Solar grants held hostage in Pennsylvania legislature – as demand soars
capitalandmain.com
capitalandmain.com
Why is it that at many levels of US government, there aren't more and smaller bills?
It seems like bills on solar energy end up getting smushed together with bills on police spending. Two or more almost totally unrelated issues.
The naive answer is that two unrelated issues in one bill allows for direct compromise: you vote for my thing and I vote for your thing. Also, usually the majority party gets to bring a vote to the floor so they have the power.
But an advantage to the single issue bills is that you'd get your opponents on record voting against stuff that may be popular, if it's truly what the people want.
You'd also get to pass a ton of items that would make for great PR bites. They might be small in effect but great talking points.
As majority leader, you can force everyone to vote yea or nay, I wonder why they don't use it more often.
The sponsor of the bill starts with a clean, straightforward version of their solar bill...but they don't have enough votes. So they start adding in causes from other legislators who want to pass other things (crime, etc.).
It’s also known as democracy. To my knowledge, it’s how every independent elected legislature works. (For obvious reasons. You’re trading votes and not every constituency gives a shit about the same issues.)
But this is precisely how democracy fails. You have a bill that nobody wants except a special interest group in e.g. Pennsylvania. It can't pass on its own because it's not worth the candle -- Pennsylvania wouldn't even pass it themselves at the state level. But if the federal representative from Pennsylvania can get that bill funded with federal money then they get reelected in Pennsylvania. And likewise for some other bad bills from Florida and Virginia and Arkansas.
But then instead of all those bills failing as they deserve to, they get combined together and all pass, because the constituents in any given district are paying more attention to whether their boondoggle gets passed than whether their representative can prevent some other one.
This is an article about the Pennsylvania legislature.
> instead of all those bills failing as they deserve to, they get combined together and all pass, because the constituents in any given district are paying more attention to whether their boondoggle gets passed
Yea. If something has concentrated approval and no concentrated opposition, it passes. That’s democracy. You seem to be criticising rushed legislation more than omnibussing.
This is an article about the Pennsylvania legislature wrangling over federal funding. And the principle is generic, and the same dynamic applies to districts within a state and state legislatures. If a bill can't pass on its own, why should it pass?
> If something has concentrated approval and no concentrated opposition, it passes. That’s democracy.
That's the opposite of democracy. If 2% of the population is strongly in favor of something and 98% of the population is weakly opposed and you put it up for a vote, it fails. Which it's supposed to, because "take a pile of money from 98% of people and give it to 2% of people with political connections" is a bad bill.
> You seem to be criticising rushed legislation more than omnibussing.
What does being rushed have to do with it? The perverse incentives (horse trading otherwise-unpassable bills for each other; disguising votes for bad legislation as "we had to vote for the omnibus") created by omnibussing are the same regardless of how long you take to deliberate.
Sure. More common: 2% is strongly in favour and 98% don’t care.
> What does being rushed have to do with it?
You described to what “ the constituents in any given district are paying more attention.” That’s a function of focus and time.
"Don't care" is the focus and time thing. Given adequate consideration, anyone would have at least a weak preference for any given policy choice.
> You described to what “ the constituents in any given district are paying more attention.” That’s a function of focus and time.
It's a function of focus and time on the part of the electorate. Legislators can take more time to do something by simply delaying action until the question can be thoroughly debated. Voters, by contrast, don't control the legislative schedule and have a finite amount of time, so if more legislation is created than they have time to consider it, having the voters consider the issue more carefully before passing the bill is the thing where you can't pass the bill until the bill by itself has the support of the majority of the population.
It’s also necessary for a legislature representing diverse interests. California, Louisiana, Texas and New York will care about a ports bill. You know who doesn’t? South Dakota and Wyoming. (We don’t export or import much by sea.) But both care deeply about federal lands. So a natural compromise bill is one that tackles both ports and federal lands. Add the rest of the fifty states and the fact that republics going back to Rome featured omnibussing isn’t a surprise.
Few hundred million dollars for Wyoming, and most of that goes to Canada [1]. It’s not an issue of political salience in the state.
> Many legislatures may have a tradition of extensive deliberation and debate prior to the adoption of laws, which can postpone passage of necessary legislation. Thus, in order to pass all desired laws within a reasonable timeframe, they are consolidated into a single bill and voted on quickly, typically near the end of a legislative session.
> Because of their large size and scope, omnibus bills limit opportunities for debate and scrutiny on the actual final bill. Historically, omnibus bills have sometimes been used to pass controversial amendments. For this reason, some consider omnibus bills to be anti-democratic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rider_(legislation)
> In legislative procedure, a rider is an additional provision added to a bill or other measure under consideration by a legislature, which may or may not have much, if any, connection with the subject matter of the bill.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconciliation_%28United_State...>
It is more responsible than just spend, spend, spend and spend in smaller patches of the year.
In most places, solar is perfectly competitive without subsidies. Take my prosperous corner of the EU. No direct subsidies, nor the indirect subsidy net metering is. .37€/kWh average residential all-in electricity price caused a solar boom anyway.
The short term result of that solar boom is an ever steeper duck curve [0]. Negative electricity pricing more frequently and longer. Lots of creativity aligning production and demand. Think dynamic pricing, energy storage both as heat and electricity, and more. Great to see these products and services springing up.
I see early signs of much larger actors adjusting to the changed electricity landscape. Ever larger scale industrial scale clients are embracing the entire spectrum of solar, electric steam generation, heat pumps and battery storage. Exciting things with the market providing a strong tail wind.
I would argue it really depends and is highly dependent upon the region. British Columbia, Canada is mostly hydro-electric. Are we going to get rid of all the dams for solar in a mostly cloudy and rainy province? We have to choose what works best for the region. Solar works great in Southern California; Arizona; Florida; Spain; Southern France, not as well in places like Washington; British Columbia; or Scotland where alternatives are more conducive to the climate.
Pennsylvania already has a strong market in nuclear; hydro; and wind, with very reliable power when not flooded or ice-stormed. We are also larger then some EU countries, and get lots of snow in the Western/Northern areas of the state that are better served by those other methods over solar. I have also never paid over .12kW/h (.09kW/h now) near a major river. When I was looking into solar panels, my average was going to be between .16-.25kW/h (own-lease range). That's a hard sell to a lot of people with little payoff for most individuals in the state.
In PA, for most of the state, solar is better provided by requiring new public buildings or parking garages/lots have panels, rather then individuals.
> “It was always a financial decision,” Suppon said. “We wanted to be able to offset our energy costs, produce our own energy and only pay distribution [fees] back to the grid.”
> There’s one catch: Tunkhannock’s plan to go solar is contingent upon winning more than $1 million in funding from the state’s Solar for Schools program. Currently in its inaugural year, Solar for Schools was born from a bill that faced an uphill battle in a legislature where environmental bills often die by attrition — a battle that required its creator, progressive Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler (D-Philadelphia) to reach across the aisle and help marry what are often competing interests in the state — labor, education and climate.
If they are really going to save $1M/year on a project that requires $1M, then they can easily issue a bond to cover this.
But those numbers are clearly exaggerated and I bet this entire idea is only going to be worthwhile at this latitude if the bulk of the capital costs are externalized.
If demand for solar is high then subsidies should expire.
Subsidies are just an indirect way of paying someone to do something. Its no more free money then if you like your job, your job is free money.
Its true though, if demand is high it probably means you are overpaying and could get the wanted result while paying less.
Let me put in solar to lower my costs and let the solar company put in solar to lower their costs if they want. Then they can pass the savings on to me (ha ha).
Yeah, roof top solar can make sense but I hate the solar farms. They clear cut a mountain top to put one in. Yes, let's save the environment by ruining more of it...
I don't see what the big deal is about paying wholesale rates for electric generation whether it's a company or resident generating it. Paying retail rate could raise prices if you have a residential vs commercial imbalance.
Is that the big deal? It looks like the big deal is that utilities are being forced to buy energy at a higher-than-market price. If it wasn't legally required there is no way they would be paying retail prices for solar. It'd be like a supermarket paying retail prices to buy their stock - they can't make money if they buy at retail prices, sell at retail prices and have overheads of doing business.
That is a lot of money they're talking about. Such things are big deals.
It goes without saying this all comes at the cost of everyone who's not receiving the subsidies.
You want to boost domestic production but you also don't want to stifle domestic adoption.
So if you implement both tariffs and subsidies, consumers can still pay the market price but will buy up all domestic production first.
This sounds correct to me? But I haven't given really thought about it deeply yet.
This seems like a mistaken use of funds. A 5% rate of return suggests that the scheme should be saving something like $400 million to really be cost effective. These people would be better off if they were just given $156 million in 20 year US government bonds which as I recall yield about 5%. Productive users of the money would probably often even higher yields! Then the recipients of this largess could buy their own solar panels if they want and have money left over.
If someone can't afford solar panels on their own then making bad financial decisions on their behalf doesn't seem like much of an improvement. Cash is a great help to people without much money.
So if you believe that the government is getting some tangible value out of rooftop solar being widespread then you need to account for that value as well as the value for the homeowner.
This looks like lending for non-commercial project; there are guaranteed to be better uses of the money than this scheme even if it is going to end up as welfare. They could even end up with more money for these people and still get solar panels installed by deferring the purchase for 10 years.
A much better alternative plan is ban coal, wait until electricity prices jump so high that the panels generate a 5-8% rate of return, then install them. Which is a terrible plan, but better than what they seem to be doing here based on one admittedly rather detail-light sentence.
When did this become a factor?!
> better alternative plan is ban coal
In Pennsylvania? This is how you get solar banned.
Spivak's comment justified pump installations because of positive externalities. Which is a good justification; but as far as I know nothing similar exists for $150 million of spend on solar panels. Is there a benefit here I can't see? Do these panels protect against storms or something?
> In Pennsylvania? This is how you get solar banned.
Possibly. It is still a better plan than what the article suggests. Buying these panels looks like a mistake from all the angles I can think of. If Pennsylvania's legislature has the numbers and view that it worth making uneconomic decisions for these households there isn't a good reason to leave the non-renewable sources of power operating. In the converse, if they don't have the number or the view then they just shouldn't be making uneconomic spending decisions when they could give the people involved the money as welfare, but more of it.
This appears superficially like it is an unprincipled position that creates no particular benefits but in a wasteful way. Maybe it isn't, but if it isn't it'd be helpful if someone outlined why not.
1. Tunhannock is in a prime area for Marcellus shale natural gas extraction. About 15 years ago, there was an extraction "boom." The town made a fortune off of it and took the town from very low income, PA "dump" to using it for massive improvements. Still not a booming town by any sense of the word, but much nicer then it was. Still a small population.
2. The town has a fortune in its coffers from the gas companies; employees; and other income related to above. In my opinion, they should use that for their solar, instead of getting a grant from the state that could be better used for solar in Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Lancaster; Allentown; or other densly-ish populated areas without large land available for solar/rooftop panels.
3. Tunkhannock is also outside a former major coal and manufacturing region, on the Susquehanna, about 45 mins from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. Except for employees of Proctor and Gamble, it's a relatively poor population compared to most of the rest of the state. They hear "improvements to school district" they think "higher taxes." PA taxes, especially school taxes are quite high, with little payoff or bang for the buck. When you're small town blue-collar, earning an OK income and your property tax goes up 1 mill (the antiquated way PA calculates property tax), there's obvious pushback.
4. PA is Philadelphia in the East; Pittsburgh in the West; Lancaster/Harrisburg in the south and nothing else in the rest of the state. Except for it being mostly woods/forest, it's prime for solar, but we also already have lots of environmentally friendly ways of producing energy as it is: hydro-dams; nuclear; windfarms (as well as coal and natural gas). Our power is also pretty reliable, outside of ice storms, so it's a hard sell to people to want to give up anything else.
5. PA is slow moving in general. We have the second largest full-time legislature in the US (we're 7th in population, 33rd in size). There's a lot of logistics; committees; and procedure with that. Most of our power is in the Towns; Townships; Counties; State (in that order). Just because it seems to be held up now, is not unusual for us. We tend to do things in slow steps, instead of one big leap that freaks people out. Pot legalization is a good example. We started medically; and there's very recent bills being proposed to legalize. However, that didn't fly. What will end up happening is decriminalization then eventual legalization after a few years of that. Everything works that way in PA. We're slow-progressive, with a priority on small region rights. Except for liquor sales. That's stuck in 1929.
6. And last, the most important, and probably most obvious, PennDOT sucks.
https://www.altestore.com/pages/solar-maps-for-the-usa
The desert southwest is only at most around 6 kWh/m^2/day, mind you.
This is horizontal irradiation; a PV module tilted properly would receive more effective hours per day. Also, half the solar intensity for twice as long would enable inverters to be downsized, even if the average kWh/m^2/day were unchanged.
> It looks like big parts of Pennsylvania only average about 3.5 hours of sunlight per day over the year.
3.5 hours of sunlight per day != 3.5 average hours of full-sun per day.
Additionally, if you re-read your page, the number is higher than your claim of 3.5, it's 3 hours and 50+ minutes for all PA locations listed. So you misrepresented what the page describes and you misstated the numbers. What's the point of your original comment?