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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

This comes up in every discussion about solar power, but it seems unfair to me. Yes, solar is subsidized by a whole bunch of factors. But so is coal and oil, because the suppliers of those power sources don't have to pay the full cost of the damage their pollution causes.

A fair comparison should either include all subsidies, or none. Not just the subsidies we are used to.

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The problem isn't the subsidies. The problem occurs when the proportion of solar users increases such that the utility's margins become low enough to threaten the minimum budget required to maintain the infrastructure.

If you want to subsidize solar users to bootstrap that market and as a general social good, that's fine. But you have to structure it such that the utility still recoups the cost of maintenance. If they're paying market instead of spot, the paid price is not taking into account the cost of transfer and storage to the utility.

When we get to that point the answer is to let the local government take over maintence, much like roads. Subsidize it with a tax.

Energy storage also needs to be encouraged and developed to make solar successful. Like solar cells, the cost of storage will come down as a function of production volumes.

Net pricing does just the opposite - it disincentivizes storage. Is that really the type of subsidy you'd support?

There are still plenty of incentives for grid storage that have nothing to do with residential rates (peak shaving with pumped storage, day/night price arbitrage). Surely not all incentives have to work for every valuable technology.

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