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Not really. It's not like we have a trillion solar panels near the surface that we simply have to dig up. Coal is only alive, because the infrastructure is all there, and it's profitable. The mines are there, the electric plants are there, they are connected to the grid, etc.

Solar panels and batteries are not there, they need to be manufactured, transported from China, land needs to be bought, then they have to be installed. New fabs need to be built to match the increasing demand.

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All of the above is true. But coal is also alive because of the way the EPA was politically forced into classifying coal ash as solid waste as opposed to toxic. This has amplified the negative affects of coal residuals a hundred fold. It has also made it increasingly difficult to regulate as well as made it easier for state and local politicians to defend. This started decades ago

The epa provides guidelines on coal ash storage but does not have the power to enforce them. This power falls to the local level and is expected to be enforced via citizen lawsuits. Some state politicians are working hard to prevent even this.

http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-co...

This is directly a result of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

While favorably classifying waste certainly helps the coal industry I'm not getting on the "more federal power will solve this" bandwagon.

We'd also have a lot more wind farms if it weren't for environmental regulations. A group of people with money can stall a project by taking them to court over environmental impact and compliance with regulation.

So are you saying that the conservatives have it all wrong when they say that coal in the US would be healthy if if it were not for the actions of the federal government?

What justification is there to simply sidestep certain classes of solution that have worked just fine in the past? Federal environmental regulation worked pretty to curtail many wide-scale human pollution problems - acid rain, water pollution, and ozone depleting chemicals, just to name a few. The only real reason to not solve it federally is political capture by entrenched capital.

I don't understand, you seem to be drawing a false equivalence between any sorts of government action.

Claim: "Campaign lobbyists are giving coal an extra advantage by helping coal dodge regulations." Your response: "We would have more wind farms if it weren't for bad regulations."

These two claims seem like two ships passing in the night. I agree with both of them.

Solar has a barely positive EROI. When all costs are considered it typically uses more energy than it produces. This has been studied extensively in multiple European countries.

http://energyskeptic.com/2018/solar-pv-has-a-net-energy-loss...

These articles making claims to the contrary basically don't make any sense. If solar panels and wind farms resulted in large amounts of cheap energy they would be going up at a massive rate. We have a relatively free economy. Utilities and entrepreneurs would be going nuts building the things. Instead they only exist as tax scams anywhere in the industrialized world. Use your head, people.

"Looking at the bulk of the research, it’s more likely that solar panels, over their lifetime, generate 10-15 times as much energy as it takes to produce them and their associated hardware. That number may be as high as 25. And it’s rising over time." http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/04/whats-the-eroi-of-solar/

These claims are based on simplistic spread sheet models. We have REAL WORLD DATA. The real world experience throughout europe and the USA shows net losses. I repeat: if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies. Do you dispute this? Does the legal environment somehow prevent entrepreneurs throughout the western world from selling solar power into the grid?

Nothing prevents anybody from selling solar power. Lots of solar farms are live and many more are being built.

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

(note how the biggest ones are all new)

If you think tax subsidies have anything to do with EROI (i.e. EROEI) you are very confused. This is calculated on the basis of Wh/Wh. Simple dimensional analysis shows that $ doesn't show up at all in the calculation.

Of course tax subsidies are useful to bootstrap on a $ cost basis, but with current costs and rate of falling costs even that will soon become unnecessary (let's get rid of fossil fuel subsidies to make this "real world data" comparison fair though).

Cash flows are in fact a reasonable proxy for energy in many cases. Manually tallying up the uses of energy and materials is a handwaving exercise at best, but net losses of cash in the energy industry indicate with certainty that you not yielding net energy to society as an enterprise.

> they would be going up without tax subsidies.

They don't even build Walmarts without tax subsidies these days.

Can you review this [1] and ELI5 why solar seems to work in China, but the Sun doesn't shine enough to make the economics work in the west according to your research?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

> I repeat: if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies

Right, so on that basis these bids below the grid rate indicate that they now work?

Bids are speculations.

Bidders are very frequently unable to actually deliver. See pretty much any highway project ever.

Agreed on that.

Can you link real world data?

Are externalities (CO2 output) taken into considerations in your unsourced REAL WORLD DATA!!~!

I would have bought a house without a tax subsidy.

But there is one, so I'm sure as hell taking it.

> if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies.

No, it's the other way around: fossil fuels are subsidized by governments to the tune of $4.8 trillion a year, so solar needs to be subsidized as well to be able to compete.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

There's also the fundamental mistake that not all energy is equal.

Energy in the form of electricity is far more useful than energy in other forms as it can be used directly. With other forms it will generally need to be converted first, with massive efficiency losses which are ignored by EROEI proponents.

So for example while oil might be said to have an EROEI of 14.5, it loses 80% of that when used for the common purpose of turning a cars wheels, giving only a 2.9. generally those who quote EROEI numbers would claim this makes industrial society a literal impossibility.

All analysis I've seen indicates pretty much the opposite. Electricity is way less useful than diesel fuel. Our civilization critically runs on diesel and no one has figured out an even theoretically viable way to substitute in batteries where diesel is used in logistics, resource extraction, and pumping.

It used to be that solar panels never paid for themselves, then it was 20 years to break even. Now, I think, we're down to 5 years.

Solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper, and they definitely have a positive ROI now. And there are huge solar farms being built all over the world. I'm pretty sure they did the math before investing millions of dollars.

If you can highlight a plant that is not a "tax farm" I would be interested to read about it.

"we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit." --Warren Buffet

This illustrates the reality of every "renewable" facility I've heard of to date. If the business case has changed just now, that's great and I look forward to the future. But most of what I've seen has been very silly industry propaganda.

Is the 40GW of production in China a "tax farm"? Your argument that "solar is a gimmick because tax subsidies" seems flawed when international counterexamples are considered.

> Is the 40GW of production in China a "tax farm"?

According to everything I can find online the answer is a clear Yes?

What you call a "tax farm" is traditionally called industrial policy, and it has an exceptionally good track record.

Some areas have produced cheaper energy without subsidies as far as 2014. See pages 2-4. It's way better now, since the solar prices went down so much.

https://www.deutschebank.nl/nl/docs/Solar_-_2014_Outlook_Let...

And to answer your question about non-tax-farm, I don't know. If the government gives a subsidy, why wouldn't you take it even if you're profitable without it?

Subsidies alone don't prove that the solar farms are not profitable.

It's almost as if initial government investment has allowed the technology to advance to the point that it no longer requires subsidy to be cost effective. Kind of like every other major industrial and technological breakthrough over the last 100 years.

That article you link to is based on the Ferroni and Hopkirk 2016 paper, but that has been discredited somewhat, I believe.

The paper below revised the EROI figure from 0.8 to around 8.0.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

The simplest response to this is: they are going up at a massive rate.

What kind of economics would allow a solar panel manufacturer to spend $301 worth of energy to produce a panel which sells for $300?

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