California to become first U.S. state mandating solar on new homes
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
As a renter who wishes to have a home /somewhere/ in the bay area, this is killing me inside. The existing home owner lobby is so ridiculously strong here. California has the Superman of home owner lobbies. Each day, it's nailed into me that Prop 13 will never go away and home prices are just gonna keep climbing so that non-1% income outsiders cannot get them. Meanwhile, estates will be passed down generation by generation tax free and with no reassessment.
If you're taxing everyone, at least make it efficient and build utility plants but even that is dumb because it subsidizes solar and likely puts the money into the wrong person's pocket.
If you were taxing everyone and wanted to help the environment, building public infrastructure, transportation, roads, bridges, trains is the best option even if it doesn't look as catchy. It'll produce a hell of a lot more benifits than a few MW of super expensive solar.
If you still want a headline, build transmission lines. Texas in 6 years went from dead last in renewables to first with over double California because the governor invested $7B in transmission lines making renewable energy an economic decision not a subsidized one
You are expanding the infrastructure, without transmission lines there is no economic viability for most of our renewable energy.
I'm personally all for more growth. I'd love to have more representatives and I think people are going to be very surprised at the results of the 2020 census. But we do need to do something about housing and traffic.
Those people are either idiots or don't care about anyone but themselves. Not everyone born and raised in California has parents who are well off enough to pass down a house to them (in fact I doubt most have parents that can). What happens when our teachers and every low paid worker get fed up with the quality of life (which includes lining their landlords' coffers instead of building equity) and decide to move elsewhere? Are the home owners suddenly going to pick up the slack and do the jobs of the 99%? "Snap decisions that sound good to my tribe but ultimately lead to long term problems for everyone" should be the motto of a certain group of people here.
It's also disconcerting that some tech people fall into that group of people because you would think tech people of all people would have basic enough skills to look beyond the first consequence of a solution.
Those people would be wrong. California lost a net of approximately 1 million residents between 2007 and 2016 [1]. Chalk it up to over-regulation (like the issue we are discussing here), high state income taxes, overcrowded/underfunded public schools, expensive housing, etc., but anyone complaining about too many transplants arriving in CA simply doesn't know the statistics.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the quoted statement is wrong. The statistic appears to be that: From 2007 to 2016: the number of people moving into CA was 1 million fewer than then number of people moving into CA. However the net population increased by about 3 million [0]. Happy to be enlightened if I'm missing some nuances.
Nonetheless, the immigration vs emigration is a really interesting statistic.
[0] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=california+population+h...
Multiply by the 10 and you have 5 million people that appear in California without migrating (or I guess closer to 4.8 million, whatever).
I’m pretty certain this doesn’t actually apply to the Bay Area in isolation, though. Population there is climbing much faster than the birth rate, I’d expect.
I replied initially because on a first read, I read it as a population drop, found it remarkable and then my gut told me that didn't seem right. I hoped to provide clarification to others of the too general statement (the part I quoted) about the cited study.
Good reminder on the Bay Area not being reflective of the state as a whole (aka the broad numbers discussed above). I think it will be worth my time to poke around later and understand the population change components at a finer grain that state-wide.
The number of immigrants to CA during that time far exceeded 1 million net loss domestically.
The study doesn't say that, it says there was 1 million in net outbound domestic migration. It doesn't discuss population change due to international migration (inbound and outbound, legal or otherwise) or natural increase/decrease; in fact, California gained, not lost, 3 million people between 2007 and 2016.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/206097/resident-populati...
in fact, California gained, not lost, 3 million people between 2007 and 2016.
Most of those gains were through births to existing residents, which says nothing about California being a destination for transplants, which was the point that I was refuting. Children born in California generally don't have a choice as to whether or not to live there. Adults do, and on a net basis, they are choosing to leave.
“From other states” alone, sure, OTOH, California has had net positive total (domestic and international) migration.
“Some people think we're getting too many transplants and that regulating the development of new housing will somewhat curb that”
The “transplants” he is concerned with are those with both the means and legal standing to purchase and drive up demand for new homes. How many illegal immigrants to California fall into that category? So most of the “transplants” that are relevant to this discussion are coming from other US states.
But certainly a sizable share of the foreigners migrating into California have substantial means (either pre-migration assets and/or post-pubescent income) and China isn't exactly underrepresented among the sources of such migration.
Any data to back up this claim or are you just arguing to argue at this point? There are many news outlets that would love to see your data on this, because it is a startling revelation indeed.
Edit: to those downvoting this, please provide data corroborating his claim above. Otherwise there is nothing to downvote, as I am simply calling into question his claim that wealthy, legal Chinese immigrants outnumber poor illegal immigrants from Mexico in California.
He's saying that the majority of immigrants who are buy houses are Chinese. I'm not arguing for or against that by the way. For places where this already took place, Toronto and Victoria Canada.
No, I'm not saying anything like that.
No, and you can tell they because the only mentioned of the phrase “wealthy Chinese” in my comment refers to people buying up property from abroad, and the phrase.“vadt majority” (or even the word “majority”) doesn't appear in my comment at all.
> Any data to back up this claim
Since I never made the argument you reference, and it's not necessary either to the core issue or the tangent from the main discussion in my comment, why would you ask for that?
Why in this thread do you keep making the mistake of thinking migration consists only of domestic migration and illegal immigration? You know that legal international migration (both immigration directed at permanent residency and more transient legal residency by foreigners) is a thing, right, and actually quite a big one in Californiaz right?
Regarding traffic - it is really sad that the epicenter of tech (and frankly our entire US economy) is so backwards on public transit and infrastructure. Its such an easy fix if we rolled our sleeves up and did it now and not over the next 40 years...
That people still sit in traffic for hours so that they can sit in front of their laptops all day in a germ-farm office and poop next to their coworkers.
It's dance monkey mentality. It's living in the past.
edit: to answer your question more directly: many people just won't be bothered to install them or don't think of it, or can't get the financing easily. For some people the numbers don't work out, because their roof is old or they don't get enough sun or their electric bill is already low.
Despite what they may teach you in Econ 101, the efficient market hypothesis isn't an actually useful way of looking at human behaviour. It might work for modelling some of the actions of Goldman Sachs, but actual people are squishy and irrational.
Because it is damn close to break even and would you spend money on something you didn't need just because it was good for the environment?
Most people don't expend effort for $0/month to $50/month in returns. Despite all the solar proponents, once you factor in interest/maintenance/etc, its probably pretty close to that.
We are probably 10 years from it being 100% obvious that all homes should have solar.
But the actual cost has never been lower and energy prices are falling. There are downsides but they're very different.
So instead of having ~$1800/yr going to your energy company's coffers, where they might use it to innovate and actually one day make clean energy cost effective, it should go straight to your bank's bottom line in the form of interest. While it may cost consumers the same amount, that sounds like a net negative to me.
And your argument for that is... banks?
Tell me how many banks are spending their profits doing clean energy research.
Roof work is notoriously 'dangerous', and impacts people with mobility/age issues differently than most of us. The maintenance burden is more than just the warranty, and any cost calculations of power savings should account for those costs as well.
[Oh, and we should all be god enough at high school level physics to solve the "climate crisis" in a few hours...]
"Solar Is NOT Maintenance Free" -- https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2014/02/accelerating-u... -- "We like to think PV is maintenance free but it is not ... if you don’t do the maintenance, you can have sub-optimal asset performance."
https://www.wikihow.com/Maintain-a-Solar-Panel
https://www.civicsolar.com/support/installer/articles/snow-s...
That sounds terrible. That $30K would turn into $100k if I put away for retirement.
That's generally not the case in California, as we're net-metering here. Very few people install storage and transfer switches to handle blackouts.
In winter in SD (so no climate control needed) my electric bill was $12 a month. Solar's great and all but putting a 15kwh a month installation on the roof would be crazy.
Do you mean 15kw per daylight hour install, or a 15kwh total per month install? Because 15kwh per month is a really small amount of power, that's roughly equivalent to running a single desktop PC for one hour per day.
That's hobby-kit amounts of electricity. A single 100w solar panel could almost produce 15kwh/month on it's own, in ideal sunlight conditions, and you can buy that for roughly $200 USD at retail.
I averaged about 90 watts in winter, around 2kwh a day, so 60 ish a month, so roughly eight or so bucks for the power with the rest from the odd fixed charge.
In summer I had one efficient window AC and would use about five times as much energy.
Either its a good idea that existing homeowners are willing to pay for with a bit of their equity, or its a dick move dressed in the moralizing of environmentalism.
With the current supply problem in Bay Area, realistically all you are going to get is marginally more displacement of people who anchored themselves to a super expensive area in the past, but could not sustain a 10x increase in tax.
Building enough supply can work: https://la.curbed.com/2018/5/2/17311992/los-angeles-how-much...
And it doesn’t take long for things to stabilize either, once you increase supply.
If a City implements a solid transportation system that gets you in the burbs within an hour, then the prices drop. Prices are simply a matter of demand and supply, and supply is artificially capped.
The truth is, humans are terrible long term decision makers for the good of a large population. Personal agendas always get in the way.
Seattle's real estate market has some but not all of the same pressures: too prescriptive of zoning that requires single family homes for no good reason and booming economies adding jobs at a faster rate than housing stock. But Seattle builds faster and taller in the median case; though the tall building seems to go through waves of either being all apartments or all condos.
Seattle has built enough housing supply that rents actually dropped earlier this year (https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...) and the median clearing price is less than half of the San Francisco rate.
It doesn't apply to new construction over 3 stories. Especially for the Bay Area, building up seems like the only way out of the current morass, so is it really that clear-cut?
Also most of the house price in high-demand areas is the land cost. $30k sounds like a lot but is less than 5% of the median house price. People pay that much over asking quite regularly.
I'm sorry but when the sums are that astronomical it really is a rounding error - especially for a home improvement that saves the homeowner money in the long term. If someone can't afford $630k they almost certainly couldn't afford the $600k it would've cost otherwise.
Like I mentioned above, because of space constraints the Bay Area has little choice but to densify if it wants to add significant new housing, and the new regs wouldn't apply to buildings taller than 3 stories.
Things like parking minimums, low-density zoning, and fragmentation of public transit have done and continue to do, most of the damage to housing affordability. Requiring solar is peanuts in comparison and has otherwise beneficial effects also - namely, reduction of carbon emissions.
[1] median list price from https://www.zillow.com/ca/home-values/
Only when there's restricted demand. Because we're in a restricted supply market, pricing is mostly established in based on alternatives. If every property tear down has the same additional cost, then it's probably not going to affect the price.
Serious question: why is that a problem?
Most modern apartment buildings here in Warsaw, Poland are built without gas. Nobody has problems with it: in fact, people would rather not have a potentially dangerous gas infrastructure in their building. I've been cooking on electric for more than 10 years now and would never think of switching back.
Why would you want to have gas?
The heatpump and gas burner that are external are much different beasts as they require some windups and unlike a solid heating rod you can't flip them on and off rather rapidly (about once every 5 minutes).
An induction heater should also be able to heat a pot much more precisely than a gas burner (again down to instrument precision if it has one)
I'd sooner consider moving to a house without heat, A/C, parking etc - than one without gas (and if fact have). Even broadband can usually be added for enough money. But gas stoves are really hard to retrofit, and camp stoves are ghetto and unstable/dangerous esp with heavy dishes.
Professiinals not withstanding, this seems involuntarily comical.
In areas with cheap and clean electric heat (like, say, Quebec with its massive hydroelectric sources and relatively cheap electricity) electric heat really isn't bad at all. And it's potentially more future proof for the addition of renewable electricity sources later.
California is really missing the forrest for the trees here. There's so much low hanging fruit (things that could kill two birds with one stone) that they're ignoring. If the state would focus on higher density living and public transportation over imposing regulations that will drive more people away and lower the standard of living for those who remain, then we would see a much bigger global impact on reducing climate change. Because of this, more people will decide to live in Texas instead of California, where they'll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses which draw power from coal plants.
Stonefruit, you might say.
>...where they'll run their air conditioners 10 months out of the year in their huge, inefficient houses
The type of people that live in huge inefficient homes are generally also the same type of people that don't want to live in high density areas. California could turn open fields in to solar farms like you mentioned, but that requires that someone foot the bill and also build the infrastructure for it. "Forcing" people to put solar panels on their own home solves both of those problems. It also makes you more immune to losing power in a natural disaster, of which California has plenty.
I'm not saying I'm even for this issue, I don't live in California. But your view is extremely negative and ignores the negatives of your way while also ignoring the positives of the way mentioned in the article.
You're missing the obvious alternative, which is that Cali could instead tax new homes the amount required to install the equivalent panels in some field, where they're cheaper and easier to service, where they can be positioned for optimal sunlight, etc.
No thanks. Then some other org controls the power I can get from those panels, can corrupt officials to raise my rates unnecessarily, charge me higher rates for generation facilities that may not be needed except to juice shareholder returns (Duke Energy collected over a billion dollars for a nuclear power plant they'll never build in Florida, and they are under no obligation to return those funds to ratepayers). This is not uncommon. NV Energy in Nevada, Duke and FPL in Florida, utility coalitions in Kentucky and Arizona have all fought against distributed generation, the list goes on.
Rooftop/distributed solar is a hedge against utility shenanigans, and with how quickly rooftop solar pays itself back (under 10 years in over half the US states while rolling the cost into a long term fixed rate loan product, ie your mortgage), it's insane we don't mandate its installation in more places on new/retrofit construction [1].
Disclosure: I own a 10kw solar install on my roof. I’m biased and opinionated.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/ug2R3Jl.jpg (NREL US Solar Potential Map)
[+] https://i.imgur.com/c86gWxh.jpg (Rate of return on cash invested by state)
[1] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-storage... (Lazard Levelized Cost of Storage 2017)
[2] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/03/lithium-ion-batteries... (Lithium-ion batteries below $200/kWh by 2019 will drive rapid storage uptake, finds IHS Markit)
[3] https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...
With storage you need less supply and you can supplement your supply when rates are lowest.
You can be "off grid" by throwing a switch.
You can however get expensive inverters than do work of the grid, but they are, as mentioned, expensive compared to a simple grid-tie inverter.
Why why just new homes. Instead tax all electricity consumers on their bills to pay for the solar farms.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is very clearly what California voters want. The idea is that we have these massive boom/bust cycles (that seem to trend upwards) and we want to ensure that those who are already here benefit from the boom times, even at the cost of making things rather harder for the newcomers.
The interesting thing is that... a lot of the older service people I've talked to, barbers, uber drivers, etc... own homes around here that they bought when it was cheap. because of these rules, sure, they can't eat out everyday, but they can continue to live around here, should they so choose, on very small wages. I think that our rent control and our prop 13 and other favoring of existing residents does in part subsidize our service industry; in some ways, I think it's why services around here just aren't as expensive as you would expect, when you consider how much more expensive rent is here (and programers are here) vs. the rest of the country.
I personally think that the economy would be better overall if we just built a lot and then raised the costs of the output of locally produced services in line with rent, e.g. raised service wages in line with programmer wages. But, I do think it's important to understand the majority California view.
...wait, what?
Just my opinion, of course, and I understand it's an unpopular one.
TLDR; the proportion of programmers matters.
Corporations using a lot of electricity get the same sized tax dividend check the pensioner gets, so it's a net loss for them. The wealthy subsidize the poor under this system.
It functions alot like ubi actually.
Given that large corporations who consume huge amounts of electricity are in the pool, it's almost impossible that the pensioner could consume more than the average.
Unfortunately, this is generally not the case. Most grid-tie solar inverters do not support disconnected operation. They all have anti-islanding features that disconnect the solar panels when the grid goes down (to prevent back-flow into the grid that could injure linemen working to repair outages). There are a few inverters that include an emergency-outlet on the inverter that works when the power is out, but you have to run an extension cord from the inverter to the devices you want to power.
It is possible to buy a hybird off-grid inverter, but they are much more expensive than either plain grid-tie or off-grid, and the power company is going to scrutinize their installation a lot more closely.
Surely they can't entirely rely on this for safety?
Back-flows from generators, solar and other home power sources are not really an issue. It takes a specific set of circumstances where there's both equipment failure and the utility worker fails to check if lines are live.
Basically, the resistance of the entire neighborhood is indistinguishable to a short from the perspective of the breakers on your power generation equipment.
Still, you shouldn't back feed because we live in a society where everyone must play by the rules of idiots regardless of whether or not they can prove themselves to be otherwise. Therefore you cannot be trusted to flip switches properly yourself and I must advise you to use a proper transfer switch.
What would be the benefit of me "properly flipping switches" in the context of a natural disaster? What if I am not home?
If solar is profitable why is some private company not doing it already ?
https://www.eia.gov/renewable/monthly/solar_photo/pdf/pv_tab...
You may be referencing old sources. For example, even though the UK's solar potential is reasonably low, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) shows that levelized cost of solar-generated power IS cheaper than MOST other forms of energy.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#...
California has higher energy prices and the poor people who tend to live in inner parts are suffering a lot.
When you look at profitability you need to deduct the government subsidies and assume that it comes from our taxes. Is it really sensible idea to tax a farmer in yolo county to pay more for his energy usage because the rich people in bay area have decides that solar is more important ?
This leads to more inequality, resentment and a divided society.
Is this true? IIRC the shortage of urban-style denser housing is so severe that pretty much everyone who prefers that type of housing has to buy a sprawly McMansion anyways, since that's what on the market at prices people can afford.
"Huge" and "inefficient" is in the eye of the beholder, and in most countries your standard-sized American house would fall under both of those categories.
I think constraining this discussion to California might be more appropriate, since this is CA legislation.
The regulatory environment currently has its thumb on the scales in favor of single-family homes. Shifting the pendulum the other way, even a little bit, is a good thing. We shouldn’t be building anything less than 4 stories tall, and if we do, costs like this can and should be spread across several tenants.
I disagree strongly. I think the most valuable thing about silicon valley is that I can walk to tens of small employers, from my house, and at least two big employers who could reasonably hire me.
In bicycling or uber distance, there are thousands of small places and hundreds of large employers.
Because I live in the silicon valley, I can switch jobs almost on a whim; I don't have to move, I don't have to upset my social circles, etc...
I think this is actually a big part of why Silicon Valley is valuable both to the workers and to the employers; there's a huge pool of people and a huge pool of jobs that we can match up without inconveniencing anyone. You don't have to settle for the job that is nearby or for the employee who is willing to move.
The only reason I think is that owners of these companeis don't give shit.
Riding crowded mass transit and living in apartments with your neighbors 4" away should be a choice and there should exist reasonably priced alternatives. The target is a society so wealthy that the median person can own a home where they want and commute in their luxury car if that's what they want to do.
(And before everyone complains about pollution I would like to point out that achieving that level of wealth is so far off that home heating/cooling and transportation are likely to be basically all electric and the grid will be what determines the environmental impact of that)
It’s relatively straightforward to alleviate transit crowding, and to sound-isolate apartments, with money. But no practical amount of road expansion fixes congestion, and we’re not likely to remove the mountains or fill in the Bay for more tract housing.
I'll take baby steps.
That's a pretty silly take. Less expensive houses have large areas of simple roof (in areas with variable climate, about ½ of the areas even face south).
The economics are worse than utility solar, but its not a puzzle how to attach them to a rooftop.
The space is free if you’re already building a house anyway. Installation seems fairly straightforward. Is it really that much cheaper to install separate panels that it offsets the cost of buying dedicated land for it?
Flat, but virtually always angled. (Sometimes good, sometimes not.)
Easier to survive a war or natural disasters if everyone has their own way to generate power from the sun. It would be a shame if solar power, which allows for that, wouldn't be used that way, and instead everyone just kept getting their power from a centralized source, just as before.
There's certainly efficiency to be gained from pooling our resources into a centralized power grid, but I think redundancy and protection from grid failures are also perfectly valid goals.
On the flip side, not everyone wants to live in high-density housing. Why not also require single-family homes to have solar?
Well, if it's mandatory, then we may see roofs being developed/built that are more friendly for installing panels on. Most homes with panels had them installed years after the home was built, in many cases before "installing solar panels on your roof" was a thing people could even do on their homes.
I think the parts of Texas and California with tech jobs are... not substitutable for a large part of the tech workforce on political/social grounds.
I do agree that higher density and public transit would help make California better by my standards more than requiring rooftop solar... but at least in the higher density parts of California where I am? I don't think requiring rooftop solar will make much difference. If you have a large multi story complex, adding rooftop solar won't do a lot, but it also isn't going to add significantly to the cost of the building, just 'cause there isn't much roof compared to the rest of the building.
In the high density parts of California that I want to live in, single family homes are already the domain of the rich. Personally, that's okay with me; I don't need a single family home, and I think we should be focusing on building more condos in the high density parts of the state, and as I said, requiring the roofs to be covered with solar isn't going to significantly change the cost of building those higher density buildings.
It's also a pretty intense flashpoint though, when those same communists exercise their Texas mandated long gun open carry rights, while wearing hammer and sickle armbands and shit.
I dunno man. You won't be hard pressed to find fellow liberals in Austin, but you're still in Texas. Ford f150s will still aggressively run your bicycle off the road, your Bernie stickers will still get you vandalized if there happens to be some sort of Republican event at the capital. It's constant idealogical warfare between the young people and the rest of the state, and not even all the young people because uta is the biggest university so all sorts end up there, including people that probably would have found more like minded colleagues at a&m.
It can be exhausting, speaking from experience.
But that's the thing, and what made silicon valley so much more attractive than my (rural california) hometown... nobody tries to run anyone off the road. Sure, sure, we disagree and puff and stuff, but people leave their guns at home, and the taboo against vehicular manslaughter is maintained, even if the victim is on a bicycle. We socialize in groups that cross ethnic and political boundaries.
But then, I'm one of those people for whom Texas is not a substitutable place for Silicon Valley. (New York might be. Texas is not.) I'm completely aware that there are people who prefer Texas in the same way I prefer Silicon Valley. (I'm also aware that I haven't spent a lot of time in Texas, and I'm mostly comparing rural California to Silicon Valley... but rural California has a lot of the problems Texas is perceived to have, re: big trucks aggressively running bicycles off the road and other acts of everyday terror )
In any case, the bay area being a liberal hub isn't exactly a strike against it, considering most cities are liberal hubs, and the existence of conservative hubs means that one can't necessarily judge a place for having a cultural zeitgeist.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/12/mapping-how-americas-...
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "little tolerance," are you saying people are being run over by cars for being conservatives? Are houses being spray painted? Are wedding cakes not being baked for Republican couples?
The bay area is the most liberal area. Comparing to other cities that happened to have liberal majorities is pointless. It's like calling a community with 3% minorities just as diverse as a community with 45% minorities.
>are you saying people are being run over by cars
If you think it requires violence to be intolerant, you need to expand your views.
>Are houses being spray painted?
Cars with Trump stickers vandalized, yes.
>Are wedding cakes not being baked for Republican couples?
I'm not sure. It would be a little hard to tell since political parties rarely show up on the cake request forms.
My point is just that Texas and California are not exactly substitutable goods, as it were. just like how there are people who would be much happier in Texas than California for non-monitary reasons, there are people who would be much happier in California than in Texas for non-monetary reasons.
My argument is just that saying that lining up Texas with California as competitors for talent is... probably not as correct as, say, lining up California and NYC.
>My argument is just that saying that lining up Texas with California as competitors for talent is... probably not as correct as
More preconceived notion crap. I suggest you lookup the city that most bay area residents moved to last year.
For some part of the workforce. 15% of software developers in the US work in California. For comparison, CA has 12% of the US population.
Many folks that work in CA are from out of state and do it for career/financial reasons, not for political/social reasons. And they'd be fine with living in a suburb of Austin if it were materially more appealing than some suburb of San Francisco.
[1] https://dqydj.com/number-of-developers-in-america-and-per-st...
The fact that most folks in CA are from out of state doesn't imply that they would be just as happy in Texas. Something like 40% of our STEM workforce is from outside the country. Do you think an immigrant would be treated as well in Texas as in California? (maybe this is my prejudice showing, but everything I've seen and heard is that they would not.) add to that the developers who aren't heterosexual (or who are but who don't look it) or who aren't white, and I think you have a lot of people who... probably have good reason to stay on this side of the mason-dixon line.
(I feel the need to add a disclaimer; I've not spent a huge amount of time in Texas, and perhaps it isn't so bad, but... this perception is common, and it does mean some people won't take jobs in Texas, just like the perception that California is a nanny state where you will get fired for not being politically correct will keep many Texans out of California.)
Yes. I would expect an immigrant living in one of Texas' cities to be treated just as well as an immigrant living in one of California's cities and same for the rural areas.
16% of Texas residents are immigrants. Non-hispanic whites are a minority in the state.
Texas is different politically than California, but it is just as good a place to live for anyone coming to the Melting Pot. And in the end, both states face many of the same problems, the major cities are very similar, and the rural areas are also very similar.
Disclaimer: I live in Texas, and have lived in many other less cowboyish states, as well as living several places internationally.
The only difference is the sense of superiority in California echoed in your comment indicating that California is the only place with enlightened people.
If I could be paid what I make in San Francisco in almost any other metropolitan city in the US I would move. The weather that people rave about sucks and the politics are rage inducing.
Here in AZ with rooftop solar, the shade difference is quite noticeable.
Besides that, big open plots of solar panels are an eye sore, and don't make sense when land is so expensive.
Contrary to popular belief, the Los Angeles metro area has a very high population density. It's 2nd in the US, and the SF Bay Area is 7th. Both are on par with European metros.
The Bay Area is basically a series of valleys where everybody lives and works, mountain ranges that are barely developed, and a large body of water right in the middle.
Total built area is, very roughly, equivalent to solar PV insolation requirements, and at least a portion of that space (or area) is low-hanging fruit.
Undeveloped land has other potential uses, including rec, ag, and ecological ones.
I think a ton more people generating their own power and being shown the data of how much power they're generating and using in real time is a great thing. People I know with solar panels are excited to try and run net zero and know stuff like their energy peak usage during heat waves. I don't know anyone without solar panels that monitors their energy use like that.
I do not claim that the California directive is sensible, but it is worth comparing to a somewhat similar directive that has been in place for 40 years with great effect - reducing grid energy production by 8%, saving everyone money (if the article is to be trusted), and only being a minor eye sore ....
[citation needed]
Someplace without freezing weather, or someone who might just say “too cloudy too long, no warm shower today” might have a different calculus.
To me that does make economic sense, both at the state level and at the individual level; why do you call it a "bad practice"?.
AFAIK, the laws do allow PV panels instead of solar thermal. I'm not aware of any innovation harmed by such a mandate in either Israel or Portugal. Do you?
Specifying HOW to go about being energy efficient is the entirely wrong approach. Instead specify a minimum energy efficiency per square meter and let home builders sort it out.
By specifying minimum efficiencies builders are free to adopt new technologies, new methods as they come along or use alternate means which are more suitable for a specific project.
For example I live near a river and intend to use micro-hydro for my electricity. Do I still need to have solar panels? Or will the legislators need to add in a thousand exceptions to the rules?
In Indiana, for example, you don't have to upgrade the electrical system if you are adding insulation, replacing windows, or replacing the roof.
You may or may not need to upgrade your electric to replace a plug, mostly because some older systems aren't grounded. It is possible to rewire a single room without upgrading the entire house.
You don't need to upgrade the plumbing while you upgrade the electrical, just like you don't need to upgrade the electrical if you are treating the asbestos (a problem my parents had with an old house built in 1918). Most times, whatever you are fixing needs to be up to code but not everything. If it weren't reasonable, it wouldn't be prudent to buy an old house without detailed upkeep and upgrade records.
Siding or brick, four to six inches of rigid foam overlapping insulation, a fully sealed waterproof, windproof membrane, structural sheathing, 2x4 or 2x6 framing, internal wallboard, latex paint.
Consider the existing state of most of those houses:
Painted sheathing or siding, 2x4 framing, fiberglass batt insulation with kraft paper vapor barrier inside the framing, wall board, latex paint.
Essentially the only piece you get to keep is the 2x4s, assuming you come at it from the inside. If you come at it from the outside, you can do marginally better by keeping the interior walls, but you also have to brace the structure while you replace the exterior sheathing since it's almost always structurally loaded.
Ideally the target metric would be expressed as energy efficiency per resident occupant, but that would be significantly more challenging to enforce.
Part of the LEED "energy" criterion is labeling the building as LEED. Which is absurd on its face.
It's also important not to forget the economies of scale here. It can be a blessing to know you and all your competitors will need to create solar roofs, the one who builds the best standardised product at scale wins.
I'd prefer to see builders be able to choose from a set of proven standardised technologies (e.g. not just panels but also say solar water heaters) and allow an exception procedure for people like you, which allows you to showcase efficiency-equivalence... rather than for all builders to do their own thing and government having to evaluate each system individually.
Require that a home has a source of electricity, water, sewage and meeds some efficiency standards but do NOT specify how those are to be met. You can issue guidelines separately, but they shouldn't be legislated.
The solar part of this adds about $15k to the cost of the house. That's about $75/month on a 30 year fixed mortgage at current rates.
Much of that, if not all or more, comes back in savings on the electric bill.
Doesn't that mean that for most single family home buyers the difference will mostly just be a slightly higher down payment?
1. Transportation of over large distances has efficiency loss on electricity and requires more cumbersome infrastructure.
2. Less heat on the neighborhood as some of that energy is absorbed into electricity instead of being bounced off to the surrounding. Having normal tiles that just absorb heat will increase the temperature of both the building and the surrounding environment. (requiring even more energy to cool off).
During the summer, NYC, especially manhattan, is famous to have 2F higher temperatures that it normally should have just because of the heat radiation from the building, pavement, and air conditioners.
Requiring a rooftop garden on large buildings is another interesting idea.
On a rooftop, you have the more significant inefficiencies of trees and suboptimal angles. In a field, you can optimize for efficient collection, and you can even install pivoting panels (much more cheaply than on a house, anyway) which can optimize collection throughout the day.
Even if the transmission loss is larger than the gain from optimal positioning (and I doubt it is), it's all marginal compared to the maintenance difference (having a technician walk out to a panel in a field vs setting up appointments with home residents, driving out to their homes, climbing on their roofs, additional risk of injury for the technician from falls, risk of damaging homes, etc).
> ... you can even install pivoting panels ...
And like I said in my post, installing these is cheaper and easier in a field than on every home. For one, you only need one "tilt computer" module that can determine the optimal angle for all of the panels in the field. More importantly though, moving parts will wear and break eventually, and it's a lot easier (and safer!) to walk out into the field and service them than scheduling appointments, driving to customers' property, climbing on roofs, etc.
Just for fun, I've built these. You don't even need a GPS module nor magnetometer, you just need a few light sensors, one or two small motors (depending on whether you tilt in one dimension or two), and a couple dollars' worth of standard electronic components.
This should have been done at the local or regional level, if at all. California should remain one state, probably, but add regional regulatory entities between counties and the state.
We could accomplish this by giving regional government authorities like the Association of Bay Area Governments more authority. Essentially the metropolitan areas become like city states. The state could set certain goals (reduce carbon by this much, increase housing by that much), but it would be up to regional government to specify implementation details.
The state government seems dysfunctional in a lot of ways, so while maybe goals could come down from the state, the actual authorities should be 1) or 2). Maybe some combination.
I propose we make a law that says any home that sells for greater than the Freddie Mac super conforming loan limit (currently $679,650) must be retrofitted to have a net energy draw of zero or less from the grid (with rules about exceptions for shade and roof angles and whatnot).
This would solve a lot of problems with this bill: It would exempt all the folks who are selling cheap homes throughout the state, it would apply to both old and new homes, and it allows for new technologies that don't exist yet or are cost prohibitive, instead of require solar panels.
It wouldn't really affect prices much, because there is already a flattening at the Freddie Mac limits, and when you get to the super conforming level, a solar install only represents 5% or less today (but I imagine the prices would fall with economies of scale).
A specific solar incentive (payable only on new construction if you'd like) based on yield would make more sense.
Step 2: Virtual signal with a supposed solution.
Step 3: Mock anybody who criticizes that solution (but who also worries about the serious problem).
I'd imagine that at a certain point, the panels themselves will be cheap(er) compared to the installation cost (so that the cost structure changes to favor the most efficient installation/maintenance regime), and that residential-scale solar will be uneconomical compared to large-scale installations in the desert, where you can get a couple of hundred megawatts all in one place getting the advantages of optimal weather, easily-installable sun-tracking, and more regular maintenance than what you'd get on a 1,500 sqf roof in SF.
It's entirely possible that, 10-15 years from now, this ends up being a "tax" paid by all homeowners to the residential-solar-installation industry so that they can put solar panels on roofs that will never earn their money back, just so that the homeowner can displace what might be equally clean energy generated elsewhere.
"While net-zero remains an admirable goal, getting there is not yet cost-effective, state officials and experts said. And it fails to address the state’s ultimate goal of curbing global warming.
Because electric utilities now rely on renewable energy for much of their power, daytime energy already is quite clean, said McAllister, the lead state commissioner on energy efficiency.
At night when there’s no solar power, people come home, turn on the lights, the TV and possibly the air conditioning and start pulling power from the grid, he said. Some gas-powered generating plants then are fired up to help meet that additional load, boosting carbon emissions.
“That additional (home-generated) solar kilowatt-hour isn’t worth very much because it’s displacing what is already clean energy,” McAllister said. “That net-zero home is not a net-carbon-zero home.”"
I want clean and efficient energy, but I want it to be good for the environment, not worse, and it appears none of this was studied nor confirmed.
And also once again, California is ensuring that low income families cannot afford to buy a home as an investment to exit the poverty cycle. From requiring new homes to have an EV jack in the garage, to solar cells on the roofs, the continually make sure that equality is out of the poor's reach by force of the law.
The total volume of water consumed remains the same, but the water lost to evaporation & distribution leakage (collectively akin to the transmission losses for electricity mentioned elsewhere in this thread) means that not collecting rainwater is less efficient.
Then there's the flood damage caused when the increasing expanses of paved ground fail to absorb heavy rain that rainwater collection can help alleviate.
We can't yet effectively store solar, so in the summer when everyone comes home, they turn on their AC's (in SoCal) and in order to be able to provide enough energy as the sun starts to set, Cal ISO (http://www.caiso.com) needs to tell gas fired plants to turn on (quickly) to have enough capacity in the grid. This causes--you guessed it--pollution.
Source: Worked 7 years for an ISO.
For an alternative view:http://www.mojavedesertblog.com/2009/11/solar-energy-develop...
When in a hole, keep digging!
Whatever you do just make sure the neighborhood is zoned single family. Multi family just doesn't have enough roof space.
What's the 'dumb' thing about a grid tie?
I have also noticed that I pay attention more to my consumption. I've debated on buying an energy consumption device like sense, but it seems like a toy...
> I will be able to run the AC this summer at 70 for a reasonable bill.
Does this imply that the -20 is after somewhat intentionally raising power usage?
Submitters: since the HN guidelines call for original sources, we'd appreciate it if you'd scan an article for a link to one before posting. It's one step of manual web crawling in exchange for better content on the site—plus it's fairer to give credit to the original instead of a cribbed knockoff.
Are we expected to research every URL and find the first to report on it no matter what? Even if it's obscure, out of date, or wrong?
If the earlier article is out of date or wrong, then presumably the new link includes significant new information, in which case it's not a knockoff.
The OCR article looked to me like original reporting, but if you know of another piece that it's copying, we can change the URL again.
By "cribbed knockoff" I mean the thing that media properties do where they lift material from somewhere, make a fig leaf's worth of modification, and publish it themselves. Some people call this blogspam, but that's a contested word. There are plenty of these sites. If knockoffs are all they do, we ban them, but some also publish original articles, and we don't want to exclude those.
Not always but primary sources are definitely preferred. If it's a science paper split the difference, eg an explainer article may provide valuable context missing from a highly technical paper, but then it's nice to link the paper in the comments.
https://onlinestore.smucker.com/display_product.cfm?prod_id=...
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The effects of their policy. High carbon output. High cost of living. High cost of energy. And as little bonus, water shortages.
Bad in every possible way for poor people living in California. Its truly sad state, specifically because all of these problems have extremly simple solutions.
- Don't only force renewables, but rather allow all forms of new energy that are better then the current (don't close nuclear plants for example). This is also better for prices.
- Allow more house building. No brainer.
- Make a proper water market with block pricing so poor people have basically free water and water is directed where it is sensable. Farmers SHOULD consider water cost when making a choice of crops. People should pay to have a green garden and/or clean their car every day.