70% of Americans Support Solar Mandate on New Homes | Hacker News Reader

70% of Americans Support Solar Mandate on New Homes

cleantechnica.com

25 pointssalzig38 comments

Since this survey was conducted at the behest of an interested party (a "leading full-service residential solar provider"), it's worth looking at what was asked. Here's the question:

> How much do you oppose or support a nationwide solar mandate?

32% expressed "strong" support for the mandate, while 38% expressed that they "somewhat" support a mandate.

Notably absent in the question: how much such a mandate would cost and who would pay for it.

I'm sure if a group that opposed solar mandates asked "A nationwide solar mandate is estimated to increase the cost of a new home by $xx,xxx. How much do you oppose or support such a mandate?" they'd get different results.

Plenty of ways to get a biased survey. Some of them will be hard to notice.

- Make it very long so only people interested in the topic will stay on.

- Make some questions extremely biased so people not of that persuasion will hang up.

Does the survey mention who’s going to pay for it? Seems to be a running issue for this kind of pre-legislation sentiment research

It's the usual issue of the wording of questions in surveys.

"Would you agree to be made to pay $20k for solar panels on your new home?" may not have got the same replies although, arguably, it's more realistic.

I don't think anybody was expecting them to be free so much as bundled into the mortgage as a standard item, sparing them from any separate financing, uppricing, or possible zoning issues.

Sure, that would probably be part of the price of the house and thus, for most people, financed through a mortgage.

But that's indeed a matter of financing the cost. The point remains that this cost would be paid by the person buying the house and therefore it seems to me that the most realistic and honest wording of such survey should include making that clear in order to get meaningful answers.

Ultimately the resident, as the cost is going to get passed along in new home prices, which will then get passed along for existing home prices and rent.

Where that "cost" over time is highly likely to be negative, aka free money, and it's only the coordination problems that prevents people from doing it.

(See also lease of EVs, if you were paying monthly anyway then the lower running costs of EV can be factored in for a fairer comparison that reflects better on EVs than the up front cost.)

If there was really “free money” in installing solar panels everyone would be doing it already.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

How does that apply here? In fact, the opposite would seem to be the case; the fewer people that install solar panels, the more expensive electricity is to buy off the grid, meaning the faster the payoff time for a home solar system.

If you build a new house with solar integrated, the person who buys the house (and society generally) benefits over time, but they need to pay up front for the costs. If you add it, then people will buy the other "cheaper" house that will cost them more in the long term and you'll go out of business. This is called a "Race to the bottom".

Pretty much every nation has a whole bunch of regulations about what you can build and sell, and what kind of houses is a popular specific example everyone is familiar with, not because they're all secret authoritarians, but because in the past, people did a whole bunch of stupid, short-sighted things to hit a lower price point and the businesses that didn't do stupid, short sighted things couldn't compete with them and were forced into doing stuff they knew was stupid or dangerous and people ended up living in dangerous, hard to heat homes.

This is the core problem of climate change. We'd all be better off dealing with it, but if someone else goes for the short term profit they ruin it for everyone.

there's 'free money' in exercising and eating healthy but most people don't do it enough.

People don't always make the most economically rational decisions.

It's economically rational in a world filled with the moral hazard provided by universal healthcare and insurance.

Why eat right or exercise when 99.8% of my $500k quadruple bypass surgery will be paid by other people?

It's a time-value-of-money problem. Over the long run, solar saves money. The payback period of our panels was about 9 years, but our utility raised their rates, so I think it's more like 7 now. Problem is, most people don't have 7 years worth of utility bills available to spend now, and if they did, they'd rather spend it on other things.

You could say the same about investing, and yet a ton of people still don't do that.

I also think that young people should pay even higher prices on homes.

If it is a sensible investment, people will intall them. I am surprised such a mandate is popular in the US.

I'm pretty sure the market will crash, independent of this rule. So, let's try what happens to the energy market if we mandate this.

Like it or not, climate change is happening, and you can't just avoid doing something about it because it's inconvenient

We cannot afford to do something, we need to focus on the most effective measures because political capital for that topic is not endless. You should also try not to increase other significant problems.

you mean something like prevention of overpriced/highly-speculated housing prices?

Millions of houses suddenly going underwater in the space of a few decades is going to cause a hell of a lot more issues in the housing market than adding solar panels.

Which houses, where? Because iirc sea levels aren't expected to go up by more than 1m this century, and also IIRC that's not enough to make New Orleans or Orlando infeasible.

Your house, if you own one that is, also needs to have a roof with the right angle and alignment for solar collectors to be feasible. It is hard to find a general rule for building houses.

Solar collectors make sense, even the economic aspects. If people actually have the money to spend on them, they probably will do so anyway.

Despite all the wailing and hand-wringing, there is actually no credible evidence that sea levels are rising. (This ranges from tidal measurements to photographic comparisons of the same site over nearly two centuries!)

Alarmist "climate models" based on wishcraft and paranoia can never be allowed to carry more weight than actual reality. (Well, assuming you beleive in actual science.)

Climate change is probably happening, sure. But you’re deluding yourself if you think that we’re going to come up with a way to solve it systemically, or that anyone in power actually cares about the issue at all. The more likely outcome is that more scammy regulations are passed that don’t actually help anything except enrich government contractors and politicians while more and more negative externalities are pushed under the rug. Meanwhile the system is helped inch forward towards disaster by well-intentioned people who feel that they need to “do something.”

I hope that the power produced to grid will be priced on market rate. With no caps to either direction. No bullshit like net metering, just fair spot price with transmission also charged.

I'm not sure why you call net metering "bullshit", it's quite a neat hack. Usually people hate it because they think it's some kind of scam, but "Value of Solar" research often suggests it's actually on the low side, i.e. the person with solar is providing more benefit to the system than they get paid for. The general direction is smarter meters and varied prices based on time, which is good and probably only further benefits solar.

Although this is a biased survey from an interested party, this kind of mandate is a fairly standard and well established idea with lots of benefits.

It just makes sense to do thing like add solar, and prep for EV charging when building new homes as it's much easier than refits. Other good ideas are banning gas connections, mandating ground loops for heat pumps and minimum insulation levels.

Net metering is most certainly bullshit, as it selfishly and unfairly shifts the costs of both the grid's distribution infrastructure as well as the cost of meeting peak demands onto all other ratepayers.

Go read about the duck curve and get back to us. https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-...

Yeah see this isn't going to work. Currently, something tiny like 20% of the price of coal and non renewable base power comes from the cost of the actual fuel. The rest is just base costs (the price of the wires, infrastructure and the actual coal plant itself).

The government charging by KWh is a market distortion that only works when everyone is paying. As long as people want power all the time, including at night and when it is cloudy or not windy, those fixed costs will need to be paid. Currently, those costs are being paid by the poor who can't afford solar panels. They are subsidizing the base power for the rich who do have solar panels but also have access to base power without actually paying for it.

What is going to happen once everyone owns solar panels and there is no one left to subsidize base power? Well prices will keep going up and up until they reach a singularity and the whole system will collapse. Then prices will have to be recalibrated to fit the actual market price. Which means people will no longer pay for base power by the KWh but instead by fixed costs no matter how much they use....

Then everyone will find they have these useless solar panels that offer no real cost advantages. Everyone will stop using them, and we will be back at square one with everyone preferring cheap, non renewable power....

Of course there is a supply of renewable, clean, cheap base power that everyone could use that would totally remove the need for destructive wind turbines or poisonous solar panels... but no one seems interested.

> What is going to happen once everyone owns solar panels and there is no one left to subsidize base power? Well prices will keep going up and up until they reach a singularity and the whole system will collapse. Then prices will have to be recalibrated to fit the actual market price. Which means people will no longer pay for base power by the KWh but instead by fixed costs no matter how much they use....

I know the discussion is specifically US centric but in many markets you already have a fixed cost/fee/tax on electricity as a base cost and on top of this an electricity usage cost. In these cases the Micro-generation offsets a usage cost not the base cost (but in a lot of places micro-generation is still heavily subsidized on the purchase of solar panels).

So as with many other things YMMV.

As far as I'm aware, in places with fixed costs, the fixed costs simply pay for the infrastructure, whereas the usage costs go towards running the base power station. However my point is that the base power station costs the same to run regardless of usage.

If some places already do have a properly priced power system then what I described wouldn't happen, but I also have trouble understanding how intermittent power could compete in a system where base power is essentially free.

Do you consider yourself a climate change denier?

Or is it just coincidence that all your opinions about "destructive" wind turbines and "poisonous" solar are indistinguishable?

If you want to be an effective climate change denier/whatever it is you think you are doing, then you'd be better of if you didn't signal so clearly that you've adopted climate change denial talking points.

You could much more subtly inspire Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in renewables if you just kept it a bit more vague.

I'm not sure it's climate change denial per say, more the usual "If everyone was as smart as me we would have all our energy problems solved already" response every time anything related to renewable energy and/or nuclear energy comes up here.

not an argument.

> conducted a survey for Vivint Solar

I’m sure that the survey was impartial.

The economics of solar PV only work with subsidies. In addition, both the PV panel themselves as well as expensive balance-of-system components such as inverters and/or batteries have a life expectancy that is considerably shorter than a conventional 30-year mortgage.

This is a horrible idea that just skyrockets the cost of new houses.

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