Billions in U.S. solar projects shelved after Trump panel tariff | Hacker News Reader

Billions in U.S. solar projects shelved after Trump panel tariff

reuters.com

218 pointsrgbrenner179 comments

It's interesting to contrast this with further details released recently from Xcel Energy's competitive bidding in Colorado, which had some unbelievably low prices for wind, solar, and solar combined with storage:

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2018/06/07/worlds-largest-lithiu...

They're planning a GWh of grid storage attached to 700MW of solar, at a cost of 3.0-3.2 cents/kWh, which completely beats the cost of coal. And that's without taking in to account coal's massive costs that it doesn't pay, in terms of our health (COPD, mercury consumption in fish, etc...).

We have some absolutely awful leadership in this area that is trying to kneecap the future of our country. Colorado's process makes me hopeful that by 2022, this will mostly be in our past. But losing several years of a technology shift is nothing good for the US.

> They're planning a GWh of grid storage attached to 700MW of solar, at a cost of 3.0-3.2 cents/kWh, which completely beats the cost of solar.

I'm assuming you meant "it beats the cost of coal"?

Yes, thank you, corrected!

> which completely beats the cost of solar. And that's without taking in to account coal's massive costs that it doesn't pay

Sorry, I'm confused. Did you mean the other in one of those two sentences, or am I misreading? If you did, which one?

EDIT: Ah, I see the sibling comment, thanks.

I'm all for solar. I use it myself. But I cannot wrap my head around these prices. They seem far too low. If this reality or is this companies trying to win bids, trying to get their feet into doors?

Solar takes space. It takes far more land than coal-fired plants. But land prices are going up and everyone expects interest rates to go up too. So how can they afford to acquire and maintain the needed land at these prices?

Colorado has land to spare. That quote might even be based on zero-cost land.

Then these prices are somewhat artificial. Even if you get the land for free, there are significant operating costs. Maintaining solar panels out in a field is very different than on the roof of a factory. In a place like Colorado (not a Nevada desert) you first have to cut down all the trees/bushes, which isn't a great image for green energy. Then someone has to keep the vegetation from growing back. Theft of panels does happen. So you need security guards. The costs aren't extreme, but at the quoted prices they are significant.

You can put it on grazing land and let the animals keep the vegetation under control.

Land is far from zero cost in Colorado. Assuming these solar farms would go on the eastern plains rather than in the even less productive (but more expensive) land in the mountains, it is true that much of that land can support only sparse grazing or sometimes wheat, since it is semi-arid (but not desert as in the Great Basin).

Have you spent much time around Grand Junction? There's much more to western CO than just mountains. And the grazing land isn't terribly valuable. I don't know the CO specific figures, but the statewide average in Wyoming is 40 acres/1 head cattle, and western CO has a similar climate.

Honestly, WY would be a better place for this, but the state government has its head way too far up the coal industries rear for that to get much traction.

You are more likely to just need a fence with barbed wire and not active security guards. Theft of panels from utility scale solar installations is unlikely to impact cost much at all. Vegetation growth is a modest issue. Fortunately, the panels shade much of the ground, which reduces vegetation growth under the panels. Yes, you may need to mow every now and then, but the panels absorb most of the sun, which means the grass under them doesn't grow as much. As far as trees and bushes go, most solar installation are placed in open areas that either naturally don't have trees or have already been cleared of trees. People are mostly installing on converted empty lots or old agricultural land. Plus, if you cut down trees, you can always "offset" by planting new trees elsewhere. Ongoing maintenance on the panels is pretty low. Assuming you install in a place that receives rain every now and then, you may not even need to clean the panels of dust. Mother nature can sometimes clean the dust off on its own.

To put some numbers on it, at the end of 2016, average US utility-scale PV O&M costs were $18,000 per megawatt-AC per year (and still falling rapidly):

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2017/09/berkeley-labs-...

Average capacity factor for utility scale solar PV is 27% in the US:

https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

That would put O&M costs at

18000 / (24 * 365 * 0.27) = $7.60 per megawatt hour, out of a total price quoted by epistasis of $30-$32 per megawatt hour. O&M could be up to 25% of total costs. It is indeed, a significant part of total costs. It is also a smaller fraction of total costs dedicated to O&M than wind or fossil power (including fuel in O&M).

The eastern plains of Colorado are a pretty good place for solar I think. No trees, not much vegetation, lots and lots and lots of space that's not being used for anything today.

Not being used for anything? What, exactly, do you think agriculture looks like?

In a place like Colorado (not a Nevada desert) you first have to cut down all the trees/bushes

Without numbers in front of me, I'd guess that most of Colorado is not trees and mountains. Plains on one side, desert on the other. Plenty of room to put up panels and not remove a single tree.

Some land is expensive, but outside of cities it need not be. And coal plants aren't exactly small. They are surrounded by all the apparatus necessary to move tons of fuel.

And consider that even if the footprint of a coal plant is smaller, that doesn't mean it would be cheaper. Coal plants have huge construction costs, and unlike solar, have huge ongoing costs to remediate their waste products. Plus there's the cost of buying and trucking in the fuel.

I just measured https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_Bowen with a generous setback as about 2.5 square miles (so ~1600 acres). That's only accounting for the generator, not the mine or the train track easement, etc.

Here's a 120 megawatt project advertised as needing 1000 acres:

https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2017/04/120-mw-first-s...

So coal plants really are a lot more compact than solar, and they do their nameplate capacity nearly 24/7.

Which hey, bring on the solar, but expect it to use a lot of land, especially when/if energy intensive industries switch to using it.

Land is not a significant input to the cost of any of these projects. And in the US West, there's unbelievable amounts of open space, much of it unused.

If the cost of land is going up, then it's an asset that after the 20-30 year lifetime of the project could be sold for a profit. Therefore, the "cost" of the land is just the financing cost, and the cost of capital has been very low up until now. We'll see what happens with interest rates...

If the land is productive, i.e. for grazing or farming, then the profit from solar must be compared to the profit of the agricultural activity. But there's so much unproductive land that it's doubtless that solar makes a lot of sense.

And even for agricultural activity, there's soooo much excess agricultural production of corn and soybeans, that with only very modest amounts of incentive (in the form of tax incentives), investors will put solar panels on land that had been farmed previously. You'll see it all over the countryside in Minnesota these days.

Edit: Let me back this up with some numbers. Figure 28 of this NREL PDF [1] puts land acquisition at $0.03/W - $0.04/W out of the $1.03/Wdc cost of large fixed tilt systems. Here's an OSU article [2] that puts solar leases of farm land at $1600/acre/30years, which apparently looks to be a great deal for farmers in Ohio.

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf

[2] https://u.osu.edu/extensioncd/2017/02/23/considerations-for-...

Interestingly enough, many rural communities in the Midwest have been soundly rejecting wind farms, and some have voted down solar farms.

The real problem with agriculture these days have been caused by subsidizing industrial production of basically two crops, corn and beans. Farms were smaller a generation ago, and produced more diverse kinds of crops as well -- actual food crops. For example, much of the corn goes straight to ethanol plants these days.

For example, much of the corn goes straight to ethanol plants these days.

Ethanol that causes wear and tear on cars while producing approximately the same energy that was used in fossil fuels to produce the ethanol.

Worse yet are the sugar tariffs. We would be better off if we got rid of the tariff then paid each person involved in growing sugarcane to not work. As https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2017/01/18/if-us-su... says, this policy would be estimated to make the USA approximately $1 billion per year richer.

Government intervention frequently results in perverse incentives that produce nonsensical results.

Wear and tear aside, ethanol also has lower energy density than gasoline. The consumer is paying at least the same cost per unit for mixed fuel and getting worse mileage.

Is there a fuel oxygenate you'd prefer to ethanol?

Ethanol isn't great on it's own, but added to gasoline in small amounts, it reduces emissions & smog.

Do you have a citation? Because that is exactly the opposite of what a quick search that I did just found.

According to https://www.nature.com/news/ethanol-fuels-ozone-pollution-1.... there are contradictory theories, but experimental evidence says that it increases smog. According to https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reduce-air-pollut... even ethanol in the quantities used in the USA is worse for public health than straight gasoline without anything added.

Your own sources offer a good perspective, if one takes the time to read them.

Ethanol has been promoted as a ‘green’ fuel because its combustion tends to produce lower emissions of carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons and NOx than petrol. But the impact on air quality of a wholesale transition from petrol to ethanol has been difficult to assess, with different atmospheric chemistry models predicting a variety of consequences. [...] air-quality campaigners should not start advocating for petrol instead of ethanol quite yet. Increased petrol burning clearly raised levels of NOx, which also poses direct health concerns, and it probably boosted the amount of particulate matter in the air, something the study did not look at. And because every city has its own unique air chemistry, a similar fuel switch might produce very different results in London or Los Angeles. Nevertheless, says Salvo, the findings illustrate that “ethanol is not a panacea”.

So, maybe I'm wrong in claiming it reduces smog, due to an ozone increase at the same time as NOx is decreased. The important point though, is why ethanol is interesting in the first place. It's not supposed to be a petrol replacement, it's an additive to modify the combustion. Specifically, by increasing the oxygen available in the combustion chamber for more complete combustion- aka a fuel oxygenate.

The second link, FWIW, specifically addresses "ethanol as fuel", which is different from "ethanol as additive to improve emissions of petrol".

"Fueling the automobile fleet primarily with ethanol rather than gasoline might increase air pollution"

Environmental engineer Mark Jacobson of Stanford University used a computer model to assess how the air pollution in the U.S. would react if vehicles remained primarily fueled by gasoline in 2020 or if the fleet transferred to a fuel that was a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, so-called E85.

The reason why ethanol was originally interesting was stories of how Brazil reduced its fossil fuel usage by switching to ethanol. They did..but growing plants for ethanol makes more sense in the tropics than it does in a temperate landscape.

The reason why it remains politically interesting is that you can't become President without doing well in the Iowa primary, and Iowa is full of corn farmers whose income benefits directly from our ethanol policies. So every Presidential nominee from both parties have been vocally been for ethanol for some time now. And most major candidates as well. (Ted Cruz managed to get away with opposing ethanol, but I can't think of another.)

Those articles aren't really about how ethanol is used in the US, it is mostly used as an additive for winter fuel:

https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/gasoline-winter-oxyge...

So a smaller fraction of the fuel than used in Brazil, nowhere near E-85.

It replaced MTBE¹, which contaminates groundwater.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_tert-butyl_ether

... Have you ever seen a coal mine? They take up a fair amount of space. Take a flight that passes over Kentucky or W. Virginia sometime. Whole mountains leveled for ... minutes or hours of domestic energy consumption per mountain. Plenty of room for solar and wind in the plains, and I'm not super sure you understand the relationship between land prices, fed fund rates, and the cost of land.

Sorry you were downvoted for asking a legitimate question. Other commenters have spoken to the land piece, but not to the actual solar/storage cost side. Most of these insanely low bids are produced based on extrapolating the cost decline of solar and storage to the future point where the plants will actually come into operation. If they had to buy everything right now, they might not be able to achieve those costs per kWh, but plants take time to build, so there is an assumption of further declines in acquisition and operating costs over the next several years baked in (in this case, the target date is 2023).

Excellent point about the install date. Most utility planning happens at longer time scales much longer than one year, as it well should.

Prior to the 2000s, the electrical utilities had basically static and unchanging technology, which meant that utilities could use long-established price estimates when determining technologies.

No longer is that possible, solar, wind and storage are dropping so fast in costs that it can be hard to keep pace. A California utility recently tried to get bids for a new gas peaker plant, unaware that storage was now cost competitive, because they were using cost estimates that were only a few years old.

And the NextEra CEO, quoted in the article above I linked, said way back in 2015 that by 2020, no more gas peaker plants would be built.

This is a revolution, where costs are falling faster than even the most enthusiastic boosters were expecting.

If these are speculative then I would call them artificially numbers, artificial because they are based on predicted markets rather than real market dynamics.

I wonder though if it is safe to predict a continuous drop in panel prices. A few years ago Germany saw prices rise due to increased demand, demand fuels ironically by subsidies. And there is a good chance that the US administration might deliberately cripple the solar market, either by increasing costs or reducing demand (ie the proposed mandate to buy coal/nuclear energy first). Give that unpredictability, these low bids are more business strategy than a reflection of actual costs structures.

These aren't "predicted markets" this is the actual market itself. These are the real bids and contracts. It doesn't get more real than that.

If you think that these providers are going to default, well, then that's a bet you can make. But these are the people with skin in the game that are betting real, actual money and the future of their companies.

We have some absolutely awful leadership in this area that is trying to kneecap the future of our country

Indeed: this policy, like many others, just makes me think, "own goal."

The majority of people I know, would disagree. It just happens that "own goal" coincides with what I think is a good idea. Not to say that all the decisions are good enough to vote for, but these tariffs are a solid move imo.

Why do you think they're a solid move?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing your reasoning.

There's a bunch of different good results (along with the bad).

The first, from the Chinese side, is the demonstration that the US can and will impact the immediate Chinese economy. That coldwar tactic is on the table (while open warfare in the south sea is not). Take the tariffs off, move on to a tariff on toys tomorrow.

From the US side, the government has a tacit approval to bring up other relationship imbalances that have gone on for too long. The fact that my machines are attacked by Chinese IPs more often than any other locality (via casual IP lookups) makes me think that this is actually part of a greater response to various Chinese incursions into various arenas in the world (not the least of which is the US infrastructure).

Another good is in regard to the impact on the US manufacturing base. Dealing with the fact that costing in existing processes and materials (based on abroad cheap labor and materials) is not reliable, is an important step. This will force higher capital investment into experimental materials and processes for alternatives (maybe with other 3rd party countries). There will also be a boon to choice US companies that the federal government favor, through existing and new contracts where these tariffs will otherwise be abated. It's not going to kill every existing company, but it hurts a lot. This is a future-investment move. It's possible it's a misstep and we will never have anything better than steel and cheap plastics, but I doubt it.

There is the geo-political arena to consider. The US has been in a cold war with China since after WW2, same as we have with Russia. The moves with regard to North Korea are suspicious. North Korea has been the heel of China for some time. NK has had no way to bargain, with anyone, much less their greatest benefactor. Setting a stake against China then making overtures to NK allows NK (KimJong) to consider becoming a valuable Geopolitical figure and US partner in a critical area, surpassing south korea (for once). It just happened to coincide (I have a feeling Trump is ironically talented at speaking to KJ) and happened to influence the ultimate decision to place the tariffs at this time.

Can the US even manufacture panels? I was under the impression our infrastructure had almost completely gone away over the last 10 years with the rise of cheap Chinese panels. And would we even be able to produce them at a competitive price with the tariffs, anyways? Would we even want to? The margins are tiny, it's a commodity product. Highly doubtful.

I'm seriously baffled here as to who is supposed to benefit from this. The only possibility is some kind of misguided attempt at forestalling the draw down of fossil fuels, which is inevitable.

First solar in Toledo manufactures solar panels. Almost 100% of their output was sold to Germany because they were subsidizing them.

Counter to narrative, there is/was some US based panel production capacity, we do still make things here! We don't make as many things as in, say, Germany, but there is manufacturing.

The whole reason that these tariffs came in to effect was that some failed manufacturers brought the issue. My understanding is that the manufacturers failed not because it's impossible to do in the US, but simply because of poor management decisions or betting on the wrong technology.

The real question is whether the tariffs will be around long enough to incentivize any new manufacturing capacity in the US. They will almost certainly be slapped down by the WTO in a short amount of time, as previous tariffs like this have been. So by the time anybody could make more manufacturing capacity, it seems likely that the tariffs will no longer be around to support the facility. So new facilities must be planned on the basis of profitability without the tariffs.

Even in this environment, there is new production being planned. However, the jobs associated with this are dwarfed by the number of jobs related to installation of panels. So while this will certainly be a net negative to the US economy in the short term, without much opportunity to provide positive impact.

Basically, just a meaningless PR move by a politician. I don't think it will cause hugely detrimental effects either, it's just stupid.

Counter to narrative, there is/was some US based panel production capacity, we do still make things here!

True, except those operations are owned by foreign companies, right? Particularly... Germany and China.

I believe so. That may be due to several rounds of consolidation; it's a tough business and there's a lot of periods of oversupply, which brings down prices.

For perspective, the Obama Administration already imposed solar panel tariffs twice and directly propped up Solyndra and US solar investors in general - the ones who now want another tariff bailout.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy-environme...

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/261363-us-hits-...

I'm not sure how that adds any perspective to my comment, or relates to it. But because it's a common politically driven meme, I'd like to address it.

Obama doing something bad does not justify current bad actions. It does not make complaining about the current tariffs hypocritical. I would agree 100% with Jigar Shah's opinion about the prior tariffs:

>“Taxing solar trade undermines both the spirit and efficacy of pledges made by the U.S. and China to work together in the battle against global warming,” Jigar Shah, president of the Coalition for Affordable Solar Energy, said in a statement.

But those prior tariffs were not identical in their form. The Obama tariffs were on a single country, China, for specific actions. The current tariffs are almost worldwide, for no clear reason at all. They benefit few jobs, and the investors that benefit are not from the US. Obama's actions were less than ideal, but at least they made a tiny bit of sense.

> not because it's impossible to do in the US

The US manufacturers couldn't compete on cost because critical materials were either solely available or so low cost, from China, that it drove competition out of the material markets in the US. This is one of those, ask any manufacturer, rather than a guess. Then factor in labor costs and you ended up with yet-another-chinese-dominant market where improvements were done in China snowballing the situation to today.

Perhaps if you're trying to compete on bottom of the barrel costs, but that's only one segment of the market.

Panels themselves are only about a third in the cost; therefore it rarely makes sense to go with the cheapest panels. Higher quality, longer life span, higher cost panels tend to win out because higher efficiency means more energy per panel and those other costs are often per panel.

This is more extreme in the residential market where the panel costs are an even smaller fraction of the cost.

Make them cheap to mount. At least here in Europe that is the most limiting factor with regards to cost.

It's pretty hard for a privately-funded company to compete against dozens of state-sponsored companies that receive government funding for the sole purpose of driving out their foreign competitors.

Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere.

Keep in mind it's not just being used for transportation and heating it's being used for more or less everything. Your computer, your raincoat, your tires, your trashcan, all the products you buy at amazon, in hospital equipment, your furniture etc.

It's hard to find anything that is as flexible as fossil fuel, unfortunately.

https://www.openaccessgovernment.org/lets-honest-gas-oil-not...

>Fossil fuels aren't even close to going anywhere.

Completely agreed. We will be flying around in kerosene powered airliners, and burning natural gas for electricity for a long, long time to come. But that doesn't mean it won't draw down to a fraction of what it is today. Personal vehicle gasoline consumption, for example, will be almost nonexistent in 20 years.

Even if personal vehicle gasoline consumption fell to zero, it would only reduce overall fossil fuel use by about 25%.

(And that's assuming it wasn't simply shifted from gasoline ICEs to natural gas power plants.)

I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either.

>I can't conceive of anything that would reasonably replace diesel for outdoor heavy equipment, either.

Believe it. Heavy equipment is a prime candidate for electrification. Mining companies are already using electric dump trucks in production, and they are incredibly more efficient because of regen braking with the mass differential of unloading at the bottom of a hill [0]. Literally anything that isn't dependent on the energy density of hydrocarbons will be electrified in the next few decades. That leaves basically aircraft and spacecraft as consumers outside the petrochemical and energy industry.

[0] http://revolution-green.com/worlds-first-electric-dump-truck...

"Soon" is a relative term. This will change over the coming decades.

Fuels' primary advantage are their density of storage. But as the cheapness of renewables comes to dominate energy production--i.e. the cost of intermittent renewable will soon be cheaper than even just the fossil fuel cost of energy--we'll see price swings based on the variability of renewable production, and the mismatch between the time of supply and demand.

With electric cars, every home will have ~2-4 days worth of storage in their garage. Charging the cars will present one area of time-flexible demand, to suck up the variable production.

For the seasonal variability of renewable energy, it might make sense to store energy from the more productive season for use in the less productive season. However, synthetic fuels are quite inefficient, round trip, if you're making them from scratch, lets say 50% at best.

If the seasonal price swings are greater than 2x, then I think we'll see some synthetic fuels made as long term storage, as long as synthetic fuels can be made cheaply enough. See for example this other front page post for current best-case estimates:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257291

However, in the long term (50 years?), there's no room for fossil fuels. They will just be too expensive compared to renewable energy to make economic sense. Synthetic fuels, perhaps, but not fossil fuels.

In the long term solar is hardly interesting either. In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that.

It's not just a matter of the market and political will, there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind.

They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak.

I have yet to see any calculation based in realistic metrics (not just wishful thinking) that outphases oil. I hope for it as much as everyone else but I am not prepared to do it at any price.

> In fact if green is what you want, nuclear (or if we are lucky Fusion) is the way to go but the environmental organizations are for some reason worried about that.

> It's not just a matter of the market and political will,

That's absolutely untrue, nuclear is waaaaaaay too expensive and old-fashioned to compete in the modern world.

Take a few seconds to look at any of the attempts at construction in the Western world. Nuclear is super expensive, and not nearly scalable enough. In the US, Vogtle and VC Summer have been nuclear disasters, but economic disasters. They had a super-supportive regulatory environment and neighbors around the construction sites, but it's just not feasible to build at a reasonable cost.

Nuclear is such a terrible idea that there's no way to get private funding for it; it has to have huge amounts of government level backing for it to become even vaguely economic feasible. Look at the UK's attempts to sell their nuclear generation capacity, all of a sudden when they were writing financial documents they had to not lie, and they couldn't get anybody to buy them. And now the UK has the economic disaster of the new Hinkley construction.

There's a batch of small-moduler reactor (SMR) startups that may improve the cost and scalability of nuclear, but I'm extremely skeptical. Such SMRs have long been rejected as too costly, it's not at all clear what would make them competitive now. It may happen, but it's further out than the massive scale-back of fossil fuels.

> there are some fundamental limits on how much energy we can get from solar and wind.

These "fundamental" limits are not in the realm of possibility of limiting our current use.

>They are linear solutions to exponential problems so to speak.

I'm not sure what part could be exponential. Our energy use is nothing like exponential, and in developed countries it is increasingly decoupled from GDP and other exponential things. Most of our "energy" use is actually wasted energy due to the inherent inefficiency of thermal electricity generation, or, god forbid, the pathetic efficiency of combustion engines in vehicles.

We don't yet have applications for energy that could come close to any "fundamental limit" from solar. If we do, then perhaps fusion or something will be useful, but fusion is even more of a pipedream than trying to construct

Nuclear is the only form of energy of all those we know thats both. Green, reliable, scaleable. The fact that it countries shied away from it because of environmental organizations is the real catastrophe. But as usual the best solution doesn't always win.

Solar and wind would also be expensive if they hadn't been subsidized.

Nuclear has killed fewer people than coal, fossil fuel, wind and solar. Plus once built it last for a very very long time.

Perhaps you should take a few seconds to look at the actual data. There is nothing old-fashioned about nuclear especially not the new types of reactors and there is certainly no other form of energy besides fusion which can provide the amount of energy nuclear can.

So no nuclear is the idea you should support if you actually care about the environment. Solar is toxic to the environment and requires quite a lot to keep functioning wind is the same.

To get wind and solar to work consistently and reliably through some sort of grid system is going to be a project many many times bigger than nuclear and it's not going to be the increasing demand from the developing countries where more and more people get into the middle class.

So you are from my perspective completely wrong about your idea of solar and wind as being the future of energy for the world. They are not and will not be. They simply aren't reliable and scaleable enough sources fuell cells or not.

It doesn't matter how much I support nuclear, my "support" does absolutely nothing to make it economical or buildable.

It's all a fantasy. The only reason that nuclear gets built is so that a country can support their nuclear submarines/aircraft carriers.

Nuclear energy is not a realistic solution to anything, because building it is not realistic.

>Solar and wind would also be expensive if they hadn't been subsidized.

The entirety of nuclear has been subsidized as the technology has been created, just as solar and wind have.

What matters now is what can be built. Nuclear can not be built without spending 3x-5x what we'd spend for equivalent wind or solar. And that's ignoring the cases where billions of dollars have been spent and then completely abandoned.

Your doubt of solar and wind are at least 10 years out of date. As are your nuclear ideas, because they were the same things being said in 2008 during the "nuclear renaissance." It all proved to be completely false. Westinghouse was given a shot, and it continues to end up blowing up Westinghouse's parent company, Toshiba.

If you can not address the specifics of Westinghouse, Toshiba, VC Summer, Vogtle, or Hinckley, then you are just spreading outdated propaganda.

> Your computer, your raincoat, your tires, your trashcan, all the products you buy at amazon, in hospital equipment, your furniture etc.

All the more reason to stop _literally setting it on fire_ when avoidable.

Are you going to stop using any of these products?

Perhaps I've been insufficiently clear. Those products are essential and currently pretty much all of our chemical knowledge is based on fossil fuels. Plastics are a _big deal_ and we don't have a clear replacement for the source material--so let's minimize burning it.

I don't understand why people say fossil fuels are particularly required for plastics. Plastics can be made from renewable sources just as much as fuel. I used to have a mug that my employer gave me made of plant-based plastic.

Because everything, the whole logistical system is based around that and optimized for that. Think about it as an ecosystem. The flexibility of oil is second to none. The second you start to "pollute" (no pun intended) the ecosystem with other sources you are making it more complex and more expensive as you are suddenly introducing foreign materials that needs to be handled differently.

It's not as simple as many would like to believe.

Then it’s better to start as soon as possible. Oil is not the future, it’s the past. It’s finite and it’s running out. You can either learn to deal with alternatives or live without.

i gave an argument for why its not going away. You gave me a slogan.

Well, good luck with your dependence on an infinite supply of fossile fuel!

I am not relying on that. I didn't say it lasted forever I said it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

My point is that plastics can be synthesized from a variety of sources, just like fuel. I'm not saying it's trivial in either case to switch to renewable sources, I'm just saying that I don't see why we should ignore economics and reserve fossil petroleum for plastics.

You answered your own question. Again you need to provide a better alternative than oil currently is. There isn't any and so oil will not be going anywhere anytime soon.

Isn’t that besides the point? The applications you list are a very small fraction of the oil dig up.

And you could get those hydrocarbon from renewable sources. They just happen to be practically free when we’re extracting and burning such massive amounts of fossile oil/gas

Do you really want your power grid dependent on manufacturing by an increasingly hostile and authoritarian country? The tariffs were made based on national security reasons.

You are right. And to think I worked at a place that made silicon wafers in the 80s in Pennsylvania

The number of jobs involved in this scam is trivial either way. The point of solar power manufacturing is not to make up jobs for people to do; it is to convert our energy to a source that doesn't kill people. If our planet is really at a slight risk of danger, and if solar panels somewhat ameliorate that, then it is stupid to prize a few thousand jobs. Last month the economy created a net 233k jobs---in one month. The economy is $19 trillion and we are waging a PR war over $1B vs $2.5B.

Federal reserve and fiscal policy are 1e9 times as important to job creation as this tariff. Would it be bad for the economy if someone invented a machine to make solar panels cheaply without any labor at all? No. That would be good because we could have lots of solar panels and save the planet.

Important to remember these tariffs were not conceived of as a job creation scheme. They were created to produce a windfall for investors who bought the bonds of bankrupt US solar companies. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/jpmorgan-...

I think that, for the White House, the tariffs have an added benefit of quashing an industry that more and more competes with coal. For reasons of graft, an obnoxious "heartland" brand and some weird fetishization, this administration is deeply obsessed with coal---one of the worst industries in the country to work for, which kills countless people via pollution.

I think lost jobs are used as a big talking point because it resonates with the average person.

One of the primary arguments given by certain political figures as to why we need tariffs is that it will protect American jobs. So by showing that it costs more jobs than it protects, that can help the average person realize that tariffs do not protect jobs, at least not in all cases.

One day jobs will be a dirty word. If something creates jobs, then we don't want it. Something that creates work out of nowhere is a bit like nagging. Nobody wants that!

Here here! Let’s make it happen.

http://tlalexander.com/machine/

Does anyone smart think the Tariffs are good for the average person?

I thought thats just the talking heads for the plebs that watch daily news.

I have always understood this as crony capitalism until the economic collapses and they need to pull back these anti-capitalist measures.

As with most things, it depends. If a country isn't trading in good faith tariffs can be used to correct that, just like fines are used to encourage companies to follow regulations within a country.

Upon closer inspection, you may find that the definition 'good faith' tends to be incredibly politically self-serving.

Take aviation, for example. Do you think the United States exports airplanes built by 'trade in good faith'? Or is Boeing a company that is largely propped up by government largess? Or, if not, would you say that Boeing achieved market and technical dominance via government support in decades past? What about Silicon Valley? It only exists in California because of military contracts and very generous R&D funding for universities in the 70s and 80s.

Yet, similar behaviours on the part of other countries are considered 'not trading in good faith'.

A more direct example of a good faith violation is China putting a 25% tariff on American imported automobiles or the EU having a 10% tariff on them. Free trade doesn't exist in its purest form.

Btw I believe that drove the demand for luxury american cars up.

They are just trying to bootstrap their auto sector. China's a couple of decades late in development, so they need to do these kinds of things.

The United States has done the same thing, when it was behind in industrialization to the United Kingdom. Heavy tariffs on foreign goods, in order to prop up its own domestic sector.

Once they get their auto industry together, to the same level of quality as US manufacturers, they won't need that tariff.

I agree that its a negotiating piece. It might be bad economics, but maybe we need a bit of pain for everyone to play nice.

The irony about "saving the planet" here is that solar panels manufacturing plants in China have virtually no regulations, which allows them to skirt the normally heavy costs of toxic waste disposal. So in the process of making these planet saving devices, they've done all kinds of damage to the environment to begin with. There is a reason, after all, panels are cheaper to make in China.

also slave labor

Small nit to pick.

> The economy is $14 trillion

The US economy is about $19T, it was $14T about 10 years ago.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...

For perspective, the Obama Administration already imposed solar panel tariffs twice and funded Solyndra and US solar investors in general - who are all now in need of their bailout as you mention.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy-environme...

http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/261363-us-hits-...

There are two ways to look at this story.

You can take it at face value and you can wring your hands over what this story apparently is trying to convey.

Or you can understand the way companies and politics and the media manipulates perception to get outcomes they want.

On the second point, let's read between the lines.

So 2.5 billion is "canceled or frozen". Okay, what percentage is canceled and what percentage is frozen? How many of these projects were actually going to happen anyway?

I have been a part of numerous attempts to manipulate public opinion by claiming that projects were canceled that never were going to happen anyway or making a big show of "freezing" things, when everybody knows the project is going to go through eventually.

In many cases "freezing" is indistinguishable from "we can't do anything right now and we are just waiting to get everything rolling".

I mean, I used to be involved with a company that made up a whole PR campaign about switching to another company for a key contract just as a negotiating tactic, when internally we knew that we weren't going anywhere. This campaign came complete with actual (truthy) quotes from real engineers at the company saying we were considering switching vendors. Of course it wasn't a lie, because we did have a five minute conversation internally about how we were thinking about switching companies, but the intention was never serious.

I am aware of a venture just several weeks ago that fed the media completely manufactured narratives, and these narratives were dutifully swallowed uncritically and subsequently disseminated as fact. In this case, the company needed justification for doing something, so it called up a "friend" and had the friend issue a press release that a certain thing was getting "canceled". We all know internally that it's bullshit and eventually this thing will happen.

So maybe everything here is really true, and may be $2.5 billion of contracts aren't going to happen. Or maybe this is the solar industry playing politics and attempting to create a narrative and pressure the administration to lift the tariffs.

So, I would ask people to re-examine their confirmation bias and/or stop being so credulous.

Please offer some facts or evidence to clarify it then? All you are offering is an opinion.

An opinion is "a view or judgement about something not necessarily based on facts or knowledge". What he offered is mostly not an opinion in that it's mostly him relating his personal experiences on this topic; which probably, if we are to give him the benefit the doubt, are factual events that actually happened.

I disagree. To me, it appears as mostly opinion with personal anecdotes presented as evidence.

The opinion esentially boils down to "Don't trust this story or the media in general, only credulous individuals would believe what this story is saying, if you read between the lines you will come to the same conclusion that I did, after all, my personal experiences back up my opinion that this story is bullshit"

I am willing to put my money where my mouth is and take a bet saying that in exactly one year, a significant number of these $2.5 billion of contracts will have miraculously found a way to happen.

I don't necessarily think you're wrong, I am more addressing your rhetoric that suggests your informed opinion invalidates the story, especially because the anecdotes you present are examples of companies deliberately lying to the media for their own personal gain. Yet the problem is the media...

FTA: President Donald Trump’s tariff on imported solar panels has led U.S. renewable energy companies to cancel or freeze investments of more than $2.5 billion in large installation projects, along with thousands of jobs, the developers told Reuters.

So are the developers lying? Maybe... but it's still totally legitimate to report that this claim was made. Some things you just have to take at face value because you're not privy to secret boardroom meetings where plans to deceive the public for profit are conceived.

Here is another article from another publication about a different tariff story.

http://thehill.com/policy/finance/391185-three-arkansas-comp...

Based on the reasoning you presented in your OP (pre-edit), I should just assume that they're lying and are really just appealing to Trump's ego in order to maximize profits. Right?

In either case the media can't really know the truth so they just report it and maybe spin the story to one side based on readership.

Well, I guess you can take that position.

I take the position that what the media reports isn't true, or at least it's some sort of propaganda and I look for who's benefiting from the information, unless I see evidence to the contrary.

Regarding the news article you linked, it looks to me like those three companies are indeed running a PR campaign to pressure the administration to give them a deal.

The media is reporting the claim; to reflexively disbelieve the claim because the media is reporting it does not follow logically. Somehow I doubt you'd be bashing the media in your comment if the story delivered propaganda (your words) that supported a position that you agree with.

You are creating a ridiculous straw man. He didn't claim the media is a bunch of liars. The media can't dig into the details and verify every detail of every press release. If a company claims contracts are frozen or canceled there is no way for the media to check whether the projects would happen at all.

The "personal anecdotes" are a series of observations about contracts that are publicly reported combined with an understanding of how companies are incentivized to report contracts. If you don't believe him or find him very credible you don't need to take his word for it, he's just some random guy on the internet whose credibility can't be independently established.

On the other hand, you can undercut his argument by providing evidence that companies always report contracts in an evenhanded way. Of course, they don't thats just PR 101.

> You are creating a ridiculous straw man... The media can't dig into the details and verify every detail of every press release. If a company claims contracts are frozen or canceled there is no way for the media to check whether the projects would happen at all.

Where is the strawman? What you've stated here is literally my argument, that is, it's not the media's fault that billion dollar titans of industry lie to the media for profit, especially because the media lacks the necessary access to verify the claims, so all they can do is report the claim as stated (which is what they did)... or are you suggesting they just never report on industry claims?

> He didn't claim the media is a bunch of liars.

He actually did make that claim farther down this thread, however, I never accused him of suggesting that, all I said was that he is suggesting we "don't trust this story or the media in general". I don't see how you can read anything else other than that out of my comment, so I would appreciate it if you would point out the part of my comment claiming he said that the media is bunch of liars.

> The "personal anecdotes" are a series of observations about contracts that are publicly reported combined with an understanding of how companies are incentivized to report contracts.

His comments are literally unverifiable personal stories from his own experiences, there is no way around it. He could have at least said "companies have been known to do x" and then shown evidence of x (though his own argument precludes his ability to use any media sources as evidence of x), then we could examine the particular case he presented and determine if the facts of that case align with the opinion he is presenting. As as of now we're just taking his word for it.

> If you don't believe him or find him very credible you don't need to take his word for it, he's just some random guy on the internet whose credibility can't be independently established.

... OK? Once again, you're just repeating my own reasoning back to me, he's a random person on the internet spitting out anecdotes to bolster his opinion, not someone presenting evidence that can be independently examined without trusting his stories.

> On the other hand, you can undercut his argument by providing evidence that companies always report contracts in an evenhanded way

First of all, it is impossible to demonstrate proof that "companies always x" and it is disingenuous to ask for such evidence because we don't rely on "always"-level confidence for proof of anything. Further, I am not trying to "undercut his argument" at all, I am critiquing the flawed reasoning that his personal anecdotes are a legitimate reason to disregard this particular story and the media in general.

>> it's not the media's fault that billion dollar titans of industry lie to the media for profit, especially because the media lacks the necessary access to verify the claims, so all they can do is report the claim as stated (which is what they did)

I fail to see the relevance of assigning blame here. If you grant what he suggests then you can apportion blame in a variety of plausible ways.

>>... or are you suggesting they just never report on industry claims?

I'm not sure there is any reasonable solution here. Industry claims, especially projections, can be quite dubious at times. It's difficult to explain why when you are trying to appeal to a wide audience, however. The media just isn't in a good position to verify or discredit claims like that.

>> Where is the strawman? What you've stated here is literally my argument, that is, it's not the media's fault that billion dollar titans of industry lie to the media for profit, especially because the media lacks the necessary access to verify the claims, so all they can do is report the claim as stated (which is what they did)... or are you suggesting they just never report on industry claims?

You just said his argument was "don't trust this story or the media in general." His claim was that in certain circumstances the surface implication of the media's reporting of PR numbers is very misleading. That's it. It's quite a simple statement that in no way implies what you have repeatedly suggested he claims.

>> He actually did make that claim farther down this thread, however, I never accused him of suggesting that, all I said was that he is suggesting we "don't trust this story or the media in general".

I'll take your word for it; he must have deleted it or it is hidden although I can't find it on the thread. I would be surprised if he did that because it is quite a ridiculous statement that would expose him to ridicule and is logically unnecessary for his argument.

Need to answer "Okay, what percentage is canceled and what percentage is frozen?" and "How many of these projects were actually going to happen anyway?" first, which requires fortune telling. It makes no sense to ask for facts when speculating on speculation.

I'm unsure what reading between the lines does here. Does the revelation that only some of cancelations is due to tariffs change the story beyond shifting a number from X to Y?

Yes, of course.

If it turns out that the number of contracts canceled is much less, then it changes the calculations completely.

If it turns out that this story is completely bogus and the "cancelled" contracts were already going to be canceled before the tariffs and the delayed contracts end up going through, then that means there was actually no effect.

Using anecdotes to speculate on the validity of any given work of journalism is just substituting media bias for personal bias.

I don't know how many contracts were cancelled, so I would have to consider the range of values between "the story is sensationalism" to "the story is accurate in its essence", and at this point I'm no better off than when I started.

Well, that's my point.

This type of analyses on the media's output needs to be taught in school.

The type that offers no facts and gives anecdotal evidence to support the opinion?

No questions like

> Okay, what percentage is canceled and what percentage is frozen? How many of these projects were actually going to happen anyway?

which were informed by the poster's past experience with public interaction through the media. I'd argue that questions are rarely opinions.

Why didn't the journalist at least cite the source of the informatoin? What if the survey that provided the data gave more details about why the projects were actually canceled/frozen? Should it really be up to the media to decide for me how to interpret the data?

> Why didn't the journalist at least cite the source of the informatoin?

In the article, they cite enough statements made by specific people at specific organizations to support the headline - it's not peer-reviewed academic research, sure, but it's not like they are just making stuff up either.

>> In the article, they cite enough statements made by specific people at specific organizations to support the headline - it's not peer-reviewed academic research, sure, but it's not like they are just making stuff up either.

The 'support' is that the PR department of the company said it. You think corporations always give you unbiased information? They are strongly incentivized, as the comment pointed out, to claim that contracts may be canceled due to reason X when the reality is far more complex. The cost for claiming this is so incredibly low that there is no reason not to do it.

> Why didn't the journalist at least cite the source of the informatoin?

The source is cited in literally the first sentence.

"President Donald Trump’s tariff on imported solar panels has led U.S. renewable energy companies to cancel or freeze investments of more than $2.5 billion in large installation projects, along with thousands of jobs, the developers told Reuters."

I'm not sure if you read this article or are just responding to comments/the title, but this article is just reporting a few statements from solar developers and isn't trying to tell you how to decide to interpret anything. They wrote the total dollar amount of frozen/cancelled investments and quotes solar developers. This is Reuters, it's a pretty boring neutral article.

The article is reporting on an unspecified question asked of unspecified developers. It's another version of "people are saying..." which Fox News popularized. It's just not satisfying without some other detail - like what question they asked or who they talked to.

Edit: read the article to this point [0] which I had assumed was the end to see why I said what I said.

[0]: https://i.imgur.com/9uI6zbt.png

It's now abundantly clear you didn't even attempt to read this article. Paragraph after paragraph listing developers and direct quotes from some of them:

To list a few: Pine Gate Renewables, GTM Research, SunPower Corp, Cypress Creek Renewables LLC, the list goes on.

This isn't a Q&A (and most news isn't). You're not going to get specific questions asked to specific people. Some people like to remain anonymous. Comparing this to fox news "people are saying..." is ridiculous. I don't even have an opinion about this article but not reading an article at all and making pointless commentary about it in the comments irks me.

https://i.imgur.com/9uI6zbt.png

This is where I assumed the article ended. It's just bad presentation, not bad journalism.

Pointless whitespace that makes it seem like the article is over irks me.

It isn't pointless whitespace. There is an iframe there that isn't probably loading

Code: https://imgur.com/vKskTnz

Iframe Contents: https://imgur.com/x0WqzmI

Fascinating to compare this with a recent thread on holding journalists to account for veracity and integrity of their stories.

It's at least supported by my own personal experience, which inclines me to believe the narrative. My wife & I were considering installing solar on our residence. The payoff was marginal, but it was there. We were going to save for a year, and begin after prices had fallen a little further.

Then, the tariff came up, and the cost/reward equation went up in smoke.

Anecdata of course, but part of why I'm inclined to believe. Solar appears to be right at a tipping point where it makes solid financial sense even if you don't care about saving the environment- but it's marginal, enough that a tariff could easily wipe out the benefit. (Which, the cynical side of me says, is exactly what the administration was aiming for)

Which is why I said confirmation bias.

Sometimes your confirmation bias is correct; sometimes it isn't.

Just a day after this article:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/researchers-predict-...

It's almost as if they want an economic catastrophe, as long as it happens when the other guys are in office.

There seems to be no real sound logic to the current admin's economic decisions. I am not considering short term political moves as logical or helpful

Then put your money where your mouth is and short the market, because your opinion about the direction of the economy is not supported by either facts or public opinion. Perfect opportunity for you to get rich.

I am not shorting the market, that doesn't make sense for my situation, but I am betting against it. Rather than buy shares of stock-based funds, which I consider to be overvalued, I stopped adding cash to my IRA and started sending the money to the mortgage company instead. That way I get a guaranteed 3.75% return.

3.75% may be small compared to the long-term returns of the market, but it's awfully attractive compared to a net negative return on securities that lose value over the next few years.

Me too... I sold all my stocks. In the process of deciding what to do with my money to safeguard it against a Trump recession.

It hurts to watch the market continue to climb, but I am confident Trump's short-sighted actions will cause pain.

Putting my money where my mouth is, as they say.

There’s no real overarching strategy. It’s a mixed bag of fringe denizens exploiting an opportunity, at long last, to roll their hobbyhorses into the game under the aegis of performative cruelty.

Somewhat curious as the media was not as dramatic when the EU did solarimport tariffs: http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-13-501_en.htm

But then, the EU also imposed import tariffs on steel.

The USA has solar panel production companies, so would be interesting why they are not being utilised more, as that is what import tariffs are for - to protect local industry from cheap imports.

The US imposed tariffs on Chinese and Taiwanese solar panels as well in 2014.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy-environme...

Prior to 1914 and for most of the history of the US the bulk of Federal government revenue was tariffs.

Here in Germany, I remember quite a articles about the EU tariffs, arguments following similar lines as here: "dumping prices kill local manufacturers, tariffs compensated and/or forced companies to adjust pricing on one side" vs "local companies still in bad shape or dead, less business for installers, less build-out of solar happened". Especially the last renewal was fairly controversial.

I'm surprised they didn't mention China's recent announcement to slash its subsidies for deploying solar at home.

"Bloomberg New Energy Finance expects expects module prices to drop 34 percent this year and a further 10 percent to 15 percent in 2019 after China cut financial support to developers and halted approval for new projects in June."

The estimate of 34% would make up for the tariff.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-07/china-s-n...

Its interesting that the USA is strategically trying to go back to being the manufacturing country and China is strategically trying to become the innovation country. Its like China and the USA want to swap places.

China is probably realizing that their free cut of others IP is about to run out. If they cant steal out IP, and we can't exploit their labor, both countries will have to get better. I'm thinking this will boost both countries at the same time by growing the respective lagging economy (innovation or manufacturing)

> Its interesting that the USA is strategically trying to go back to being the manufacturing country and China is strategically trying to become the innovation country. Its like China and the USA want to swap places.

Or the US is trying to reduce its dependence on China just like China is trying to reduce its dependence on the US.

IMHO, it's not good for a country to be all manufacturing or all "innovation" and "services." It was a mistake for the US to let its manufacturing sector wither to the degree it did. It's better to strike a balance, especially when your trading partners have drastic political and ideological differences and thus cannot be considered reliable.

>House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.) said finalizing the tariffs was another example of Obama's resolve.

>"Today's decision by the President to impose tough tariffs on Chinese solar imports is just the latest step by the Obama Administration to get tough on foreign companies who don't play by the rules," Hoyer said in a statement. "I applaud his move, which will help American manufacturers compete here at home and overseas."

2012: http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/261363-us-hits-...

2014: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/17/business/energy-environme...

There's a pattern here of pervasive industry lobbying going back to Solyndra, for anyone claiming this is unusual.

Before Trump's tariffs were even a twinkle in his advisors' eyes we (where "we" == some of we domestic OEMs developing new solar power products) were facing a more difficult market due to federal tax credit phase outs. Would have been OK but for the damned tariffs and erratic leadership scared the hell out of the money people who decided the company was better off shelving its solar interactive inverter product line - and we were in the sub 10 cent/kw pricing - in favor of using corporate $$$$ for financial engineering (acquisitions) and distributions to owners.

IMO the root cause of lots of these failures is the absence of consistent, thoughtful policies, and leaders.

According to FRED there seems to be a glut of coal plants https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CAPUTLG2211S .

Side point, I was under the impression that Chrome was going to stop videos from auto playing but videos on Reuters still play by default. Any ideas why? Thanks.

Chrome comes with a whitelist; it's possible that Reuters is in it.

They introduced that in one update and then removed it in the next, shelving it until October I believe.

Muted autoplay is always allowed. Working around these changes for one of our products right now.

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-p...

Chrome has never truly blocked autoplay. In some cases it will be blocked, in others it'll just be muted. If you want true autoplay blocking use Firefox.

>Those investments were driven by U.S. tax incentives and the falling costs of imported panels, mostly from China, which together made solar power competitive with natural gas and coal.

Why not manufacture the panels in the US? It would create jobs and save the environmental impact of shipping billions of dollars of panels across the pacific- freight ships are brutal when it comes to emissions.

Because those costs are externalities that aren't properly factored into the cost of panels anywhere. The same is true for pretty much any product with an environmental impact in either it's creation or transport to market. The few places it does get factored in and regulated are places like fishing where the entire industry nearly crashed because of overfishing. Hopefully the same doesn't have to be true before other environmental externalities like shipping pollution get regulated properly.

US labor is much more expensive

Does the US have the raw materials? Shipping them in prior to manufacture might be even worse in terms of environmental impact (assuming some material is wasted during manufacture).

You get what you vote for... or at least what your Constitution interprets the vote as being for.

This is excellent, we need innovation in the US solar panel supply chain. Energy independence is tantamount with security.

> we need innovation in the US solar panel supply chain.

Completely agree but reducing competition could backfire and create less innovation (due to less incentive to compete / innovate) than more.

> Energy independence is tantamount with security.

This only helps if you are talking non-renewable energy. A country can stop their oil shipments, they have leverage there. They can't typically take away solar panels.

Now one could say that they can take away the supply of new panels and slow US adoption of renewables. But isn't that exactly what the President is doing here? It's like saying I might be shot at some point so I might as well shoot myself in the foot now.

"excellent" isn't the adjective I'd use to describe a loss of $2.5B in investment. The effect is less energy diversity, not more.

The United States is now a massive oil exporter, most of the news stories you read about pipelines or other new facilities involve getting this oil out of the country and selling it.

"Energy independence" is one of those buzzphrases from another era that doesn't really make sense anymore, insofar as it ever made sense. The idea that oil or electrical capacity is special and shouldn't be traded or should be traded differently than anything else because "security" is utter nonsense and has been used to justify lots of bad things.

If you actually wanted "energy independence" you'd stop allowing oil companies to export or otherwise nationalize the energy industry, which is probably not going to happen.

Meanwhile, California is requiring solar panels on all new housing starting in 2020. These two things are going to make housing even more expensive. I guess Trump doesn’t mind screwing California a little bit more.

No, solar on single family homes makes them less expensive. It's a cash flow positive move, and if it wasn't, the body that enacted that would not have been allowed to enact the regulation.

You may end up in the black in 10 years, or something, but solar will undoubtedly make the purchase price higher. This is not what we need in California at all. Moreover, the rule applies to many apartment buildings and condos as well.

$10-20k is very little a 30 year mortgage. If you're buying an expensive house than that then you can definitely afford the baseline cost of solar panels. If you live in an area with high housing prices and can't afford to buy then you're renting, and the costs of solar installed on multifamily is shared across all tenants. The cost of solar panel production and installation will drop as processes become more efficient, and solar panel production costs are (were?) being halved every year or two so the $10-20k price tag will continue dropping despite tariffs.

Private solar energy will also reduce costs of maintaining a grid, reduce odds of widespread power failure, and reduce costs of environmental externalities of other forms of energy production. California is also pushing hard for electric vehicles. Solar powered electric vehicles reduce reliance on oil production and imports. I don't live in CA but it seems to me they're playing the long game by reducing government ownership/operation of energy systems while reducing the costs of energy for all Californians to a low equilibrium state that reflects the cost of solar panels, which will drop over time. I wish Texas were more interested in these kinds of programs rather than bathroom legislation.

What if I’d rather have the $20k?

Buy a cheaper house

>>Private solar energy will also reduce costs of maintaining a grid, reduce odds of widespread power failure

You have claimed this multiple times in this thread, but I'll need a citation to believe this. How, exactly, will residential solar make maintaining the grid cheaper? The houses are still tied in to the local utility, so unless you are trying to claim that what causes maintenance costs is literally the amount of power flowing through the wire and not weather/age then I don't believe this for a second.

Edit:typo

The above is my only post in this thread as of writing this comment. If everyone can produce their own energy, then you don't need to extend a grid and can reduce its operations over time. Right now energy is going from renewable sources into the grid, but eventually it will be a mesh network of energy distribution among neighbors/communities. Don't ask me how we get to that point economically because I don't know - I'm just wearing my systems engineering hat :)

Sorry, confused you w/ someone else. Question though:without a utility company, who is going to pay to maintain that network? We already have an existing mesh network of multiple power generators w/ the associated distribution systems. My father's house is off-grid solar, mostly due to the $18k required to run ~1 mile of overhead line. Currently these costs are distributed over a large # of customers, and a large interconnected grid is required for the plan of using EV batteries as distributed storage.

I imagine private companies will maintain connections between properties, and property owners will maintain the panels. Not so different from hiring a plumber or electrician. The incentive to network maintainers is the opportunity to sell off excess energy to other homes, businesses, schools, and maybe even other states. The incentive to home owners is that they'd take profit on excess energy sold by the network maintainers. Or maybe maintainers would retain the profit but maintain the privately owned solar panels at no or low cost. Or community groups could band together to create a mesh net like some municipalities are doing for internet. There are many proven business models that would apply here.

>>$10-20k is very little a 30 year mortgage. If you're buying an expensive house than that then you can definitely afford the baseline cost of solar panels. If you live in an area with high housing prices and can't afford to buy then you're renting, and the costs of solar installed on multifamily is shared across all tenants. The cost of solar panel production and installation will drop as processes become more efficient, and solar panel production costs are (were?) being halved every year or two so the $10-20k price tag will continue dropping despite tariffs.

That statement doesn't make sense. You have to compare the net present value of an upfront investment with the electricity savings over time. If you amortize that amount over 30 years it doesn't change the fact you made the upfront payment, you just pay the bank extra money (interest) for the privilege of differing payment.

>>Private solar energy will also reduce costs of maintaining a grid, reduce odds of widespread power failure, and reduce costs of environmental externalities of other forms of energy production. California is also pushing hard for electric vehicles. Solar powered electric vehicles reduce reliance on oil production and imports. I don't live in CA but it seems to me they're playing the long game by reducing government ownership/operation of energy systems while reducing the costs of energy for all Californians to a low equilibrium state that reflects the cost of solar panels, which will drop over time. I wish Texas were more interested in these kinds of programs rather than bathroom legislation.

None of that supports the claim that it is a worthwhile investment to install solar panels on homes. It doesn't follow logically at all. Externalities are the exact reason regulations exist. If you want to argue that the cost is worthwhile for society do it, but none of that has anything to do with the price to a homeowner of installing solar panels.

The upfront investment on a mortgage is the down payment, which can be as high or low as you want these days. Buying a house for $310k vs $300k works out to ~$100/month going from on a 30 year fixed-rate mortgage, $10k down (depending on interest rates). About $30k difference on total loan payments, or $1k/year, which at least for me in Texas is at the low end of much I pay for energy anyway. Plus you're not paying for residential energy (system maintenance aside), and maybe not gas if you're using an electric vehicle. You're not thinking about fluctuations in oil prices either, which will certainly increase over the next 30 years.

The societal benefit is a separate bonus, as you stated, but not one to ignore.

This will absolutely increase the already high cost of homes. Even f its "eventually" cash flow positive, there are much better things one can do with money than "invest" in solar panels

It's cash flow positive from day 1. Your mortgage increases by $20/month, and utilities decrease by $40/month, or whatever.

This is why there are companies willing to lease your roof space to install residential solar.

So even without interest, that's a 7200 cost that will take 180 months to get back (15 years). And this is also assuming there is zero maintenance and you will never need to replace the panels. I'd rather not be forced into this "investment"

Where did you get those numbers? I was under the impression that each $10k on a 30 year loan was roughly $70 / month, depending on your interest rates and property taxes.

If $40 / month is what you can expect from electricity savings, it's an absolutely awful investment.

I just made them up, off the cuff, which is what I meant to imply by "whatever."

The average estimated numbers are $80 of savings for $40 of finance cost:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/releases/2018_releases/2018-05-09_b...

If you consider it an "awful investment" then you simply not make the investment, let a solar company make the investment and do it through a lease instead, with zero upfront cost:

http://www.residentialsolar101.org/solar-lease

In any case it's absolutely clear that this move decreases the cost of a new house after 2020.

By mandating solar you reduce the value of the power generated with each new home. The ROI will continue to decline until it's near zero.

That's only if there's fixed demand. The population is growing, each home needs new supply that wasn't necessarily there before.

The big thing is time-shifting the generated energy; in the spring there's already curtailment of utility-scale installs of solar.

With appropriate time-of-use rates on new installs, keeping older sites grandfathered in, combined with dramatically falling costs of home storage, the market will solve this nicely.

>> No, solar on single family homes makes them less expensive.

Then why in the world would they have to regulate it?

>> the body that enacted that would not have been allowed to enact the regulation

That 100% wrong legally. No one ever has been able to avoid regulation by claiming that the regulation imposes a net cost. That's the entire point of a regulation, to shift behavior in the absence of direct economic incentives.

In reality, this regulation is a tradeoff between higher net costs for new home builders and the need to reduce carbon emissions.

You don't understand, the body that enacts these regulations enacts them on the basis of cost savings. It's the California Electricity Commission:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/efficiency/savings.html

There is no net new cost, overall, this is all win, and if it were not, the standards would not be allowed to be set. In particular, on average, the CEC found $80 of savings on $40 of finance cost:

http://www.energy.ca.gov/releases/2018_releases/2018-05-09_b...

Now, you seem to be implicitly assuming that if this cost savings were true, it would already be done by builders and consumers. However, human behavior is sticky. Even though this is a good idea now, it takes people a long time to realize that.

Witness all the people in this thread that seem to doubt it's not a cost saving measure. Even taking a small peak at the cost of solar should reveal how much of a cost saving measure solar is in California. Even residential, which has high labor costs, and where 30% of the cost of an install goes to customer acquisition costs. For new large builds, that customer acquisition cost goes away, so it becomes an even better deal. And you've already got people on roofs, building them, so it becomes yet an even better idea.

California screwed itself over with such a stupid mandate.

I agree, but Trump just compounded the matter with this stupid game he’s playing. I am not conflating the issues here: both CA and the Trump administration have pushed me farther away from being a California homeowner.

Maybe. But my primary objection to this is that it will shift the cost burden of the legacy transmission infrastructure onto the poor.

Wouldn't correcting the large trade deficit between China and the US result in a net job increase in the long run?

It would take several years but we can build factories in rural parts of the US(you know, where people voted for Trump) or even in Mexico.

It will never happen. There will always be some lower labor cost region where manufacturing jobs can be sent, and there will always be some loophole which corporations can use to get around restrictions.

Yeah but there's a trade off with that. I'd imagine labor isn't as cheap as it used be(especially in China).

> It will never happen. There will always be some lower labor cost region where manufacturing jobs can be sent, and there will always be some loophole which corporations can use to get around restrictions.

It will have to happen. IIRC, the US has trade deficits with pretty much every country it trades with. At some point, those places are going to get tired of trading real goods for IOUs and IP, especially once there are competing providers of IOUs and IP.

Those other countries have developing economies and populations. It won't be long before the other large countries stop seeing the US as significant -- they'll be trading with each other where appropriate.

Isolationist policies result in the obvious: isolation.

> Those other countries have developing economies and populations. It won't be long before the other large countries stop seeing the US as significant -- they'll be trading with each other where appropriate.

Which is why the US needs to redevelop its economy to be able to produce more things that those countries might actually want to buy besides agricultural products. The IOU-based trade-deficit policy isn't going to cut it long term.

From Kansas. From first hand experience people don't want to work in those jobs. Work at a printing company and we have had several open press operator positions for a year or so that start at $25 and get up to ~$35 over time and pay 100% of you HC premium, all you have to be is mechanically inclined and competent. Zero applicants. People don't think these jobs are resilient (we focus on small orders than ship in 2-3 days so we have to be stateside) or are not willing to work. I've suggested either recruit straight out of HS and offer some level of tuition reimbursement at the local CC or go immigrant or non-violent offenders out of the county jail. We've also seen some food processing plants derailed [1] over how it would impact the community [2][3] and xenophobia.

[1] http://www.cjonline.com/news/business/local/2017-11-20/tyson...

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kansas-town-rejects-tyson-chick...

[3] https://www.npr.org/2018/03/19/595018875/somali-immigrants-h...

You got 1 example of an empty job, where there's something else might be going on, while there are whole industries being phased out.

Yes anecdotal for my press operator job. It's not the only open one we have. Also throwing in the chicken processing plant. I've read countless other articles though basically saying the same thing about these production/manual labor jobs that require little formal education but a decent amount of on the job training.

It would take several years but we can build factories in rural parts of the US(you know, where people voted for Trump) or even in Mexico.

The section 201 solar tariffs apply to crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules made in Mexico as well as in China. And to those made in Malaysia, the Philippines, Japan, Singapore, Germany, South Korea, Canada... every country but the USA. This aspect has been under-reported outside of solar industry outlets. "Countering subsidized exports from China" is often tossed into mainstream news about this issue but the tariffs are curbing imports from everywhere. It seems crazy to me, and reminds me of the crazy steel and aluminum tariffs that have recently been imposed even on US allies.

There's no fighting the future, regardless of whether this administration likes to bury its head in the sand.

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