Hacker News Reader

Comment by PieTime | Hacker News Reader

Some countries with state gas or utility monopoly will ensure legislation blocks solar power. Example Thailand has huge solar potential but cheap gas, so they block solar panel installations

Yes, there is inequality as can be seen in Pakistan. But once restrictions are dropped the solar panels take off.

View on HN

Surely you can do what you want within your own home, so long as you don't hook it up to the grid?

I'm also not sure if this fits with the price restriction they mentioned. Prohibitions can't be bypassed by paying a higher price, unless it were to refer to bribes

The systems in the article are hooked up to the grid though.

They're hooked up in an extremely safe and responsible manner, but it's understandable that there are regulations about what can be hooked up, and simply not surprising that they haven't been updated to say "yeah, this is ok".

A lot of solar systems are set up to sell excess power back to the grid. It makes sense that these systems would have some regulatory criteria because you wouldn't want e.g. home solar systems putting power on the lines when the utility company has the power off because of a downed wire or active work.

It's also possible to have a solar system that doesn't do this. Either you have a battery system and if you generate excess power you only put it into your own batteries or the system is small relative to the load of the house so you're rarely if ever generating more than you're actively using and configure the system so the grid is only ever attached to the input side. This should not be any more dangerous to the grid than using a UPS or charging an electric car and if the regulations make it more difficult than that they should be suspected of malicious intent.

The systems discussed in the article aren't necessarily selling excess power back to the grid, but they are sending it back to the grid (possibly for free). Because they work by pumping power into a wall socket.

They do so responsibly (fancy electronics that turn them off when the grid goes down). But it is the case where you are acknowledging that extra regulatory criteria make sense.

But in that case the regulations would only have to apply to plugging in something that doesn't do that. There shouldn't be any forms or approvals or fees for someone who buys a product that does.

I agree there shouldn't be, but I don't think it's surprising that in many places there are. It takes active work for the regulator to look at the product and say "this design is sound, we're sure it won't kill anyone".

It takes active work to do that but not to manually approve zillions of individual installations?

The zillions of individual installations probably aren't actually getting approved, manually or otherwise.

Not if the purpose of the regulations is to thwart them, no. But those are the rules that ought not to be.

Purpose, ought, shouldn't, shouldn't, sense. These are words of minimal relevance to regulations and bureaucracy, which have internal incentive structures that rarely align with any kind of human morality.

Suppose that it isn't literally impossible to affect what the rules are and then if we're going to attempt it we need to determine what they ought to be.

"Need."

If you want the rules that exist and the rules that ought to exist to get closer together, do you not need to reckon what they ought to be?

Well, if you don't have any such compass, your efforts will be at best ineffectual. But an even more likely reason your efforts will be ineffectual is that the change you want to make is to a point outside the possibility space determined by the internal incentive structures of the institution.

Analogously, you might reckon that the best place for a nickel mine would be on 16 Psyche, because that's where the largest surface nickel deposits are. Or you might reckon that it would be good for an interpreter to give an error when the user attempts to run an infinite loop. But, lacking an interplanetary spaceship or a solution to the Halting Problem, these calculations are of little value.

The most effective response I've found to regulations that harm me is to leave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com