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socrates1998

The problem with this idea that we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate.

Solar power doesn't pollute and I would argue that all other forms of power that do pollute aren't taxed nearly enough for it, with coal being the most obvious example.

Coal power sends an insane amount of carbon into the atmosphere. If we properly carbon-taxed coal, it would go out of business tomorrow. And that doesn't even get into the environmental destruction that comes from strip mining.

Strip mining is when coal companies buy a whole fucking mountain and then destroy it piece by piece to remove the coal. How the fuck is that not good for the environment and our society after the coal is gone?

So, solar power really is a lot of cheaper than coal when you consider all the negative externalities that it brings.

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Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though, it had to go through several iterations which required significant investment capital. This is usually where government agencies like DOE leverage their capital investment programs because private business aren't interested in paying for the R&D to solve those kinds of big problems without a guaranteed success.

Solar is only becoming cheaper today because of the research and capital that was put into developing the technology, not because it's inherently cleaner than coal. To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option. And if the government is motivated to migrate businesses off of dirty energy resources, it also has a motivation to help develop alternatives that the market will accept.

Solyndra[0] was one example of a company that received government support to develop solar technology and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solyndra

I'm not sure your point in bringing up Solyndra; with that notable exception, the fed's investments in renewables turned a decent profit. It's actually a problem, in hindsight: the program was supposed to take risks on innovative ideas and companies that would be difficult to find via traditional channels, but Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.

Yeah, I meant to add the caveat that it was one of the most publicly notable government energy investments for the simple fact that it ended up in scandal, since many aren't even aware that the government invests in companies like this. I wasn't trying to criticize the initiative.

> Solyndra had such a chilling effect that the DOE stopped taking those risks.

It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.

> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.

Definitely! Sorry if I came across as defensive, I'm just used to people using Solyndra to criticize the whole program. On the whole, the DOE made a big impact. It's just disappointing that one bad actor reduced that impact by turning into a political hot potato.

Not at all! Nothing to apologize for, I remember when that whole situation blew up very well. And I completely agree with you.

Was it even bad behavior? I recall that there were allegations at the time that Chinese business were dumping solar panels onto the market and that meant Solyndra couldn’t compete. Though I’ve also found some news sources saying that the high prices for polysilicon caused a bunch of players to enter the market to produce it, causing prices of poly silicon to crash and Solyndra couldn’t compete. Either way it seems to be bad luck unless the CEO and board knew those were huge risks and intentionally downplayed them.

Edit: It just seems unclear to be what the supposed fraud was.

> It's frustrating to see that a private company's bad behavior wound up being a stain for the government like this.

Do not be confused into thinking there was no government collusion. Not only was solyndra a cesspool of revolving door players, it definitely knew how to play the government contracting game. I used to deliver food for ill low income housing clients and on one complex I visited saw old solyndra tube on top of the building. Someone had to look at this project and see it as a cost plus opportunity for an unrelated and unnecessary product; and now that housing block is saddled with unsupported infrastructure. Who is going to pay to remove those solyndra panels and put some other solar system up there?

> To your point, based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option.

Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions. That's a non-negligible externality which your market needs to price correctly. Not doing so is in effect subsidising coal. There is nothing "pure" about this, quite to the contrary. And this has been known for decades.

It's 2021 now. We don't live in 1890 anymore.

>Oh please. Based "purely on market forces" can't exclude carbon emissions.

Huh? A bunch of people with no altruistic tendencies, and who are incapable of coordinating through any means but pricing, will not stop overfishing or carbon emissions. I don't get this often repeated thing about how not taxing carbon is subsidizing it, or how cap-and-trade is indistinguishable from naturally occurring markets. Both of those things are clearly artificial constructs built on top of the naturally-forming market. It's like many people are trying to use a perfect society as the zero-mark which all deltas and relative measures are measured from, while the state of nature (and the absence of a policy) is the obvious zero-mark to use.

No. Carbon emissions are hurting everybody on this planet. Even if you ignore plants, funghi and animals, then there are still a few billiom humans around that are participating in your market and get damaged by emissions. A fair market needs to contain provisions for compensation of this damage. Just because you can't see it right away does not mean it does not exist.

Compare it with sewer systems in a city. Many businesses would be much more profitable if they could dump their crap straight onto the street. Municipal cleaning services would need to clean up and everybody pays them. So they'd be subsidised though this. We don't accept this, we have rules against it since it's not fair. They have to pay their share, and excessive generation of crap needs to pay accordingly.

We don't accept this with crap on the street, and we should not accept it with crap in the atmosphere either. It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.

>It's the exact opposite of a free market. It's misuse of a common resource.

Why can't free markets result in the misuse of common resources? I feel like some are trying to square a circle here. Free markets aren't axiomatically the definition of good, and it's okay for something good to not be a result of them. There are these things known as "market failures," where unattended economic activity will lead to people's goals not being achieved. Overfishing and carbon emissions are market failures; far from being the opposite of a free market, they are well-recognized consequences.

Ok sure. That's like saying time dilation is a physics failure in newtonian physics. Technically correct, and entirely unhelpful to solve the problem.

The problem here being that writing "based purely on the market forces (i.e. excluding carbon taxes) coal is still a very viable option." suggests that since we all want free markets we'll need to accept this. No we don't.

We also don't say "well purely on human nature forces we'll have a few alpha males who keep a harem of women and try to kill all competition that's not submissive". Technically correct, but entirely unhelpful to find a way how to move forward.

A free market needs rules. "Free market" does not equate "do whatever you want". Without rules that are enforced, you don't have freedom either.

I think the source of the confusion here is a massive positive esteem laid on the two words "free market," which confuse people into thinking that anything good has to be labeled a free market. Labeling a system that requires government intervention a "free-market" mechanism is, just like in your example, just as much of a misuse of language as labeling quantum mechanics a Newtonian mechanism. Minimum wages, antitrust action, taxes, bans, sanctions, and subsidies are all examples of interventions in free markets, and they can be good or bad, just like the features of the state of nature (a free market) can be good and bad in different situations.

I'm really against this idea of redefining the baseline so that whatever policy choices we like are defined as the absence of subsidies and the presence of a free market. Subsidies are when the government intervenes to give money to those who trade in certain goods. Intervention is defined as doing anything other than letting people sort it out for themselves. Likewise, a free market is not one where everything we don't like is banned, it is a market where there are no constraints on the participants' process of trade and price determination.

A free market needs government intervention. Somebody else mentioned enforcement of rules. I think that's exactly right.

Might sound paradoxical at first, but what would you get without enforcement?

>what would you get without enforcement?

You would get the societies depicted in Snowcrash and Cyberpunk 2077. People would hire private security to perform the security tasks they need, just like multinationals do in third world countries. If you don't want that to happen, one has no choice but to restrict the freedom of at least one market. (The market for mercenaries.) Some countries go further and restrict other markets, for example the markets for weapons. It does not make any sense to call gun control a free-market mechanism, that's just not the right use of the term.

Ok I think I'm beginning to see where you are coming from.

Thanks for the debate!

A free market with rules is not technically a free market in the economic sense of the term.

In reality all human markets have rules and the ideal free market doesn't exist (nor is it ideal in any non theoretical sense.)

I think you're just confused about the terminology here, you're using a different definition to everybody else.

My feeling is you're equating free market to capitalism, but you can't do that.

Freedom and rules are two sides of the same coin. Just doing whatever you want in a market does not make it a "free market". If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market. A free market needs enforcement of rules of trade. And those rules include that you don't damage other market participants without compensation. Be it a potential bullet to the head, the mentioned "crap on the streets", or carbon emissions in the atmosphere.

>If somebody can go and hold a gun to your head and thereby persuade you to give them your goods for free, that's not a free market.

It's a free market if you can hire private security to stop them. The ban on the violent trade (often called the "monopoly on violence") is an example of an area in which modern liberal democracies do not permit complete freedom in the markets they host. I guess the slogan could be, "not every policy liberal democracies like is a free-market policy."

In a fully free market, slavery, selling of body parts, hard drugs, murders, torture for hire, kid porn, kid workers, nukes owned by private citizens etc. would be fully allowed. Very few people actually want that.

no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5). there is no 'good old days' where markets were free and the traders were good, upstanding people by happenstance.

it's just as 'natural' to prohibit the ability to unknowingly harm others without pricing that into the transaction.

>no markets--free, 'naturally-forming', or otherwise--are devoid of rules, whether they be implicit (e.g., dollars as trading medium, refrain from taking by force, etc.) or explicit (e.g, trading hours are 9-5).

9-5 trading hours are not a rule of US markets. If there was demand for trading at 8, people would organize to do that - and in fact they have, it's called after-hours trading.

Dollars as a trading medium is also an example of a non-rule. In a free market, all currencies would be lawful for transactions. In fact, in the US companies are free to sign contracts that numerate quantities of money in any currency. The only legal privilege of the dollar is its role in taxation - hardly an aspect of the free market.

Finally, the rule against taking by force is enforced by the executive branch of a democratically elected government. It is not possible to call that a free-market mechanism. A free-market mechanism for security exists, it's where you hire rent-a-cops, or in third world countries, where you hire mercenaries.

so is your argument that those off-the-cuff examples are not really rules because they're arbitrary or fuzzy (like every other rule, convention, or custom)?

the point is that there is no real world 'free market' that meets your idealized (and arbitrary) conditions.

Yeah, of course there's no real world free market. It's a theoretical idealization that we wouldn't even want to exist in reality.

The "state of nature" does not include property rights. Markets rely on those property rights (a form of regulation), and are therefore a fundamentally artificial construct.

Markets suck at pricing on negative externalities. It is literally the textbook example of market failure. That's why we need regulation (e.g. Carbon taxes) to step in and make sure those costs are accounted for.

I don't know what kind of hypothetical utopian market you're referring to, but it's not one that exists in human societies.

It's not one that exists yet for sure. It's one we will need to get to, but in the meantime subsidies are most definitely needed.

> and became notorious for defrauding the government in the process

Where's the evidence for that? The major point was that Solyndra bet on the wrong horse with CIGS; they were unknowingly doomed to fail from the start.

What happened with CIGS? There was a privately funded CIGS company here in Austin TX that also didn't make it (even though the founders and investors were solid) and I've not gotten a straight answer as to why - esp. confusing because the first quals looked very good.

Well, nothing. That's basically the point. Or, at best very little happened with it. "It wasn't getting cheaper faster than silicon was" is the most concise answer I can come up with.

You ignored my main point, which is that coal is also subsidized because we don't accurately price in all the pollution.

Solar would have been explored much sooner if we factored in the pollution.

> Solar didn't magically just appear on the market at a lower price point than carbon-based resources though

You are ignoring the entire point of the post you are replying to.

Extracting coal and burning it has massive external costs. Massive health costs to the workers and even people just living near coal extraction. Massive devaluation of land near the coal mines. Huge issues with non-carbon solution. That's all before the concerns about climate change. Few people were compensated for the massive destruction of wealth/ health & quality of life in the region. In many places the companies extracted every ounce of coal then when the lawsuits started pouring in, the company went belly up.

Once you take into account all the costs outside the costs of acquiring the land and extracting the coal, coal is vastly more expensive.

Uhh:

> not because it's inherently cleaner than coal

Is patently false.

It took capital to get there but solar -is- inherently cheaper than coal. That is -exactly- why it's being deployed at scale now.

>Solar power doesn't pollute Nope. The heavy metals used in solar powers are pretty awful. Perhaps they don't have the same impact as CO2, but we don't have a decent solution for what to do with the trash from old solar panels.

Yes, I didn't bring that up because I feel like Solar's manufacturing pollution isn't comparable to coal's ongoing and inherently massive pollution.

Coal pollutes both in destruction of the physical land (strip mining) and in ongoing pollution from huge amounts of carbon emissions.

Solar needs to be a responsible in how they get the materials (mining) and dispose of broken or outdated panels.

When talking about coal pollution lets not forget toxic metals released into lakes and rivers, such as mercury and arsenic.

Or the lung cancer causing particle emissions.

Which heavy metals are those? Be specific.

Solar panels use cadmium and lead in trace quantities that makes recycling certain parts of solar panels unprofitable. I can easily see this being like plastics all over again.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/01...

Cadmium is not used by Si cells, which comprise 95% of the market. Lead has been used in back contact sheets but is being phased out. Heavy metals are not necessary for solar.

I tend to agree with your point about coal, but fail to see what you're trying to say.

Maybe the non-taxation of fossil fuels' externalities is akin to subsidies. Then that becomes the reason why solar power needed subsidies, but it doesn't change the fact of their existence.

I also doubt raising prices for fossil fuels would have had the same effect on research into alternatives. Solar power is now cheaper than coal, even at the low costs of coal you decry. Given enough time, solar power research will yield tremendous returns, and would have done so under any imaginable tax/subsidy regime for coal and/or solar power.

But markets aren't always capable of reaping such rewards. Not because they are evil, but there was a lot of uncertainty and extremely long timelines involved that those institutions just aren't set up for.

Politics, however, are. And it worked. Score one for that dirty concept.

Manufacturing isn't free.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/solar-energy-isnt...

> Making solar cells requires a lot of energy. Fortunately, because these cells generate electricity, they pay back the original investment of energy; most do so after just two years of operation, and some companies report payback times as short as six months.

While the above article is from 2014, it likely still applies today. I would be interested to know how much manufacturing processes have changed since then.

The other big thing the article points out is the toxic chemicals and toxic process used to produce solar panels.

So a model based on pollution taxes would have worked better - We could tax the manufacturing plants, and the coal plants, and have a bake-off to see which is cleaner - Burning coal for power, or burning coal to run factories for PV panels.

But it would have been less popular, because at least in the USA we don't have a good welfare system to balance out the indirect tax on poor people, who have to spend more of their income on electricity, gasoline, other pollutants.

Energy requirements of various technologies is commonly measured with a simple ratio called ERoEI -- Energy Returned on Energy Invested.

Basically, any energy source can be thought of as an "energy multiplier" -- it takes some amount of energy to free the resource (manufacture it, mine it, etc.), then it produces some amount of energy output over its lifetime. So by looking at energy-out / energy-in, you get a sense of your bang for your buck.

Looking at the latest figures on wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment#Ap... :

- Conventional oil wells are 18-43:1 (I've heard saudi oil wells -- the easiest to drill -- are in the range of 60:1)

- Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel)

- Oil sands are 5:1

- Wind is 20-30:1

- Solar is 9-34:1

As with any lifetime/embedded cost analysis, there's lots of variability dependent on your assumptions, manufacturing conditions, and operating conditions. There's nuances in energy types, like wind turbines produce electricity but require tons of diesel trucks and concrete to assemble.

But we can roughly say that in terms of energy requirements, solar is more efficient than shale or oil sands, but it tops out at the lower to mid range of conventional oil.

>- Shale is 1.5:1 (say you what you will about the shale revolution, but from an energy output point of view, it's literally scraping the bottom of the barrel)

>- Oil sands are 5:1

wtf? I thought oil sands were the least efficient but shale is even lower? Is there a source for this?

The negative externalities of coal aren't adequately captured by taxes, sure...but what does that have to do with government subsidizing solar? Clearly they have.

The government subsidy is a point of criticism for "free-market" proponents. It's fair to point out that fossil fuels, and especially coal, have long benefitted from being able to externalize pollution costs. This is not consistent with an efficient market, since the extra costs of coal are borne by everyone regardless of whether they benefit.

Society has subsidized coal by both paying for negative externalities and through direct government investment, which is true for all waste producing energy sources.

This is orthogonal to OPs claim that "we subsidized solar until it was profitable is not accurate"

So only rich people can heat their apartment in winter?

Have you just arrived here as a time-traveller from Victorian London?

I have fabulous news! Forsooth, in this, the Year of Our Lord, Two Thousand and Score, Plus One, it has come to pass that mankind hath, by workings most subtle, made manifest many wondrous heating apparatuses that requireth neither coal nor coke, nor indeed train oil.

Gas?

Take revenue from carbon tax and distribute it as UBI. This gives everyone the money to pay the average carbon use, and encourages carbon use to reduce on both the supply and demand side.

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