Wow, you really think I’m speaking in bad faith. I assure you I am not. I am certainly not making any of the indirect claims you accuse me of.
Certainly it’s true that a poorly architected solar panel system can be bad for your roof. If you know you have to design the roof for solar panels, that’s much less expensive to do in advance than to try to mitigate bad roofing materials after the fact.
For reference, I just installed solar panels on my roof. The raw cost of the panels was 25% of the full installation cost. The architect study was another 5%. Hardware to fasten the panels to my theoretically solar ready roof was another 8% of the cost.
The rest was labor.
I am shocked you think it’s controversial that dramatically less labor is required to do something at construction time than as a retrofit.
This doesn’t require any economies of scale (although I think those will also appear with this bill). It just requires that coordination costs that are already being paid at construction time not increase dramatically when adding solar panels to the list of things planned for.
Shading and cooling dark roofs is, in fact, a good way to reduce the weathering of a roof. They don’t do much for metal roofs, and they are signally inappropriate on several types of shingle roofs, but torch down roofs, which are very common in California, are in fact likely to be improved by panels, not degraded.
The contention that talking about market failures implies someone trying to sell you something doesn’t seem like it lines up well with the economists I’m familiar with, but you know, at the end of the day, we’re going to have to see how much actual builders in California charge once this bill is in full effect.
I’m perfectly willing to admit I was wrong if, in fact, the TCO of solar panels ends up being enough to make this other than an extremely good bit of legislation.