Can you explain with numbers how you arrive at this conclusion? (Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe, so it surprises me to read it)
However, energy prices in the US are considerably lower, so the bar for profitability is much higher.
The EU also has colossal subsidies for renewables, which obviously skew the market. In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.
I understand your point, I just take issue with the phrasing that subsidies for renewables are skewing the market, since in fact they are rather correcting it. Secondly because the oil industry is subsidised as well.
People who say this don't seem to realize that it was only 70 years ago we were just stopping the use of horses and other beasts of burden to do the majority of farming, and of course, replacing them with tractors... or the impact this had on productivity and availability.
Yes.. oil has negative "externalities." It also had massive benefits and created opportunities for expansion that we might not have otherwise had. The purpose of a market isn't to achieve perfect tyranny in the use of all resources, it's to make the best compromise out of the available choices.
Finally, it may just be that we haven't exactly factored in all the negative external components of our new energy choices. The market, if anything, has shown that it is willing to brazenly lie to the entire world if it senses that there is massive profit to be made in it. I don't know why people would expect the elites of green energy to operate any differently than the elites of oil energy have in the past, particularly when the market has made no efforts to induce the kind of perfection you have imagined here.
It's fine to be suspicious of any entity. But it's not easy to hide externalities. Your suspicion should lead pretty directly to evidence. As it does with fossil fuels. Those who profited from fossil fuels brazenly lied about their own knowledge of their externalities, but the rest of the world could see them in real time. They weren't trying to hide the externalities as much as they were mitigating their legal exposure and improving their propaganda.
I do realise the enormous positive effects the ICE has had on growth, labour intensity and general wellbeing. But it also has bad effects and we can move past the ICE now, and in fact we could and should have a lot sooner.
Most of the emissions come from electricity generation though, so no romanticising of the ICE will save us there.
The world panicked about nuclear power 30 years ago because of a Soviet screwup but that was a mistake. Nuclear and renewables should have been our focus all the time since.
And yes I absolutely realise there are negative externalities in cobolt extractions and whatever. That’s why we need the carbon taxes and similar regulations :)
Well, maybe, but there's more to a market than buy and sell price. There is also the cost of external energy dependency, for example, or environmental degradation.
In a purely market-driven world, we'd already be well on our way to extinction.
What does that even mean ? I have a ton of sunlight all throughout the year (almost). What do I do to harness it ?
So in 2021 solar construction costs averaged $2.94/W for residential and $0.77/W for utility scale solar. https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/how-does-utility-scale-sol...
So if you installed a 10kW residential system it might cost $29,400 which would make you eligible for a 30% federal tax credit at a cost to the government of $8,820.
However if the government instead spent that $8,820 on utility scale solar it could pay outright for the construction of 11.5kW of solar generation capacity.
> I have a ton of sunlight all throughout the year (almost). What do I do to harness it ?
So as an individual it might make sense for you to take advantage of the government subsidy and have them help pay for a residential system for you! It just makes no sense at a societal level to spend money on small expensive systems when we could instead be spending it on large cheap systems.
Panels cost 4 times as much when installed individually instead of at a community scale. I agree the economy of scale here is just too good to be wasted away like this.
As a consumer though, I see two practical choices (1) keep paying PG&E their increasing cost for electricity or (2) eat that initial high cost of solar install and keep outgoing cost constant for a decade.
And some impractical ones like convince a bunch of people to setup a grid at community scale or do a DIY solar install to keep the install cost low.
Now that panels are cheap the installation costs dominate. Residential installation is basically never going to get substantially cheaper so it no longer makes sense to subsidise such systems when the subsidy alone would pay for more efficiently installed utility scale solar.
It seems like we should shift the subsidy to expansion of grid connectivity as that now seems to be the blocker for projects.
There seems to be a better argument in the southwest, where we have less agriculture and the hydro power Lake Mead provides is now questionable. which is why there are already massive farms there. Though, without that water I'm not sure who would want to live in Vegas at all. The best place for solar seems to be California rooftops. Lots of population, far enough south to have closer to optimal solar incidence, and arid climate that wont interfere too much.
But all of this means that you shouldn't expect a unified, cohesive federal energy plan. I don't, at least. Instead we should expect different geographies to find different niches, and a much more diversified plan spread across many more forms: wind, solar, hydro, fission, fusion, geothermal, etc. Plus anyone complaining the US underinvests in R&D has to contend with the fact that this publication came from MIT, and was funded in part by the NSF.
popular? yes. viable? not as much. all of the contiguous US is further south than the UK. That means shorter winter days, but also incident angles are bad year round.
But dont take my word for it, check out https://globalsolaratlas.info