Comment by g129774 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by g129774 | Hacker News Reader

solar panels on small mom and pop properties (100 or so acres) were entirely exploitative and people in the comments don't seem to realize the nature and the extent of the exploitation. there was an analysis document from an ivy law professor which at some point was the only such source, but now googling for keywords brings up a lot of relevant material. few years back i was helping a number of farmland owners in a row with their solar installation deals, and every single one of those deals took a scorched earth approach (ianal, but i read contracts in my day job)

cleanup specifically is a huge part, because it's an externalized cost burdened on the land owner. bringing up the necessity of documented cleanup strategy in the contract pretty much immediately leads to the solar company withdrawing its proposal (in fact only one company even bothered to politely say no, everyone else just ghosted).

elsewhere in comments people are saying "well panels still work at 50% capacity, so why even dismount", but that's not how it works. the entire installation is leased and operated by the third party, the owners typically have neither expertise nor the ability to continue operating an industrial site past the lifetime of a contract, or past its operational lifetime for that matter. a lot of these installations exploit the old age and the effective poverty of the site owners (those 100 acres are a low-liquidity asset, while the industry they supported is no longer there due to aging population and regulatory changes), the companies despite the good cause they are attached to seem to be interested purely in short term gains, the contracts are all about externalizing as much cost as possible, the installed equipment is presumably all treated as write off (i sort of wonder how subsidies factor into this, i suspect that they are significantly enabling this kind of behavior).

american socioeconomic model somehow managed to take a wonderful future looking thing and turn it (at least in some instances, but also every single one i had to deal with) into a scorched earth, after après moi, le déluge thing. recyclers will possibly improve the situation, at least for the people who are already locked into financially disadvantageous contracts, but that really depends on how much deinstallation they'll be willing to take up.

I work in the industry. While this is theoretically true, in practice it is not.

First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means.

In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning.

Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved.

That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain.

But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice.

When repowering, what happens to the old modules and inverters?

i appreciate your comment, i'm glad that industry is developing mitigations, even if they are profit driven. i haven't looked at solar contracts in a few years (hence "were" in op), but i'm sure recent improvements make them significantly more attractive. like a sibling commentor given the massive information assimetry i would prefer significant regulatory scrutiny, specifically standartization, mandatory disclosure of known externalities, perhaps established by cfpb.

the op link though is about solar installations approaching their lifetime, which means contracts from 10-20 years ago. i'd like to point out that you started with a very strong statement ("in practice not true"), which was then variously hedged. more importantly the fact that in practice the mitigations have manifested ("repowering is a windfall") doesn't after the fact negate that the initial contracts were exploitative. in my experience simply verbalizing and pricing various hidden factors (i used Shannon L. Ferrell's "understanding solar energy agreements" as starting point), decomissioning being one of them but other points in ferrell also played a role, or even just developing a rudimentary payments schedule, ended up strongly discouraging land owners (and smh als the solar representatives). i'm glad that we're having this dialogue though, because i'm sure there was no malicious intent behind those omittions, and solar industry has become significantly more transparent since.

> elsewhere in comments people are saying "well panels still work at 50% capacity, so why even dismount", but that's not how it works. the entire installation is leased and operated by the third party

What is the specific issue with the setup? Is it that the operator will stop maintaining the array after the contract expires? And that land owner will then have to pay to remove the panels? Could they hire someone to take over the maintenance instead? I guess I'm trying to figure out where the exploitation of the impoverished landowner is happening.

Based on the contents of your comment, I'd be surprised if this wasn't on your radar but it's a very informative and thought provoking read: https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/27/here-comes-the-sun-king/

i don't otherwise follow solar, beyond being a strong supporter in theory. i'm an eastern european autist, who used his soviet education to price financial instruments for capitalist. i bought a farm to raise ponies, and got into solar contracts purely because a friend asked me to look at hers. the opening paragraph strongly resonates though. at least the people i deal with are country rich, they have land, they have some savings, they want to leave a little something for their grandkids. i wasn't aware of the details of rooftop solar (another sibling commentor pointed it out also), but i'm smh not surprised.

This is news to me. Where can I read more about this?

And the solar industry is currently repeating this entire mess with low-income homeowners, offering to add the cost of the panels (and whatever else needs to be done to the home to accommodate them) to people's mortgages, oftentimes causing people to lose their homes due to living on fixed/low incomes already.

In so far as most people here believe in capitalist markets, we can agree to disagree. But at the very least I don't think it's too radical pinko commie scum of me to suggest maybe large industries shouldn't be able to just... fuck their customers like this? Over and over? Like I just don't care if people sign on the dotted line, that's not good enough. The layman clearly doesn't understand these contracts well enough to agree and they are blatantly, openly predatory in nature. I don't give a shit if someone has signed a legally binding document that says Solar Inc gets to fuck them, I still don't think it's right to let them do it.

Incentives make it worse, because it provides a fig leaf - we’re doing this because the $Xk incentive is available to homeowners only.

Otherwise if it was a good deal the companies would do it directly, and you’d be able to ask why they’re not and instead selling you something.

> In so far as most people here believe in capitalist markets, we can agree to disagree. But at the very least I don't think it's too radical pinko commie scum of me to suggest maybe large industries shouldn't be able to just... fuck their customers like this?

At least over here in the UK, people got money from other taxpayers to buy solar panels. This isn't a very capitalist scenario. You're right that some regulation around advertising TCO would have been useful, and markets that do well need informed consumers. So add good regulations and subtract incentives; both of these aren't things markets can control. They sound like government failings.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com