Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattnewton | Hacker News Reader

> “I applaud your greenness,” Chris Landis, an architect and board member, told Preister at a meeting in October 2019, “but I just have this vision of a row of houses with solar panels on the front of them and it just—it upsets me.”

My blood boils, of all the things to be a busybody about what someone builds on the roof of their own property, you want to have them throw away free energy and keep burning fossil fuels because you are used to the current aesthetics of the roof, no doubt made that way out of practical choices made with the technology of the time but now frozen for the dubious benefits of nostalgia..

View on HN

Yep. The decline of humanity will be at the hands of greater spotted fucking moron, of which Chris Landis is clearly a prime example of the species.

You can have both. But really the entire planet works on making negative side effects of solving a problem someone else's problem and this spans from globalisation of supply chains to energy supply. This attitude just enables it.

People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.

> People needs to start looking at local self-sufficiency of energy and materials to some degree.

This is a complete, unrealistic pipe dream. Yes, we've obviously seen a "deglobalization" occurring, and many countries are feeling the pain of being completely dependent on critical fuel and materials from one or a few other countries with shaky political systems.

But the idea that "local self sufficiency" is possible on a wide scale, without sending us all back to the stone age, is quite frankly nonsense. I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.

Saying "we should look at local self sufficiency" makes people think of planting a garden in their back yard, when in reality it would mean virtually all of the advances in human comfort, health and convenience over the past couple hundred years or so would have to be given up.

I'm not suggesting that we send ourselves back to the stone age. I'm suggesting that we stop shipping resources half way around the planet and then send the trash back because it's cheaper. The last 50-80 years at least has been a race to the lowest cost with no consideration for any consequences such as the environment, security and stability.

UK is a fine example. We had a great steel industry here. But it's cheaper to buy it from China and India and it helps us hit our pollution targets not processing it here. But we just pushed the problem to where the side effects aren't immediately visible. The real issue is our consumption and use of materials.

This is the reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy63PEgmm8w

Or how about in BC, where sawdust is shipped by the gigatonne to China, gets made into particle board, and comes back as cheap furniture?

If you had non polluting shipping and the costs were still cheap enough there would be nothing intrinsically wrong with this.

The problem is the market externalities of the pollution of our current shipping methods, and likely the imbalances in the labor markets and regulation.

If you fixed those, then it would probably no longer make sense to do that, but you can't fix those systemic problems by banning the symptoms of them.

> I remember reading an article a while back about how something as ubiquitous as a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.

I'm the article was informative but I know where a few cows are and I know how to at least field dress a carcass, so I bet I can wrangle me some hamburger.

I'm sure you can, but it doesn't scale. The only way we eat is industrialised agriculture.

You will be fighting your neighbours for that cow and wasting most of it.

Similarly with "backyard plots" and that other great modern stupidity, the vertical indoor garden. Like anybody will be lazily reaching over to pick a tomato from their indoor vertical garden instead of the monstrous greenhouses that most tomatoes come from these days.

I agree with you that we rely on industrial agriculture and the amount of space someone needs to fully feed themselves is larger than most peoples available space, but I and others totally reach for the shit we grow before resorting to buying in a store, I don’t know why you think that can’t subsidize some need for shipping food

For basics like potatoes, carrots, onions etc. this is possibly doable but it isn't going to replace a families worth of food. For an individual or a couple, maybe. But certainly not all year. If you use the old-school Australian "quarter acre block" you might do a families vegetables for part of the year.

As a supplement, it's worthwhile. As a substitute it's non viable.

In WWII home gardens roughly doubled fresh vegetable production.

The degree to which they’re a good idea personally varies quite a bit, but backyards represent a lot of viable farmland on a national scale.

If I take the local example - the city was built where it is due to the local conditions being good, including great, volcanic soil.

Then the city grew and houses were built all over the good soil, pushing agriculture further out. The last market garden in the area became a housing subdivision about 5 years ago.

> In WWII home gardens roughly doubled fresh vegetable production.

but at what cost? "The $64 Tomato" comes to mind.

> In WWII home gardens roughly doubled fresh vegetable production.

This is obviously not true in any meaningful sense. I assume this is based on "fresh" restricting the numbers to a meaninglessly small fraction of total production. It doesn't even make sense within an order of magnitude.

In the US it was 18 million victory gardens out of a population of 140 million people. They really did represent a lot of land and a lot of labor.

In absolute numbers they allowed a 50% increase in total vegetable production over farms alone in the US. Fresh in this context referred to the amount of canning going on. So they made a very significant difference to diets of people domestically.

> In absolute numbers they allowed a 50% increase in total vegetable production over farms alone in the US.

Once again, this is a facially stupid claim. If you know anything about industrial agriculture, it's clearly impossible. Where are you reading this?

My guess is you're being confused by the "fresh" qualifier, which is probably the intention.

“The US Department of Agriculture estimates that more than 20 million victory gardens were planted. Fruit and vegetables harvested in these home and community plots was estimated to be 9-10 million tons, an amount equal to all commercial production of fresh vegetables.” https://livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html

That’s 3 pounds per person per week, or 1/3 of the total 12lb of vegetables per person consumed per week.

https://www.ars.usda.gov/ARSUserFiles/80400530/pdf/hist/bhnh...

It is very hard to match the efficiency of something like this:

https://costagroup.com.au/our-categories/tomatoes/

Their Guyra tomato farm is an enormous undertaking that produces all year round. I'm sure in WWII Britain it was easy to double vegetable production because while the UK is covered in farms, they are relatively tiny and unproductive and only survive through subsidies.

A cheeseburger is much more than just beef. The article highlighted that getting beef, cheese, fresh lettuce, tomato, etc., a bun, seasonings and condiments all at the same time is what required a larger supply chain.

Sure, but >90% of people don’t have whatever upbringing (or interests/hobbies) that led you to have that knowledge, so at a population scale the point stands.

>a cheeseburger is only possible with wide, nation-crossing supply chains.

I know you are just giving an example - I get your concept - but frankly all the ingredients for a darn good cheeseburger are produced within a two hour drive of where I live, on an industrial scale. Maybe I'm just really lucky, but on the other hand if you go back just a bit more than 50 years ago, most small towns had their own dairies, bakers, butchers, local farmers and rancher, they had various kinds of factories and industrial producers - and maybe this is one place where we need to go back in history.

That dude's quote is definitely moronic but you making the leap that globalization is somehow the root of all of society's problems is pretty close.

After using the term spotted fucking moron, I don't mind anything else as I now have a new phrase I can borrow/steal/use to describe people of a certain type that couldn't be more appropriately named.

-- looking at their website I can see why this is his mindset - they appear to be extremely traditional - and his bio - well - the dude is ooolllddd --

https://www.landisconstruction.com/our-portfolio/

I am here to tell you that these food miles and industrial material miles, were of deep concern and in the public discourse fifty years ago; and that my grandmother's brother told me that suburban housing patterns were of deep concern and in the public discourse seventy five years ago. The "markets" decided this course of action? many, many business people competitively won over others doing it differently. It was the winning by competition that was elevated. The results of the competition were "oh thats how it worked out".

A deep philosophical skepticism of central planning, a lust for industrial-scale profits, and the lessons of warfare where certain kinds of weapons won and the loser was dead forever; all contributed to this kind of decision-making contest. We live amidst the results now.

We should have Federal solar access laws. It's especially pathetic this is in D.C. It sounds like they bowed to pressure though:

https://positivechangepc.com/uncategorized/dc-will-now-allow...

>>We should have Federal solar access laws

Why Federal? Under which Constitutional Authority would such a Federal law be placed?

Frankly a HUGE part of the problem we have today, including the ever increasing division is the federal government expansion in areas (like property use) never envisioned or authorized by the US Constitution

So no we do not need a federal solar access law.

stepping in to protect on issues of liberty and property is of course under constitutional authority

Which Amendment, or Power in Article 1 Section 8 is "protect on issues of liberty and property"

I am missing that from my copy? 10th Amendment would clearly put that in the power of the States.

Remember the people and States created the LIMITED federal government for specific purposes not to be all powerful and all encompassing

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

Sorry try again, 14th simply puts the same limits on state governments as the federal government, granting the people (all people) the more rights under their states then previously allowed since the federal constitution only applied to the federal government

The 14th amendment DID NOT expand the power of the federal government, it simply grated the federal courts authority to strike state laws using the federal constitution

No where in the 14th amendment does it claim what you imply

section 5 explicitly states

> The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Ok, I am still waiting for where in the section would give the federal government the power to mandate solar power access?

Let’s flip it. How do localities have the authority to prevent property owners to put solar on their own property? Why do local bullies have authority to remove freedom, but the state or feds don’t have the authority to protect freedom?

Nonsensical.

The tenth amendment to the US Constitution says that all powers not explicitly granted to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people.

So, under the US Constitution, state and local authorities can enact laws that the federal government cannot do anything about. The state governments absolutely have the power to prevent local governments from restricting the installation of solar panels.

Wait, what about “the people” part? The people just don’t have rights as long as there’s a local bully that wants to remove them? That doesn’t seem consistent or reasonable.

See my comment above.

Are you familiar with the Slaughterhouse cases?

In our federalist system, outside the power granted to the federal government by the constitution, the State governments hold the most power

So a local government would have to be granted regulatory authority over solar by the State government, which could also remove that authority.

State governmental power are dictated by the State Constitutions, those things that people have largely forgotten about has a federal government as swallowed more and more power and authority. Each State has it own binding constitution granting it authority and powers over the people of that State.

Commerce clause.

Sunlight crosses state lines, to boot.

> Under which Constitutional Authority would such a Federal law be placed?

The Commerce Clause. Same thing that authorizes the Communications Act of 1996 and FCC OTARD rules.

I would actually love for Congress to try that, it would give the Supreme Court a prime opportunity to Roll back the commerce clause or even completely undo Wickard like they did Roe...

I would love beyond all measure to see Wickard reversed

never envisioned or authorized by the US Constitution

Oh FFS. It's not religion, that's why it includes an amendment process. Constitutional fetishists are as bad as Marxists, having some good long-lasting principles is not the same as being right about everything and isn't a good excuse to overlook centuries' worth of additional insights because they don't fit neatly into the original codebase.

Meanwhile, a row of houses without solar panels (or at least solar heaters) upsets me.

Imagine being so selfish that you are opposed to something that is objectively good for the world, just because you think it's ugly.

Not to mention, you can barely even see solar panels against black roof shingles, which is typical in most of the US.

> Imagine being so selfish that you are opposed to something that is objectively good for the world

A randomly selected house being covered in solar panels is not "objectively good for the world". Please do some research into energy production and distribution economics before having such a strongly-held opinion.

Are we talking about randomly selected houses? I believe the conversation is around large groups of houses utilizing solar and at that scale, it is objectively good.

No, it's not. Why would you make such a strong statement when you clearly haven't researched it? There are only a small number of climates where solar installations on homes already on the grid have an expected net positive social externality.

Preventing any house from utiliising solar has a direct and specific negative impact.

Even individual-choice solar deployments at small scale have benefits from a testing-and-development standpoint, increasing technical understanding of installation, operation, maintenance, and decommissioning.

> Preventing any house from utiliising solar has a direct and specific negative impact.

Domestic solar has an extremely tenuous value proposition. If you don't have batteries in your house, you're using the grid as an extremely inefficient subsidy for solar production/load mismatch (externalizing many costs). If you do have batteries in your house, it's more expensive (and less efficient) than using grid power.

Domestic solar is usually not a good thing compared to grid power, and any small marginal benefit may easily be outweighed by aesthetic costs.

Solar will require a large land-area deployment.

In absolute magnitude, it's roughly equivalent to total built area, and dual-purposing land that's already dedicated to human use rather than appropriating crop or wild landscapes has its benefits.

Not all structures can be readily retrofit, but again, blanket prohibitions on aesthetic grounds seems exceedingly short-sighted and petty.

Exactly.

I don't think most solar & wind maximalists realize how little of the world is both optimal for solar panels AND located near a urban centre.

Having solar in the middle of the Sahara is utterly worthless because transmission makes it comically inefficient (beyond how inefficient solar is to begin with), and then you take another inefficiency tax storing it in batteries. Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas. Who knew humanity doesn't like living where the sun is baking them 18 hrs / day year round?

See: https://zeihan.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/globalsolarpot...

And it's about as bad with wind.

If only there were a very efficient, clean, and geographically-independent source of energy we could use that didn't depend on the weather or sun, and could be placed trivially near urban centres.

We are counting the specific efficiency of the solar panel now to malign solar? And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible?

The proof is in the pudding. Even with all the structural headwind, people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power. Who is going to give you the $15B+ it takes to build your nuclear power plant that needs to run 50+ years when that's what is possible today? That's why no one is building them anymore - it's not plausibly ever going to make money.

> And <1200 kw/h per square fucking meter is negligible

Why are you swearing - are you upset about this?

It's 0kW/m^2 at night.

> people can put solar on their roof and a battery in the basement and trivially source the majority of their own power

The key here is "majority". The remaining 20% or whatever is disproportionately expensive, and people who are using solar while connected to the grid are externalizing the vast majority of the negative costs of using solar to other grid participants.

If you need to generate 100% of your energy using solar, you need to significantly over-allocate and spend a huge amount on batteries. People who generate "most" of their power using solar would need to spend multiple times as much to go to 100% solar, so A) the approach doesn't scale and B) they're imposing a much higher marginal cost on the grid per joule consumed than a "normal" customer.

They will get more and more efficient. Now imagine someone saying Apple I / personal computers are close to useless because they are inefficient and only IBM datacenters can run serious programs and solve real world problems.

Marginal increases in panel efficiency don't solve any of the real problems with solar, such as production/load mismatch (cf duck curve).

Like 90-95% of the world population lives at latitudes that get better solar resource than Northern Europe, such as Germany and most of the UK, etc.

The seasonality isn’t that great and you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.

15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars for my household of five.

And with tandem Si-perovskite cells commercialized over the next couple decades, etc, that amount could climb to ~20-30kW for the same roof, taking care of seasonality effects, etc, except at very high latitudes.

I love nuclear, too, but if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs, I don’t want any part of that.

> if nuke-bros are gonna make excuses for NIMBYing solar roofs

If this is the level of your discourse, why would you expect people to take your claims seriously?

> 15kW of solar, which is about what you can get with a roof full of solar panels, would be enough to handle the household energy including heating, cooling, cooking, and commuting in electric cars

You are aware that solar panels do not work at night? I.e. the time during which you would be most likely to heat your home and charge your car?

Sorry for "NIMBYing" you with the duck curve.

I mean, storing the solar in Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries in bulk only add a few cents to the cost of electricity. I even mentioned it earlier in my post, which you ignored:

> …you can displace like 80-90% of grid energy use affordably with a battery (at least in bulk prices) even without net metering.

But no point in doing that while solar penetration is low, which it still is in my area.

As far as level of discourse, yeah, that’s precisely my point. Claims like this are so far from true for the vast majority of the world that it lowers the level of discourse to misinformation and slander:

> … Having solar panels on a random home will almost certainly be worthless because most major urban centres are not in solar-efficient areas.

Installing solar is costly, and requires dealing with trades. Also doesn’t always pay off. Not everyone’s house is suitable either.

I remember how weird and out of place the first metal roof in the neighborhood looked. By the third, I didn't think anything of it. I assume solar panels become normal after a while in the same way.

The cheap metal roof types look bad the long sheets with high fastening ridges. But you can get metal rooves that look indistinguishable from slate or other materials.

It's a great idea to get a metal roof first then solar. Even the cheap ugly metal roof since the large ridges are great for attaching solar panels. Then in 20 or 30 years you don't have to remove the solar panels if you need to upgrade the shingles if you have metal roof.

I honestly wonder whether or not they should have named Landis in this article, because he could easily end up the target of a lot of abuse due to this article (and how it demonstrates that he is a complete knuckle dragging moron).

This is the incorrect response to this. A better response is how can you make architecture with solar panels more aesthetically pleasing. The half covered roof is objectively ugly. Leaf-like, self-standing panels look much better.

I bet early stoves were ugly too but kitchen appliances do have styles and they've gotten better with updates.

I don't buy this. Tasteses are informed by what is common and what is common is so because of technical reasons, most of the time. Getting stuck in what is the current taste is myopic, we should focus on function.

Bias up front, I've signed a contract to have a Tesla solar tile roof go in later this summer at a significant premium and I do care about my house design while not denying the critical importance of getting the move to renewables happening as fast as possible. That said:

>Tasteses are informed by what is common and what is common is so because of technical reasons, most of the time.

I think you're making a mistake here in going to generalities over the specific area we are talking about: roofs on homes. And we have literally thousands and thousands of years of examples of lots of humans caring quite a bit about the look of bulk surfaces on their homes. All modern roofing materials properly installed will do the core job of keeping out the elements. But there are wide varieties of colors, styles, and types, not for technical reasons but because lots of humans care. They care about the siding material, about stain/paint and trim color details. Having nice patterns even just with concrete. Not everyone of course, but many. We've been decorating surfaces since we lived in caves! I think you're the one being myopic with your view of "function" that entire ignores form and a significant artistic impulse across our entire species.

So no, I think plain solar panels on roofs go against pretty fundamental instincts. They all look the same for starters, and they cannot be decorated or made individual in any significant way (obviously painting over them would largely defeat the purpose!). People certainly can tolerate stuff they don't like, or even outright hate, in the name of functionality. Lots of people live in architecture they dislike or even conditions they dislike because that's what they can afford (or that's what their job demands or whatever else). But I don't think you can honestly look at the vast array of buildings that are built and continuing development of design and then just claim all of that going away in favor of big uniform silicon panels on everything is simply "taste".

Also, there isn't in fact a technical reason for it. Highly customizable solar shingles are clearly technically possible and could be produced in bulk. It's not as if they require platinum group metals or something inherently expensive. If you really care about this as I do, then if aesthetics would accelerate tolerance of mass installation of solar power then that is absolutely something plans should take into account. On the scale of the kinds of subsidies we give to fossil fuels and the costs we're looking at for global warming impact effects, tens or even hundreds of billions down to speed things up and help with the human factor can be quite justifiable.

I think you have a some very good points, even if with some I don't agree with. I never claimed looks are not important, my claim is merely that functional design informs tastes, and things that are "ugly" can become pretty merely by being common and tastes changing. My stance is a bit shakier, nu I still think the underlying claim stands.

A better response would be: “let’s use the tech we have now while we design a more aesthetically pleasing solution”

Aesthetics can be important but pragmatically they’re far less important than the health of our planet.

I don’t 100% disagree with this, but what was aesthetic today relied in part on the practical technology of the past. The instinct that everything should “look like what I am used to” is causing real harm for dubious benefits here. Roofs are infrastructure. Imagine if someone said that about bridges, preferring stone arches to steel cables and limiting us from making longer and safer bridges on those grounds.

I actually think the solution here is to have the people who care about this buy the roofs they want to look at, (possibly through the state if need be), pay to subsidize some kind of aesthetic compromise, or stop complaining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com