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Comment by jdmitch | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't sound like it is sustainable to have these subsidies for very long:

- At current rates the Feed-in Tariff pays you 14.9p for every kWh you produce, whether you use it or not. The Feed-in Tariff is TAX FREE and RPI Linked.

- Export your excess electricity to the grid and earn an additional 4.6p/kWh.

(http://www.hanergy.co.uk/why-solar/feed-in-tariff)

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It does if you factor in the extremely expensive, yet largely unaccounted for, costs associated with generating electricity from coal.

Where are you getting your information? What assumptions are you making here?

It looks to me that coal is one of the cheapest forms of generating electricity there currently is. [1]

[1]: http://en.openei.org/apps/TCDB/

I believe xbryanx was referring to the externalities (ie the costs arising from pollution, global warming, etc that traditionally go unpaid by the producer) rather than just the financial cost of producing the power.

Perhaps. But you don't hear about those things with the green power alternatives, either. Like, for instance, the pollutants created when manufacturing solar panels, or the amount of energy consumed in making them and safely disposing of them every 15 years or so. I'm not going to cite any articles here, because at my knowledge level, it's near impossible to separate the biased articles on topics like this. But a simple search for "pollutants from making solar panels" will garner some things to read about it.

I suppose I should say at this point that I'm all for green, cleaner energy, and wouldn't go so far as to say I'm "pro coal". I do, however, think that living in Michigan (which is lucky to have a single sunny day a week) makes me a tad pessimistic about using solar to power my house. I'm well aware that it makes more sense in places that can practically guarantee sunny days 6/7 days a week, but the TCO will need to improve massively for it to make sense in my region.

That doesn't factor in numerous externalities such as healthcare costs due to emphysema and other diseases caused by coal smoke, ocean acidification killing fisheries, rising sea levels displacing seaside residents...

That depends on how you define "sustainable". So far, a perhaps pessimistic assessment of sustainable energy is that it's driving up energy costs, while reducing the increase of CO2 emissions by only a very small amount. It's increasing fuel poverty and deaths from cold weather events, and ultimately it will drive business out of the countries that are building sustainable energy into countries that have cheap energy, by making business uncompetitive. Then, people will buy products from the cheap energy countries that are emitting CO2 (although they'll be poorer, so perhaps they'll buy less).

Calling it a subsidy seems weird to me. Every state I've lived in will pay you if you generate more electricity than you use. You are providing power back into the grid, of course you should be paid for it. That doesn't sound like government support to me.

It is called a subsidy because the feed-in-tariff you get is generally more than the market rate for the electricity produced. Also in many countries, you lock in a certain tariff for many years (20-25 years) so the amount you get paid vs market rate diverges even more over time.

>you lock in a certain tariff for many years (20-25 years) so the amount you get paid vs market rate diverges even more over time.

Isn't that only true if the market rate for power goes ~down~ over time?

It's a subsidy if they're paying residential solar power generators more than they would pay other power sources. I don't know if that is true in the UK, but again to use Ontario as an example, here you get paid almost $0.40 per kWh, while on the open market the power authority pays just $0.03. The difference is a substantial subsidy.

In Ontario you get 39.6c per kWh fed into the grid, down from 54.9c per kWh last year. Worth noting that when you hook in and sign up, your rate is guaranteed for, I believe, 25 years (meaning reductions, which are surely going to continue, impact new builds). It is completely unsustainable and is not rational pricing, but instead is built around the notion of bootstrapping the industry through subsidies, and it does seem to be working -- solar panels are getting more efficient and less expensive as a result of programs like this, which would never have happened had they been left to their own merits.

I should add that the Ontario program also demands a percentage of domestic content of installs as well, again trying to bootstrap a domestic industry rather than simply benefiting foreign manufacturers. As a result various solar manufacturing businesses have arisen here.

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