Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyum | Hacker News Reader

I live in DC like the author and went solar in 2020. I want to emphasize that DC's energy credit (SREC) prices are the only reason that solar makes financial sense here - perhaps anywhere.

Without SRECs, we would be losing money. Our SREC payouts have averaged $380/MWh over the past four years. When last I checked, this was by far the best price on offer in the US. I've seen "solar is a scam" posts across the Internet. Given the numbers, I'm inclined to believe that's true wherever SREC prices are below, say, $250/MWh.

I keep a detailed spreadsheet and have been meaning to write a similar blog post. The short story is that we have made more money overall from SRECs than from savings on our monthly bill.

View on HN

Rooftop solar can't be economically efficient without subsidies of some sort. How could it outcompete the economies of scale of putting an extra 10 panels in a utility-scale installation 50 miles away?

SREC is one such subsidy - which looks enormous, twice as big as the actual retail cost of the electricity! - and the author also mentions a federal tax credit for 26% of the cost.

Note that net metering is yet another subsidy. Try to sell electricity on commercial terms at "we will provide you with energy when it's sunny and withdraw when we want, at the same price" and see how quickly you get laughed out of the room. Granted, in a climate like DC peak usage (AC) is pretty close to peak solar production so it's not quite as bad as that, but batteries cost order-of-magnitude the same as solar panels, and this is asking the grid to serve as a giant battery.

All these subsidies have clearly had a positive effect - rooftop solar is better than none at all, and perhaps there are some secondary benefits in job creation, environmental awareness, etc. But this is one area where the tax breaks would have been more efficiently spent enriching big businesses rather than sent directly to middle-class home owners.

> Rooftop solar can't be economically efficient without subsidies of some sort. How could it outcompete the economies of scale of putting an extra 10 panels in a utility-scale installation 50 miles away?

By not using expensive land (since it's on top of a building that existed anyways).

Utility solar is not being installed on expensive land.

There's likely to be a document somewhere where they calculated that SREC value and justified it by savings on health and other negative externalities of the grid energy that it displaced.

I really hope that is the case.

My understanding is that in the DC case, the SREC values are anchored by DC's Solar Alternative Compliance Payment (SACP). This is a penalty energy companies must pay if they don't produce their quota of SRECs. Currently, the penalty is $480 per SREC, so the energy co.s save some money paying $350-400 vs. the penalty.

In tandem with this, DC is small, meaning rooftops are really the only place you can put panels, and DC requires that the SRECs are generated by systems located in DC:

"The D.C. City Council passed a law in July 2011 preventing out-of-state systems registered after January 31, 2011 from participating in the DC SREC Market, further limiting supply."

Source: https://www.srectrade.com/markets/rps/srec/district_of_colum...

This program has benefited me and other DC residents individually, but I would be much more at ease knowing that this is actually globally good policy. I'll admit I don't really know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com