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Comment by stefek99 | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the solar business in the UK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_irradiance

$1000 worth of raw materials (photovoltaic cells) would be much better used in countries like Syria.

In Winter there is not much Sun / daylight hours, and the energy usage is higher due to heating and lightning so other electricity production methods need to provide 100% of the demand anyway.

  installation slowed by 85 percent

  caused by the end of subsidies for solar farms and and incentives for homeowners

It's even more outrageous after considering - homeowners are on richer than people who are renting. Giving taxpayers money to...

(I could never understood solar business in the the UK and rapid decline after subsidies has ended only proves the point)

Next time similar opportunity arise - I'll raise the money and hop on the bandwagon... :)

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> $1000 worth of raw materials (photovoltaic cells) would be much better used in countries like Syria.

In case you've not noticed, there isn't an electricity link all the way to the UK from Syria, and there's a war on in Syria; securing your solar panels against theft and aerial bombing would cost a lot more.

Yes, the UK should probably be looking more at wind and the tragically neglected tidal power opportunities. But solar is still surprisingly effective even this far north.

(addendum: I should show HN my solar panel stats again https://flatline.org.uk/daystats.html - at 56N it's very seasonal but still effective)

"It's even more outrageous after considering - homeowners are on richer than people who are renting."

This is one of the more sickening, cynical arguments I've heard passed down from think tanks on to the public (and I'm a renter not a 'rich' homeowner).

This is just leveraging the jealousy of the home owner "haves" with the home have nots in order to artificially pump the profits of heavily polluting companies and give even more money to people with enormous stock portfolios who are not just relatively wealthy, but spectacularly obscenely wealthy.

Moreover, it does nothing to actually help the "have nots" and it's a HUGE fuck you to the idea that we should actually be doing something about global warming.

Even when green energy can stand on its own two feet without subsidies/tax-breaks-relative-to-coal it should get them because polluter should have to pay for negative externalities.

Instead, tax breaks are being dropped, the EU is slapping TARIFFS on solar panels (I guess the "free market" was only a good idea when it helped coal and oil companies?) and in my constituency they killed a wind farm because even though it wouldn't have spoiled the view or affected tourism, the Tories said it would spoil tourism.

well it also totally disregards the people who do not want to own a home.

If you want help the people who do not own or do not want to own a home - and I agree that we should because i'm one of them, the government can:

* Build more homes (using compulsory purchase where necessary)

* Raise council tax and make the owner pay for it (not the occupier) and use the proceeds to build more homes.

* Eliminate mortgage interest tax deducations

* Raise interest rates

* Don't privatize the land registry like the Tories are trying to do.

Eliminating tax deductions on solar panels will mainly just help the oil, coal and gas oligarchs trying to set us at each other's throats.

I'm confused - how is 'hurt people who own property' the same as 'help people who do not'?

Similarly, eliminating the solar deduction hurts folks with solar panels, not quite the same as helping oligarchs.

>I'm confused - how is 'hurt people who own property' the same as 'help people who do not'?

Partly by helping reduce the systemic wealth transfer between property owners and non-property owners that is more colloquially known as "rent" and "asset price appreciation".

>Similarly, eliminating the solar deduction hurts folks with solar panels, not quite the same as helping oligarchs.

Things that make carbon based electricity generation more competitive and build in reliance upon the electric grid help the owners of those things. Do you not agree?

> Partly by helping reduce the systemic wealth transfer between property owners and non-property owners that is more colloquially known as "rent".

This works the opposite of the way most people think it does.

Anything that makes property more expensive increases rents, because it discourages the creation of new housing, which keeps housing scarce and rents high, and prices more people out of self-ownership.

The big caveat here being the abominable subsidies for loan interest, because they encourage people to bid up the price of land, which makes buying and creating housing more expensive rather than less, with the balance of the money going to the banks.

"Anything that makes property more expensive increases rents, because it discourages the creation of new housing"

Increasing council tax discourages land hoarding which would actually free up more land for the creation of new housing.

The supply of housing in the UK is not limited by how much builders want to build. It is limited by availability of land.

Moreover, if coupled with heavy investment in council housing (the only thing in the past that has actually ever meaningfully added supply to the market), that would bring down rents a lot.

Taxing land and using the money to subsidize housing construction has the potential to work, but you're probably better off with land value tax (or some entirely unrelated tax) than council tax in that context. The problem with council tax is that if you do the desired thing and build new housing, your taxes go up because now you have more property.

You also don't really need the government to operate the buildings. Build them and sell them for cost, or just make it a tax deduction to do construction that increases the number of housing units on a lot. As long as it gets built it doesn't much matter who owns it, and then you don't have the local government in the property maintenance business for no real benefit.

> Raise council tax and make the owner pay for it (not the occupier) and use the proceeds to build more homes.

> Eliminate mortgage interest tax deducations

how do these help? increasing landlord costs would result in them raising their rents to cover the difference

> Raise interest rates

this would result in lenders requiring higher deposits

(the others make sense)

>how do these help? increasing landlord costs would result in them raising their rents to cover the difference

Actually, counter-intuitively, it would probably bring rents down.

A lot of housing is now held on to like a bar of gold and not used - previously expected to just keeping increasing in value. These taxes would arrest that rise and potentially cause a drop. This would lead to a lot of spare housing being rented out in an attempt to recoup investment losses.

Also, since it would push up costs for home owners it would make many of them bite the bullet and rent out a spare room to help with the mortgage repayments.

Since investment in new property in the UK (we're not talking about rural Iowa here), is determined primarily by plots of land becoming available it's unlikely to throttle new building.

I've heard countries like the UK and Ireland are excellent for solar. Not in the same way as deserts like Syria and North Africa because the temperatures are much cooler the solar cells can operate more efficiently thus producing more power.

Seemingly under this logic frozen deserts would be excellent solar farm locations.

http://scienceline.ucsb.edu/getkey.php?key=2668

> thus producing more power

more power than if the temperatures were higher in the UK, not more power than if the UK had the solar irradiance and winter daylight times of Sahara.

It's still much more efficient to do produce electricity with solar plants in the Sahara. The problem is moving electricity over long distances is both costly and not efficient.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that.

Solar irradiance refers to the power per unit area of ground. Which is affected strongly by the angle of incidence of sunlight. You don't typically mount solar panels facing straight upwards, but rather pointing at the sun, so this has little effect. While you'll require more land to gather a given amount of solar power as you go further from the equator, you don't need more solar panels.

There is also some effect due to the length of atmosphere the sunlight needs to shine through though.

globally the fossil fuel industry receives over four times as much in subsidies as the renewable energy industry.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-12/fossil-fu...

I've dug into these numbers and it's rarely clear how "subsidies" are defined. Often tax breaks and "unpaid externalities" are included in the total subsidies. "$X of subsidies for fossil fuels" usually does not mean the gov't gave $X to fossil fuel companies.

That's a bit misleading. Many emerging markets countries subsidize the cost of gasoline and diesel at the retail level so that their citizens can afford it. Effectively the governments import oil (or produce it) and then sell it domestically far below where it would trade on the open market. And most headline "subsidy" figures include things like R&D tax credits, benefits that every other industry receives as well. In reality, the actual number of bonafide subsidy is a small fraction of what you've suggested (on the order of $15B in the US, one of the largest fossil fuel markets).

So yes, in some sense the "fossil fuel industry" is being subsidized, but it's not like they're just receiving $550B in cash from world governments. Many of these countries sell oil domestically far below what the cost of production is. So if you don't subsidize it, their citizens simply wouldn't be able to drive cars or run generators. The oil companies simply can't produce as cheaply as these citizens would need to be able to afford it.

Of course, that would be a great force for incentivizing cheap renewable tech (or bicycles, etc) but the motivation behind said "subsidies" are quality of life and social unrest, and not corporate welfare.

> Many emerging markets countries subsidize the cost of gasoline and diesel at the retail level so that their citizens can afford it.

Which is still a petroleum subsidy. They could just give the citizens the equivalent amount of cash and then it wouldn't be.

What? Either way it's the same. Those people would just go use the cash to buy gasoline. It's the exact same thing.

It isn't. They could use cash to do something else where possible, like help pay for housing which is closer to where they work, or buy a computer so they can work from home, or buy a hybrid car etc.

Well I don't see the benefit of installing my solar panels in Syria...

What I want to say is: it's not only important that electricity is generated but also where it is needed. As transport is a problem it is certainly viable to install them in not optimal conditions such as UK or northern Europe.

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