Solar is a market for (financial) lemons | Hacker News Reader

Solar is a market for (financial) lemons

pluralistic.net

95 pointsTimothee105 comments

Compare America's federal rooftop solar subsidy scheme (the ITC) to Australia's (STCs):

The ITC is a tax credit, which means only households with a large tax bill will be able to benefit. And they'll not benefit up-front, but only after their next tax year.

STCs are cash rebates which actually reduce the up-front cost of purchasing solar.

The ITC is based on the price of the system, which incentivises higher prices.

STCs are based on the kW size of the system, according to a formula intended to estimate the system's energy production over its lifetime. It's a very rough approximation of course.

(Not directly related, but the amount of STCs awarded also steps down annually until in 2031 no certificates will be awarded. This policy has remained remarkably stable over the last several governments.)

The ITC looks to this foreigner like it was intended to ensure that solar must be purchased on finance. It's not "government subsidies" that are the problem, it's subsidies that may as well have been designed by banks.

EDIT: Australia's market is by no means perfect, and we also have our share of financial shenanigans. But it's much better than what I've seen of the US market, and our prices are drastically lower.

> The ITC is a tax credit, which means only households with a large tax bill will be able to benefit

Can you explain your working here? Pretty much every home owning household is going to pay $10k of taxes, say.

That's a fair point, I hadn't run the numbers on that. It being a significant problem was just based on having read articles on the US market over the last 5-8 years and not an in-depth analysis, so I can't cite any of them in particular.

10k is a reasonable guess for how much tax liability is needed, and it's not a huge issue, but it is an issue. Retirees and lower-middle income folks often pay less than that each year, as do folks with even lower incomes who inherited their homes.

> Pretty much every home owning household is going to pay $10k of taxes, say.

I'm not so sure. According to this [1] the median income of homebuyers in mid 2023 was $107 000, up from $88 000 the year before. I assume the median income of homeowners is less than that of homebuyers, so I'll be conservative and take $107k as the median homeowner income.

As a sanity check, this seems reasonably in line with older data [2].

Let's assume their income is all ordinary income as opposed to capital gains that might be taxed at a lower rate, and assume they are mostly families that file jointly, and assume they have no deductions other than the standard deduction.

The 2023 standard deduction for married filing jointly is $27 700, leaving our median homeowner family with $79 300 taxable income. That puts them in the [$22 000, $89 450) bracket, where the tax is $2 200 + 12% of the amount over $22 000.

That comes to $9 076. That would be median so there should be a lot of people below that.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/typical-income-to-buy-home-surg...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/974721/median-income-hom...

Thanks for doing the calculations here, very helpful.

I do agree that tax rebates are less preferable to at-purchase rebates, though I wonder if there is an “ease of implementation” accounting difference for the government that isn’t obvious. Eg securing funding to pay out a cash rebate has a budget effect different than reducing tax collection.

More generally though, solar (and energy efficiency in general) has an interesting principal/agent problem - households in the bottom quartile or even half are not likely to have cash lying around to invest in 10-year ROI projects. So these efficiency gains often don’t get harvested. Solar financing is an option for these cases but it has its own implementation problems. The situation for renters is even worse; I’m sure that fixing the drafty windows in my apartment would pay off in 5 years, but it’s unlikely I’ll be here long enough to harvest that win, and there is no financial product that lets the landlord and me to coordinate on this.

In the U.K. there are massive grants for home owners who don’t have a reasonable income.

It’s ageism - more money flowing from young workers (who pay the highest taxes) to old owners (who pay the lowest)

The generation that can benefit are “Generation Me”, they’ve spent their entire lives having society warp around them and don’t even realise it.

People make the best decisions when the benefits are up front, not delayed to a yearly tax filing with a probability of distribution dependent upon income.

If you have a low tax burden and get a large tax credit, don't you just receive that as a refund?

The federal solar tax credit can't take your tax liability below zero, but any remaining portion can be rolled over to later tax years until it's exhausted. Given this, I think a situation where someone couldn't meaningfully benefit from the credit would be very unusual. You'd have to have an effective tax rate of zero for years at a time.

That’s the difference between a plain old tax credit and a “refundable” tax credit.

I always say the mortgage interest deduction is a subsidy to banks, not homeowners, because it is not available if you buy your house for cash.

> STCs are cash rebates which actually reduce the up-front cost of purchasing solar.

This is key because renewables are a swap of op ex ( buying fuel) to cap ex (capital expenditure on the “power plant). Most people can’t afford that.

This is a well written article, that makes the point that rooftop solar is good, but a market based approach to roll our it leads to anti-social outcomes like scammers installing substandard systems consumers pay through the nose for.

Still, I would like to see some solutions articulated. Should we be promoting solar installation by non-profits? Direct government financed solar installation? Or abandoning rooftop and promoting community solar?

Larger scale ground mounted solar looks like it will always beat rooftop solar in terms of energy produced per dollar of investment. There are some cases where rooftop solar can save money by eliminating the need for a grid connection altogether (remote rural properties) but that's a tiny market compared to current suburban-focused rooftop solar businesses.

Ground mounted solar has the following benefits over rooftop solar:

- Much less permitting overhead per megawatt of capacity installed

- Safer and faster installation process (no risk of workers falling off rooftops, uniform rows of panels are easier to install)

- Lower hardware costs for inverters (since the units are larger)

- Easier to orient panel installation for optimum sunlight gathering, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year

- Easier to clean panels regularly, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year

- Possibility to use single axis sun tracking mounts for panels, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year

Rooftop solar has the following benefits over ground mounted solar:

- No additional consumption of land

- Slight reduction in transmission and distribution costs, since more electricity is generated directly at the site of consumption

These benefits are comparatively minuscule. A least-cost, fastest-progress plan for decarbonization would have the solar component heavily weighted toward large scale ground mounted projects. The additional money that would otherwise be spent on rooftop solar is better invested in all sorts of other things: wind farms, battery storage, insulation retrofits, heat pump replacements for gas heating...

Generally agree, though let's be real that transmission and distribution losses for ground mount solar are not slight, they are in the 30-40% range, like all utility T&D.

That's much too high an estimate, at least for the United States:

How much electricity is lost in electricity transmission and distribution in the United States?

The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that annual electricity transmission and distribution (T&D) losses averaged about 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States in 2018 through 2022.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

That's just outright false. Where did you get it from.

I can't find a link so I'll explain it...

Single high voltage transformers approach the 6-8% at full load... Not to mention the wire losses and other transformers in the system minimum 3-5). The number you quoted from the EIA is not accurate. See this Nameplate Z% (impedance aka losses) of an ABB 20MVA transformer: https://images.app.goo.gl/hXNTWAv1xnu83znQ7 It is higher as the transformers get larger.

Correction tho... 30-40% includes the losses from generation, not just T&D. And if you keep searching the EIA quoted that at 34%.

> The number you quoted from the EIA

I didn't quote any numbers.

Rooftop is generally on site. Ground is generally in large arrays owned by power companies. Being on site and owner-operated means not incurring the expenses of lines and various markups (sometimes extreme) from power companies. And it means being completely independent of the power companies who have different incentives.

Conversely, you’re entirely responsible for maintenance and system upgrades/replacement on a per household basis which people won’t budget for

Household? Do business properties not have rooftop arrays?

I'm not sure why that distinction matters, it's the same situation. The CapEx is being decentralized and so also is the burden of ownership

We'll end up in situations where people buy a property (personal or business) then the first year of ownership get hit with a "sorry, needs new solar system" type surprise bill. This is not uncommon for HVAC and sometimes plumbing issues, much more unusual for electric and gas utilities.

  - No additional consumption of land
  These benefits are comparatively minuscule

I think that benefit is significantly less minuscule than you make it out to be. For rural installations, sure, but in high density areas the cost of land can be absolutely insane, and those high density areas tend to have high power demands just due to the density of humans that live there.

You can put all the ground mounted panels out in the countryside hundreds of miles away from the density, but high power transmission lines are also expensive and dangerous to maintain. Generating the power right where it's used completely eliminates a problem which has serious negative consequences like wildfires.

At some point, we're going to have to learn to eat the cost of HVDC transmission. You can move GWs of power with conductors of reasonable size and complexity (both underground and undersea), if you can get the right of way, and there are no technical limitations on length besides line loss.

https://www.nationalgrid.com/sites/default/files/documents/1...

https://europacable.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Introducti...

To add some other points - rooftop solar being the future is untested. Most of the installations were done in an environment where solar wasn't really commercially viable and people were trying to push water uphill with a shovel. Which can be done, mind you. There are cases like Germany where they seem to have done a lot of damage to their own energy supply.

But now that solar seems to be a viable option it is unclear what the equilibrium point is. For coal, it didn't make sense to give everyone a generator. Even coal-powered fireplaces in homes turned out to be noncompetitive for heating, which is a bit of an unexpected outcome. So since rooftop solar is dangerous to install and comes with a maintenance burden as well as presumably increased risk to consumers, it might still turn out that the best approach is a big centralised solar farm with huge economies of scale. Keep maintaining and using a distribution grid.

Grids are expensive, so it could shake out either way. But I don't think the public knows what will happen yet.

> which is a bit of an unexpected outcome

I don't see it. Coal fireplaces are relying on the same idea as the ICE car, this fuel is so cheap to use that it won't matter if we use it inefficiently. But unlike cars, your house isn't going anywhere.

One thing people tend to get wrong about heating is that because of the laws of thermodynamics it seems as though any method must always be 100% efficient and thus it can't matter. But actually we care what gets heated. Fireplaces heat the air in the chimney well but you don't live there - you live in the rest of the house. As little as 20% of the thermal energy in the coal is converted into a warm living space, and that makes it pretty easy for electrical solutions to compete.

Something like a gas boiler heating water for radiators still can't deliver the same point of use efficiency (as resistive heating) because the burned gas is toxic, so we need to put that warm gas outside (otherwise what you've made is a death trap, not a warm home), yet we'd like to capture as much of the warmth as possible, the result is we're maybe 80% efficient. It's much easier to add radiators than chimneys, so the result is much better, but far from perfect.

We're burning coal - which burns really hot. Nobody has managed to come up with a more economically efficient approach than burning that coal kilometers away from the place that needs to be heated. And not for clever chemical reactions, we're still burning it for heat. So it turns out that the most effective way to heat a space is to burn coal for heat but jam a ridiculous amount of stuff between that and the eventual heated space.

Obviously you've got all the details, but if those details are what turned out to be true for coal then we as the public have no idea at all what the details are going to be for solar. Possibly even the insiders don't know yet. There is a pretty good chance here that centralised solar installations win the economic battle.

> Nobody has managed to come up with a more economically efficient approach than burning that coal kilometers away from the place that needs to be heated.

Have you tried not burning the coal? The coal was fine where it was, leave it there and save on extracting it, then burning it and then cleaning up the tremendous resulting mess.

Having the ability to generate electricity in the event of a power outage is another benefit of rooftop solar.

Grid connected solar disables itself in this case.

You need a compatible inverter for it to work, and they're quite uncommon.

With my setup I just need to flick a switch to cut power to the main grid, and my inverter will automatically turn back on. In Japan at least this feature is ubiquitous - I looked at systems from several manufacturers, and all had the ability to generate electricity during an outage.

Only if you have battery storage.

My system does not have battery storage. A storage battery would be considerably better in the event of a power outage, but also would have doubled the cost of the system. My plan is to have another look at batteries when it is time to replace the inverter, and hopefully the cost per kWh will have dropped by then to the point where batteries make more financial sense.

That’s mostly true, but not entirely. SMA (inverter) offers Secure Power Supply on some models, which give you a single 120 Vac outlet that can provide up to 2 kW (about 15 A) assuming there is enough sunlight. If the solar panels are producing less, it can still provide lower amounts of power. For things like charging phones, a small TV, laptop, modem, and router, it should give you power during most daylight hours, regardless of cloud cover, if you have a 6 kWdc array.

I’m not sure where you live, but I’ve been privy to thousands of rooftop solar installations deployed in the U.S. (New England mostly) and the common case is to have the inverter wired into the circuit panel with a per-circuit or whole house automatic or manual switch, then also grid tied to realize net metering benefits. Very few installs have battery storage (less than 1%, though this is changing rapidly).

Ground-mount arrays can also use bifacial panels-- solar panels without the opaque backing that can capture light from both sides at once.

> Possibility to use single axis sun tracking mounts for panels, so a unit of capacity generates more electricity each year

I read an HN comment earlier this week that noted that solar panels are so cheap that is is more economical to just install more panels than to pay for the expense and maintenance of moving parts. I.e. you can generate the same amount of extra energy that tracking would give you by adding more fixed untracked panels. And fixed panels with have no moving parts which makes maintenance super cheap.

A quick glance around at internet articles seems to confirm this take.

That may be true in some locations. The most recent information I can find for the United States says that single axis tracking is used by most large solar farms:

The use of single-axis/one-axis tracking in the U.S. utility PV market has grown significantly over the past decade. At the end of 2022, 73% of all U.S. utility-scale PV systems used single-axis tracking. And 86% of U.S. utility-scale PV systems installed in 2022 used single-axis tracking. This growth can be attributed to the reduced cost and increased reliability of trackers, making them the economic choice in a broader distribution of PV systems (e.g., less irradiant climates).

"National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Summer 2023 Solar Industry Update"

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy23osti/87189.pdf

- Slight reduction in transmission and distribution costs, since more electricity is generated directly at the site of consumption

The generation being at the site of consumption has another big benefit: one of the largest roadblocks in the way of utility scale solar in Australia is that it's slow to get approval for the large grid connection you need to actually export that power. That time represents a cost that is sometimes larger than the cost of the actual grid connection itself.

I don't see how you can say government subsidies are a "market based" approach

Why not try to just NOT create incentives and let consumers choose?

I got my roof mounted solar by saving for 3 years, getting multiple quotes, and going with what I thought was sensible. At current rates it will pay itself off in 9 years. It's not a great investment but also good for the environment. I wouldn't recommend borrowing for it. Just save for it if you can

Good luck finding a 25 year bond with even close to that rate, risk profile, that also pays after tax returns.

I have solar on all of my properties (primary, secondaries, rentals), but there is a lot of peril in the residential solar install market. Below are some of my observations on the topic from my experience.

You can install on asphalt shingle roofing, but I don't recommend it; unless aligned with your roof replacement cycle, you're going to be paying thousands to remove and reinstall the system (racking and panels) to reroof when the time comes. Install solar on your roof if the roofing material will outlive the initial solar lifetime (~25-30 years). I love standing seam metal roofs for this, as there are friction mounting systems where you do not need to penetrate the roof to mount the racking and PV panels; $$$ but worth it imho. If your roof is coming up for replacement, do not install until replacement has occurred.

Installers are fly by night (lots of sales->subcontractor to install relationships) and it is very likely they won't be around to maintain the system; the only mitigation for this is to find a vendor who is also a roofer or some other business that can buffer from the cyclic nature of residential solar (cyclic from PV panel commodity costs and government incentives). If you're capable, get certified by the inverter manufacturer to get installer access to your system (Enphase University [1] or the like).

Get multiple quotes from installers [2] (a coop buying org is also a great option if available in your area [3] [4]), compare on equipment and price per watt. Research what your interconnect agreement with your utility looks like. 1:1 net metering is best, everything else less so. Net metering vs something else will govern system sizing and panel layout/direction. No batteries unless your grid is unreliable and you have the economic tolerance for it, or there are generous incentives from your state and utility. No PPAs or leases, they are economically inferior with the cost of systems having fallen so much and can make a property transfer transaction more difficult. As you mention, borrowing for this is economically inefficient unless you can get a long duration loan at something like ~3%.

It is a great equivalent of an after tax bond return as Retric mentions, but you must do your homework [3]; it is not turn key unfortunately.

[1] https://university.enphase.com/

[2] https://www.energysage.com/

[3] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/articles/purchasing-power-...

[4] https://www.solarunitedneighbors.org/the-ultimate-solar-co-o...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/solar/wiki/homeownerguide#/c/purple

> I wouldn't recommend borrowing for it.

Not necessarily. Just run the numbers.

I installed rooftop solar during low interest rates. I could have paid cash but my loan payment is less than the power bill it replaced.

> At current rates it will pay itself off in 9 years

One thing to consider, over that period of time, electricity tariffs will most likely go up, meaning that R.O.I. will end up being less than 9 years.

If the Govts stop subsidizing fossil fuels directly and indirectly (ethanol subsidies, defense budgets to protect fossil fuel assets and shipping) then we'll have properly functioning energy markets. It will function perfectly if we price in the externalities: air pollution, climate change, energy security amnd terrorism.

Why Are Governments Still Subsidizing Fossil Fuels? Last year, fuels that drive climate change and pollute the air were underpriced to the tune of $7 trillion. It’s hard to think of a more misguided policy: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-16/climat...

Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Why Do We Accept That as Normal? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/opinion/environment/air-p...

more than 80 countries have policies that support biofuel demand: https://www.iea.org/energy-system/low-emission-fuels/biofuel...

> There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation.

> So the government moved in to tinker with the markets

> But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat.

Typical example of someone blaming markets for outcomes caused by the government intervention in those markets, and the government's poor judicial system.

> If governments are willing to spend billions incentivizing rooftop solar, they can simply spend billions installing rooftop solar

The same thoughtful government responsible for creating a substantial portion of our global warming through car-dependent infrastructure can surely be trusted with the reins to mitigate it.

>caused by the government intervention in those markets, and the government's poor judicial system.

How exactly did the government intervene to make those fraudsters commit fraud?

When the government opens up the feed trough and fails to police it (as often happens), it ought not be surprised when pigs show up this time, just like the last 99 times…

Failing to police is not intervention it is a lack thereof.

It's like blaming your alcoholism on your friends' intervention because they failed to stage an intervention.

The government is charged with employing foresight when designing policy, particularly around financial incentives where the wolves are ready to take full advantage of any available loophole. The incentives need to be perfectly aligned with the desired outcomes, even for adversarial actors

The wolf leaving meat out for the wolves isn't a failure to police. The word you might be looking for is corruption. The fact that they assume we're idiots has nothing to do with alcoholism and everything to do with a lack of consequences. It's not THEIR failure to police the system. It's OUR failure to police politicians. There's no reason to assume they are any stupider than the rest of us.

Government broke my kneecaps, so obviously it shouldn't be allowed to give out crutches, or worse, stop breaking kneecaps /s

It’s incredible how the markets where the government intervenes the most - housing, medicine, education - are also those with the most dysfunction, scandals, cost growth, lack of accountability, and on and on. Yet many think, “We just need a few more laws and tax dollars, and this time it will be fixed for sure!”

ISPs are a good example as well. Hyper regulated in the USA with millions of permits and little laws about everything...

Meanwhile in Romania people just put cables up wherever they wanted and had 100s of bootleg ISPs and now they have the fastest/cheapest internet in the world.

Guess we need more ivy league "educated" professional experts to solve this problem for us, as is the american way.

The American system works like this:

When a new industry develops, usually with totally new technology, we let entrepreneurs run wild. They don’t need permits, making new companies is easy, they file patents, and it’s a land rush.

Once the industry matures and ossifies, and the winners go public and the pension funds and sovereign wealth and retail and everyone gets their retirement in, the American system begins to protect the incumbents.

The government passes laws that are ostensibly neutral but are written hand-in-hand with lobbyists to ensure the incumbents remain. The incumbents get subsidies, they donate to politicians of both parties, they become embedded into the fabric of corporate America.

America is crony capitalist once the players are established. However for small firms and new technologies, it’s wildcats and free markets. VCs not only provide capital but act as the nexus between the crony capitalists and the anointed new firms for acquisition, muscle in legal disputes, credibility, sustaining enterprise deals, etc.

I would heavily reform the system to be less crony capitalist in numerous ways. Despite this, the American system is beating all other large countries by a lot.

It's honestly impressive how productive the American economy is even with all of the shackles we put on it.

I suspect the reason the USA couldn't do that was because of strong land ownership rights. You couldn't "just put cables up" without people getting restraining orders to keep you off their property.

I always figured there was more value in the easements (rights to access and run lines in property) than the actual physical plant on a lot of the legacy telecom companies. They had to do a lot of legal and commercial effort to get those for POTS phones, and trying to reproduce that effort for fibre seems near impossible.

Part of the problem is that rooftop solar doesn't really make sense in the United States. It does make sense in Japan, possibly England, some parts of Europe, and maybe Miami and New Orleans. But in most of the country, solar farms are just a better value proposition.

You've probably seen the numbers that if we just used the land currently growing corn for ethanol fuel, we could power the whole country. And we have a lot more empty land than that. The smart money also saw those figures, realized that there is no long-term market, and took their ball and went home.

Installing stuff in cities — even suburbs — is expensive. Installation costs now dominate solar costs. Modus ponens, rooftop solar loses. The exceptions I mentioned are swampy places where open land is very expensive to build on.

I love how the author blames the market and then goes on to explain the government created subsidies in the first place.

If you let the market do his thing the growth would have matched exactly what consumers wanted.

We also had some moderate subsidies in my EU country but we didn't get fast salesmen and crappy products. The quality was reasonable. I suspect this happened because the subsidies were not large enough to warrant the business model.

We, the middle class taxpayers, just gave a bunch of free money to the people who own houses and who were smart enough to buy solar panels - which happened to be quite rich already.

Surely the fault is in the scammers not the market.

The point of "lemons" is that for some markets, scammers drive out legitimate businesses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

> Akerlof's theory of the "Market for Lemons" paper applies to markets with information asymmetry, focusing on the used car market. Information asymmetry within the market relates to the seller having more information about the quality of the car as opposed to the buyer, creating adverse selection.[1] Adverse selection is a phenomenon where, buyers result in buying lower quality goods due to sellers not willing to sell high quality goods at the lower prices buyers are willing to pay. This can lead to a market collapse due to the lower equilibrium price and quantity of goods traded in the market than a market with perfect information.

Rooftop solar doesn’t seem like a good with unobservable quality that significant (which is necessary for the Akerlof equilibrium), this seems more like people not understanding what they are buying. For instance I 100% guarantee you the rate after the intro rate was disclosed in the initial contract and the people just didn’t look at it. You can’t fix stupid and all that.

Highly opinionated article void of facts. Reaching the conclusion that the government should install solar, not seeing the fallacy in that argument. Governments are also optimization machines that connects the opinion of voters and interest groups, to action. What they spend on is not based on objective good, it's based on what the public opinion is that year. Most people would rather money going into low income housing and fighting homelessness. So the system will end up underfunded and that's assuming if the gov is efficient. I say that as a socialist, if the market is bad, regulate it.

Well-covered ground in public choice theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice

I don't think the argument is that the government should install all solar. But if they're going to put all this money into it, they should put the money into just installing it instead of these gameable incentives.

My solar investments sure havent done well. It doesn't seem to make sense neither. They ought to basically be amortized and pure profit.But they all seem to do so poorly.

renewables are not so renewable as advertised.

I dreaming but man would I like a solar system that I could roll out like a 20 x 60 carpet in my backyard and connect it to a system to provide power or charge a battery pack. Otherwise fixed installation is to costly for me.

"only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory."

lol. markets certainly have their place, but they often need to be tightly controlled in order to devliver societal benefits, not just 'profits'.

Great article, but any opinion about the solar industry that diverges from the marketing is a recipe for downvotes and harassment. Best to keep quiet and pretend solar, batteries, and other "clean" sources of energy are actually clean, while capitalists and marketers sweep the ugly truth under the rug by branding them with one political agenda or another. Most people aren't scientists and they have louder mouths and shorter tempers than do scientists.

> pretend solar, batteries, and other "clean" sources of energy are actually clean

Death/TWH is a good metric. Do you have sources to claim solar and wind are not actually clean?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...

https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

Sure. Here's the first result from a Google search. It has links to research as well.

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

But did I really need it? Why would you expect one solution to be the most efficient in all possible environments? Could it be because of marketing?

Seems like I was right on the money. Downvoted and then shouted out with marketing materials.

Are you a chemist, out of curiosity?

I got my degree at ASU.

That’s an almost 10 year old article, about an industry that has grown almost 10x.

Some of the referenced material includes work from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which has (intentionally or not) spread misleading information about things like hexavalent chromium in PV panels (spoiler: there is no Cr VI in PV).

IEEE Spectrum has some decent stuff, but they also recently had an article about the top ways to reduce global CO2 being adjust thermostats a few degrees and build new coal plants that operate a little more efficiently.

Is it the only article saying this? I'm happy to keep Googling for you guys, but seem to be intentionally ignoring my point.

Is solar best suited for ALL environments? Should we clear vast swathes of rainforest in the name of the omnipotent power of solar? Surely you don't think so?!

> seem to be intentionally ignoring my point.

I assumed your main point was something along the lines of any claims that solar is clean are lies,

> Best to keep quiet and pretend solar, batteries, and other "clean" sources of energy are actually clean

We could probably go back and forth citing articles and search results, but I’ll say that I agree with this recent ~peer reviewed article~ [comment] in a decent journal and leave it there: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02230-0

As to your last 3 questions, they seem hyperbolic and/or inflammatory. I don’t think solar is the best solution everywhere. I don’t think we should clear huge portions of the rainforest for solar. And I never said or implied those things.

Edit: looks like the article I linked maybe was not peer reviewed. Still a good article, though.

Claims that solar has a negative carbon footprint in high sun low cloud environments are founded. Most other claims about solar are indeed lies at worst, and hyped at best.

The article you linked to; the reviewers and authors are one and the same and they all work for the same company. It's a perfect example of my point. These are blatant marketing materials. I could link to any number of posts on HN that cover bribery in science journalism.

Good catch on the article. Maybe not peer reviewed, as I don’t know how Nature handles review on “comments”. But there are certainly editors involved, but that’s maybe no different from the editorial you posted.

But calling it “blatant marketing materials” seems hyperbolic. Similar to implying that I advocate for cutting down vast areas of rainforest.

And are you suggesting that the authors of that article bribed the editors? They didn’t even pay an open access fee (likely were not allowed to due to US DOE funding). Can you even point out lies or hype in the article?

It's beside the point. The point is that corporations are pedaling a "gas bad solar good" blanket statement where anyone that asks for critical thinking on the issue is immediately downvoted, like I have been. Meanwhile my forest is being leveled for solar. It's not a win for anyone but the moneymakers.

> Should we clear vast swathes of rainforest in the name of the omnipotent power of solar?

Where are rainforests being cleared for solar? You are just making up stuff. 40 million acres in US are used for Ethanol (with subsidies!!) just for a small fraction of the transportation energy.

Solar can go on rooftops on all kinds of buildings, there is at least 10x parking area if not building. They can go on top of lakes and conserve water from evaporation. Vertical panels work perfectly with farming with zero land use. They can go next to highways[1]. They can go on landfills, superfund sites, deserts and so on..

[1]https://electrek.co/2023/08/31/why-putting-solar-panels-besi...

10 miles from my home vast swathes of state owned forest are being cleared for solar. Have you considered that you might be unintentionally helping rich people destroy the environment?

All sources anyone will cite I will shoot down faster than you've shot down this article. The fact of the matter is that nearly all publication is influenced by some source of funding. Including the "use solar for everything" camp. So let's be realistic, and scientific, first and foremost. Start by accepting that most of what most people know about solar is marketing. Unless they happen to be environmental chemists, at least by education, if not profession.

https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-env...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01735-z

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environmen...

I can keep going... If you imagined that RIGHT NOW batteries and solar are DECREASING the carbon footprint you are simply wrong. It is a hope for the future based on an assumption that adoption and technological advancement will eventually create a negative carbon scenario. But we're far from that scenario today.

The first link is from a think tank started by a Koch brother and appears to have a history of being funded by coal and denying climate change, second is an editorial, and the 3rd discussed cobalt and nickel problems and does not even mention LFP (which in my opinion makes it either too old, biased, or uninformed to be relevant).

The downvote on the comment you replied to is from a random guy on the internet. Should I care more about that than you care about the articles I posted? Or maybe the bigger picture is that what matters is how much we as individuals and as a society care about stringent qualifications for what we call science?

Hopefully you see the irony in your response now.

Your claim was:

    If you imagined that RIGHT NOW batteries and solar are DECREASING the carbon footprint you are simply wrong.

Your three links do not support that claim, they all iterate around toxic waste by products of concentrate processing - which is a real problem but not a carbon problem, and a problem that for now is of a lesser order than toxic waste by products of copper mining.

None of this deep science, more material process engineering.

The solutions to the issues in your three links are to move processing to first world nations that have a greater incentive to make better tailings dams, to transition mining trucks away from fossil fuels and onto local electricity from solar and hydrogen - you'll see if you look about that processing is already moving an that companies such as Rio Tinto are already transitioning to renewable electricy generation.

Those articles are not related to that claim. Of course. But surely you don't think mining lithium with giant gas powered machines and then shaking it into a separator with more gas powered machines, and then hauling it across the ocean with more gas powered machines is carbon neutral, do you? If you do, let me know, I'll go ahead and help you find those articles that do support that claim. My assumption is that you don't actually need my help for that.

In the case of batteries, it obviously matters what you do with them. Put them in an EV and offset a new ICE on the road? Then yes, significant lifecycle CO2 reduction.

You are implying that it’s easy to find lots of scientifically rigorous publications that show solar, wind, and/or batteries (to be used in better integrating wind or solar to the grid) have an objectively worse CO2 impact than gas or coal [0]. I don’t think that’s true.

[0] I think nuclear doesn’t count, because it is too expensive in the US. Maybe (hopefully) one day it will be economically viable.

There are wrong places to put each of these technologies. Electric vehicles don't make sense on a coal power grid. But that's what we're doing here. Coal doesn't make sense at all. Keep downvoting. It only serves to show that I'm right and you're not listening.

I don’t have enough karma to downvote.

US electricity is about 20% from coal [0], and almost certainly trending downward.

I agree that there are wrong locations/applications for most technologies. But I don’t think you can make a robust science-based argument that wind and solar are worse than gas or coal for the US in terms of net CO2. Or that the Nature article I posted is full of lies or hype.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I am not making those claims. I'm making the claim that blanket policy is not a good solution EVER because it ignores the nuance of reality. And as I'm not able to reply, you can say that saying so is incredibly unpopular. Why? Because of marketing and hype meant to ensure that people who don't want to destroy a forest in the name of solar will not be heard while corporate interests profit in the name of green energy that's anything but green.

Regardless I fault the downvoting and the yelling over rational thought, just as we can see in this thread. You guys pedaling the idea that any opposition to solar is evil are the evil. You guys are the reason our environment is being destroyed because you imagine that what works in your neighborhood is best for everyone and you vote that way without imagining what a blanket policy on electric vehicles means for places still on coal.

Anyway, sure 80% of the POPULATION is on nuclear. But MOST traffic is goods delivery not your driving around a nuclear powered super metropolitan. Those goods travel through the middle of the country where there is no nuclear and won't be for a very very long time. You can read for yourself about why nuclear is essentially at a halt in the US. It's mostly to do with the high cost of meeting safety guidelines that didn't exist when existing plants were built.

Ignoring the supply chain doesn't make you green. You get to live comfortably near nuclear and make decisions for everyone else. But you're making awful ones that ruin our natural resources, destroy our land, and show blatant disregard for how things work outside of your bubble.

You may not see it, but I see every day how "green" energy is destroying the environment right outside my door. We simply need more care, discussion, and nuance in energy policy. Screaming down every discussion and drowning it with irrelevant research isn't going to help the environment. It's going to destroy it.

I’m sorry that a solar project is having such a negative impact near you.

But implying that I’m evil and drowning you in irrelevant research isn’t making me think that this exchange is productive.

It looks to me like the exchange was productive.

I didn't call you evil. That is, unless you are identifying yourself as one of the "guys pedaling the idea that any opposition to solar is evil."

Assuming it's not you downvoting, then I don't think this applies to you, specifically.

I'm curious about what you think about the vast majority of the country being far from nuclear. It makes up the majority of what WILL BE our power demand if all vehicles are EV, just as it currently makes up the majority of our gasoline use. The timing of how, when and for which modes of transport we should be rolling out EVs is critical, otherwise we are simply INCREASING our carbon footprint, all the while also endangering wildlife with batteries. CO2 is not the only enemy of the environment. Good intentions can be as well.

I didn't imply that. I'm clearly stating, without hidden implications, that destroying a forest to build a solar panel is not environmentally sound. I don't care what the CO2 reduction is. It's negligible in comparison to the damage you're causing to the environment.

It hasn't grown 10x because it's cleaner. Growth and environmental impact are independent of each other. I'm not sure if that's what you were trying to claim. I don't see where solar is cleaner, except that the cells are more efficient in theory (we won't know for another 30 years). Manufacturing is still the same. Let me know if I missed something.

That’s a good metric for safe. I think clean is best looked at in terms of something like lifecycle CO2 equivalent per kWh. In which case wind and solar are only beat by nuclear.

Then there’s lifecycle (levelized) cost per MWh, where wind and solar are way ahead of nuclear, and mostly have an edge on gas CCs.

> like lifecycle CO2 equivalent per kWh

Oh yes, the big "scare" of it costs more (in terms of carbon) to manufacture. Does it cost zero carbon emissions for fossil fuels? Fossil fuels after all have to be explored, extracted (from 10s of thousands of feet from the bottom of the ocean) , shipped, shipped to refineries, shipped from refineries (40% of global shipping is fossil fuels), methane leaks from all this extraction of coal and oil, flaring. And all this comes free of carbon emissions?

From the article you cited:

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.

Thats ten years back, Solar panels have been continuously advancing since then, quite possibly payback now is a couple of months or less. Perhaps read the source you cited instead of scaremongering?

I think you might be confusing me and my comment with the person we are both responding to.

I agree that wind and solar are clean and safe compared to almost all alternatives. And much cheaper than nuclear.

Edit to add: and yes, the energy payback on solar is great.

Sorry about that, didn't realize i'm not at the right thread level.

No worries. It is getting confusing in here :)

You can focus on power output and if you're looking to clean that part by dirtying another, then you've won the debate. But that's not clean energy. You're not fooling any chemists with that logic. Clean energy takes into account the input side of the reaction. Mining lithium is filthy, emits carbon, introduces a waste cycle that we have no solution for, and distributes toxic waste across continents, especially Asia, in the current market, and across oceans. This is like the push for recycling plastics that lead to the giant plastic collection in the Pacific. Turns out shipping plastic is worse than burying it. Turns out mining lithium is worse than mining gas. Turns out you'll still mine gas for electric vehicles because you still need tires and roadways. What will you do with the excess gasoline? Have you thought about that? I'm just asking questions, but hopefully you have some answers for these questions because so far what I'm seeing is that people are advocating for electric, solar, etc. while offering no solutions for roadways, tires, etc. Meaning your plan is to mine lithium AND oil. To mine solar AND coal. To mine uranium AND burn gas. And those aren't clean solutions. Those are problems. Those are highly profitable problems.

That’s just the nature of western capitalism.

Australian capitalism isn’t that different to American capitalism, and the interaction of government incentives and market players has produced all manner of disasters here too (child and aged care are but two examples).

But in the case of the solar market things have turned out dramatically differently. The Australian rooftop solar market has worked so well that a large part of the market is now unsubsidised.

> That’s just the nature of western capitalism.

I'm also an Australian, and I think rgmerk is bang on. It's not the nature of all capitalism - just the USA style of it, and only in some instances. It seems to arise from the USA's love affair with free markets, or perhaps distrust of governments. They are two sides of the same coin, because distrust of government means they don't trust them to put the rules in place require to create competitive markets.

For clarity, not all markets are equal. A monopoly is a kind of market for instance, but it's one that favours the suppliers. As other comments here have pointed out, some markets can self-destruct. A personal example is I refused to purchase SD Cards off suppliers like Ebay because fraud was so rampant, and it was impossible to figure which sellers were genuine. Later, SD Cards disappear from Ebay from a while - ie the market collapsed. I bought my SD Cards from stores instead, so that market (for an identical good) worked fine.

A competitive market is one where there are lots of buyers, lots of sellers, free flow of information - in general no power imbalances. They are surprisingly fragile. Government intervention is often required to create them. An example of such in intervention is the EU changing the rules for software, effectively saying software must do what it promises on the side of the box. (Currently software typically has shrink wrap licences that disclaim all liability if it doesn't work.)

In typical fashion, a lot of what appeared to be USA posters here decried the the unnecessary impost on business, and promptly predicted all software producers would move their operations to the USA. Perhaps they will, but businesses can't survive without customers and it's just as likely the customers will doing their purchasing in the EU when they can.

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