generation that costs you money to run.
Or to use a home as an example, I'm getting free-to-collect energy all day when I'm not home and running the meter backwards, earning credit towards my electric bill. I'm earning maybe 8-10 cents per kilowatt-hour on credit this way. When I get home, the sun is setting but I'm using more electricity now, so I'm buying back that power at maybe 20 cents per kilowatt-hour (base fee that I was being credited for, plus taxes and fuel charges and other BS). If I had storage, I could be saving ~10 cents per kWh for the energy I was able to store and recover. That's not a waste by any definition; it might not be enough to make it economical but it's not a waste either.
=Smidge=
Really?
What about solar orientation, air sealing, mechanical ventilation, and superior insulation methodology in any way conflicts with earthquake-proofing (which is primarily additional anti-racking precautions and tying foundations, walls, floors and roofing together with strapping)?
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When I get home, the sun is setting but I'm using more electricity now, so I'm buying back that power at maybe 20 cents per kilowatt-hour
That's illegal in many states. When someone overgenerates, the nearest instantaneous net-consumer consumes, and so the distance of transmission is generally low. This reduces load and wear on parts between the power generation facility and the consumer, lowering costs. Accordingly, many states prohibit refunding power either at wholesale or only by itself, and require actually billing net per period: if you consume 800kWh and produce 600kWh, you only pay for 200kWh.
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I am paying ~$0.08/kWh for electricity. Everything else is fees and taxes.
My utility does net metering. It's the only sensible option regardless of law. However, every 12 months the account balance is settled, and if it's a net negative? They cut me a check for ~$0.08/kWh because that's the wholesale market value of the electricity I gave them.
So every kWh I buy costs me $0.20, but every kWh I sell earns me ~$0.08. The fact that the account is only settled once a year doesn't really change that.
=Smidge=
So every kWh I buy costs me $0.20, but every kWh I sell earns me ~$0.08. The fact that the account is only settled once a year doesn't really change that.
If you were doing this intra-day with a battery, you'd store in the battery, then draw off the battery until empty, then draw from the meter. You'd net-consume more on billing spans longer than the period of net-consumption (i.e. on billing spans longer than 8-12 hours) due to loss to battery storage.
By billing once per 1 hour, if you spend 14 hours producing and 10 hours consuming each day, net-overproducing 3kWh by producing 30kWh and consuming 27kWh back from the grid, they would be able to bill you for 27kWh @ $0.20/kWh = $5.40 and then credit you for 30kWh @ 0.08/kWh = $2.40 each day. Across a year, you'd net-owe $1,095.
By settling once per year, each day is a net 3kWh overproduction. You will end up settling with them owing you $87.60 at the end of each year.
With battery storage at 90% efficiency, you'd store 1,095kWh and recover 985.5kWh. Ultimately, the power company would owe you $78.84 at the end of each year. The Tesla Powerwall starts life with an efficiency of 92.5% at 2kW charging rate and 25C operating temperature.
Thus, settling once per year drastically changes how much each overproduced kWh affects your ultimate utility bill; and using a battery incurs a cost when settling on longer than cycle periods. (The cycle period is really a year, due to changing daily production across the year.)
Batteries don't produce electricity.
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which is primarily additional anti-racking precautions and tying foundations, walls, floors and roofing together with strapping
Um....no. It also plays a massive role in the design of the foundation, as well as many building materials and techniques throughout the structure. And those building materials have an extremely low R value. And you can't just spray insulation on top to make up for it because that insulation takes space.
Also, a passive house usually doesn't work well in a climate that requires significant heating and cooling. It tends to forsake one for the other - ie: solar orientation to either heat or cool. So this might work in, say, San Diego where you almost don't need heat. Or Redwoods where you basically don't need cooling. In between, it starts getting problematic. Which means you can't really apply it state-wide.
Also, a passive house typically makes extensive use of the Earth as a heat sink or source. Which is a tad problematic when the ground moves. Also requires a complementary geology, which means you can't require it on all houses.
An AI as we currently call it would never recognize the utter uselessness of its actions. It would just do them. Hence my claim.
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