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Comment by davidf18 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the economics would be without the federal tax incentives for wind and solar. Does anyone know?

EDIT: Someone above provided a link that provides the figure I was looking for:

"Between 2010 and 2016, subsidies for solar were between 10¢ and 88¢ per kWh and subsidies for wind were between 1.3¢ and 5.7¢ per kWh. Subsidies for coal, natural gas and nuclear are all between 0.05¢ and 0.2¢ per kWh over all years." [1]

I wonder how much of a subsidy there is for LED lighting. A lot of energy goes for incandescent lighting.

Also, there should be a lot of subsidies to replace heaters in building burning #6 and #4 fuel oil which is very, very dirty and pollution (NYC where I live banned #6 a few years ago but #4 is allowed to persist until 2030 I think).

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2017/05/30/why-do-fe...

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It's a complex question. In trying to answer it, one should keep in mind that the tax incentives for fossil fuel production dwarf the $15 billion per year or so that supports renewable energy. In addition, fossil fuels impose an estimated $200 billion/yr in social costs (external costs), in the form of pollution, etc. And it would be hard to estimate how much of our defense spending should be attributed to the need to secure the middle Eastern oil supply.

The Harvard study estimated the negative externalities of coal at 200-500 billion annually. The study estimates the effective subsidy from not including these costs at 9-27 cents per kilowatt hours.

Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%.

The "coal/gas/nuclear funded free markets lobby" (ALEC, etc.) who whine incessantly about hairdresser licensing went awfully quiet about that one.

> Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%.

Because they were both substandard and being dumped. And they drove a lot of reliable US manufacturers under.

In addition, a LOT of installers went under because the warranty they offered assumed that they wouldn't have to show up again for 10 years. 3 years on they're getting warranty calls because the solar cells were failing. Of course, the Chinese manufacturer was nowhere to be found.

There is a big difference between disposable electronics being too cheap and a capital expense being too cheap.

Until US businesses can sue Chinese businesses for bad practices and win "the market" won't sort itself out. In the meantime, tariffs are a good working solution.

The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years. If the market couldn't things like double and triple pane windows wouldn't be able to out-compete single pane windows.

We have done it with other goods too. American car companies got away with selling substandard stuff for a long time but revenues kept shrinking as Americans bought more foreign brands. It a major market disruption and a bailout for the car companies to right themselves. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes a touch of government regulation makes it happen faster but when a business do shady stuff they punish themselves in the long run if there are legitimate options competing with them in the market.

> The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years.

How many years does your reputable solar cell manufacturer need to survive to allow the market to "figure it out"? And where does he get the money to do that? "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" applies to more than just shorting stocks.

That was the issue. The domestic manufacturers were going bankrupt waiting for the market to figure out that the Chinese cells would die prematurely. Of course, once all the domestic manufacturers are bankrupt, "the market" no longer matters because all you can get are the crappy Chinese cells.

Don't forget the Iraq war.

Edit: Nvmd, you didn't

What about it?

My utility sent some LED bulbs in the mail. I expect it was attached to some government incentive (they probably get green credits for the difference in consumption).

Lighting isn't that big though, ~10% of US electrical consumption, when you include commercial and street lighting.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=99&t=3

(It's a big chunk, just not a huge one. If you figure on a fair amount of it already being florescent or other relatively efficient lighting, the savings aren't going to be dramatic)

Thanks for the link.

Still, incandescents consume a lot of power, and LEDs little.

It's too bad that the light "quality" from incandescent bulbs is vastly better than either LED or CFL.

You've just got to pick the right bulbs. I tested out a Feit LED bulb in one of my kitchen can fixtures and it was totally indistinguishable from the other incandescents so I replaced all of them. 13 watts each instead of 65, and they are the same brightness and color temperature.

LED can produce just about any kind of light you want. Don't confuse them with the terrible CFL bulbs that were forced upon us. LED is likely the end game for lighting in our lifetime.

Used to think the same. Got good quality LED lights with "warm yellow" color (same as an incandescent bulb). Even at 5W, they are far superior to a 60W regular bulb.

Often true, but it's a question of quality.

First, you need a quality DC power supply for the light. Most bulbs use small capacitive droppers that let a bit of current squeak through with each change in polarity from the AC mains. These need to be well designed with plenty of filtering to provide stable light without lots of flicker. The power supplies are also generally the failure point, rather than the LEDs themselves.

Color temperature and quality are addressed with phosphor coatings over the LEDs. With an appropriate coating, they can be perfectly suitable for many lighting applications.

The issue for all of this is mostly cost; quality LED bulbs are still rather expensive. Passable-quality LEDs are becoming much more affordable, though.

Passable quality LEDs have been around for a few years, and the price has dropped substantially. I got a few 75W-equivalent LED bulbs with a warmer color temperature for $35USD each in 2013, and they color match almost identically with some incandescent bulbs that I can't replace (built-in lighting units in an apartment).

Those same bulbs now sell for ~$11/ea on Amazon.

In short: 5 years ago - bad. Currently - pretty good. In 5 years - wonderful.

Tax incentives and their predictable phase-out gave enough momentum to the market that it can currently continue on its own.

It's a hard to say, but in your case every dollar of solar subsidy probably reduces ratepayer cost by $1.50 or more.

Adding marginal capacity to the NYC grid costs a fortune to ratepayers, as siting a plant will take a decade and cost billions, and transmission capacity is already constrained -- nearly limitless hydropower is available from Quebec, but it requires massive infrastructure investment to move!

That's why New York subsidizes solar and heavily subsidizes peak load reduction.

Our brilliant governor Cuomo has decided to remove Indian Point power plant from the grid. It generates electric with no greenhouse gas for 1/4 of NYC and Westchester County which in total is a population of about 10 million (8.5 + 1) meaning that the equivalent of a city of 2.5 million will go from no greenhouse gas back to carbon-based fuels. The power company that runs Indian Point wants to shut it down because it costs more to run than natural gas.

Are you certain that there is limitless hydropower in Quebec? I think we are using capacity and that more damns would have to be built? We already get a lot of power from Hydro Quebec, some of which runs our subway system.

I don't know the economics specifically but coal, gas, oil are all subsidized too.

per kwh, they are miniscule compared to solar or wind. The scale difference between ONG and Solar-Wind is huge

A large part of the U.S. military budget is implicated in fossil fuel security.

That has not been true for a while, I would actually contend, that US spends more for subsidizing defense of Europe than any Middle Eastern security.

US Shale with Canada and Mexico already made North America energy independent.

Source?

That is completely false.

Some fraction of the US military expense should be attributed to obtaining energy, both explicitly (eg, patrolling shipping lanes) and implicitly (as a superpower, we can get considerations other countries don't). I don't know enough about it to hazard a guess, but I'm hoping someone, somewhere, has done an analysis.

I expect the military has.

I'm sure this is also non-zero for, say, elements required to construct solar panels, however it's almost certainly (currently) dwarfed by those for fossil fuels. That may change in the future, though.

I dislike this line of thought because it seems to imply that oil producers in the United States need to be taxed to pay for the military defense of all the overseas producers trying to put them out of business.

It is reasonable to have arguments about whether or not certain wars were fought of fossil fuels. This is not the case for any other industry I am aware of. When pressed I could not categorically refute those claims and there is at least some shady evidence pinning some of our responsibility for violence in Iraq on oil companies.

This is not a stance I personally hold or reject, but there are many with strong convictions about at least some evidence with regards to this. These people cannot easily be dismissed as tinfoil hatter.

If true the most certainly they should be accountable for the cost of military action and life lost. If false then I don't know how to prove it, proving negatives and all that.

And I am way more concerned about the economics of all that pollution, and how that seems to be ignored by so many people.

Maybe you should do like the EU and ban incandescent lightbulbs?

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