201–210 of 329 posts
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Yeah a tax on electricity would make the most sense.
Yeah because who cares about those poor people who need electric to live, right? Most people don't realize that if you tax the externalities, that is basically a regressive tax on the poor.
[1] https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/solar-and-vehicles/opt...
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Yeah because who cares about those poor people who need electric to live, right? Most people don't realize that if you tax the externalities, that is basically a regressive tax on the poor.
That's why basically every carbon tax scheme ever proposed involves remitting the revenue back to people on a per capita basis.
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Politically expedient but dramatically inefficient and less effective is... still dramatically inefficient and less effective. The idea that it's clear that this is "good" relies on a bunch of assumptions about carbon costs that haven't been made. It's not sufficient to say "fossil fuels are bad, solar is good," because then you make stupidly inefficient decisions that limit your overall capacity to tackle the big pr…
The problem is that "dramatically inefficient and less effective" is relative. People are comparing it to some scenario that is simply not going to happen like the state funding large solar and wind farms. Once again, I don't know whether this proposal is good or not. I just think it is a mistake to to oppose proposals that move us in the right direction solely because they don't move us in that direction quick enoug…
As long as carbon costs can't be priced into the market, the solutions are going to be short-sighted, politically motivated/maintained, and inefficient.
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That's basically what we do now, but the trouble is cheap power sources with undesirable externalities win the energy market because consumers want more energy for less money.
Who wants less energy for more money?
There are a lot of nutjobs running around saying they want Coal back, the President of the United States, for example, despite Coal being more expensive than Solar now.
So, to answer your question in earnest, Fossil Fuel Energy Companies and their bought-and-paid elected officials.
I'm having a hard time finding a news article with links to the actual standard, and secondary sources like this Bloomberg article are omitting important details. Does this represent the standard that was adopted: http://docketpublic.energy.ca.gov/PublicDocuments/17-BSTD-01... ? In particular, I wonder what the minimum system size is, in kilowatts. Reporting household system size in "dollars" is a poor metric because…
I believe section 150.1(c)14 of ... http://docketpublic.energy.ca.gov/PublicDocuments/17-BSTD-02... ... actually specifies the requirements.
14. Photovoltaic Requirements. All low-rise residential buildings shall have a photovoltaic (PV) system meeting the minimum qualification requirements as specified in Joint Appendix JA11, with annual electrical output equal to or greater than the dwelling’s annual electrical usage as determined by Equation 150.1-C:
kWPV = (CFA * A) / 1000 + (NDwell * B)
Where:
kWPV = kWdc size of the PV system
CFA = Conditioned floor area
NDwell = Number of dwelling units
A = Adjustment factor from Table 150.1-C
B = Dwelling adjustment factor from Table 150.1-C
(I'm not going to try to copy the table into this comment.)
I also found this document digging around recent additions to the public docket site:
http://docketpublic.energy.ca.gov/PublicDocuments/18-BSTD-01...
It says "The specific minimum size of the system is based on the size of the building and number of dwellings and can vary between 2 and 7 kilowatts output per dwelling..."
Which is less specific, but it's nice to see upper and lower minimum capacity requirements without having to consult a table.
Requiring specific technical solutions is rarely a good idea. For example mandating that all new cars have catalytic converters is a common but not very good requirement. The requirement should be formulated as a goal/limit, not a solution. Having one solution required means you can’t innovate to find a cheaper or better solution to the same problem. The answer in this context would be to require a total net power dr…
Perhaps we should discourage people from building in shady places, but that would have a side effect of encouraging people to build where they need more AC.
A more market-based approach might be to just tax electrical use higher. Unfortunately, that would be a very regressive tax. (I don't live in California, but I understand you have or used to have a sort of sliding scale, where if you use more energy than average you pay a higher rate per kwh.)
Another option would be to require new power generation to be built along with new construction, but allow builders to decide how to do that and allow them to share power generation. For instance, a developer building a hundred houses might put solar on each house or they might build (or buy a partial stake in) a solar farm or wind turbine being built outside of town where land is cheap. The tricky part there is to ensure that any new power generation is actually being built specifically for the new construction, and builders aren't just piggybacking on power generation that would have been built anyways.
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Who wants less energy for more money?
> Who wants less energy for more money? There are a lot of nutjobs running around saying they want Coal back, the President of the United States, for example, despite Coal being more expensive than Solar now. So, to answer your question in earnest, Fossil Fuel Energy Companies and their bought-and-paid elected officials.
The people that want less energy for more (immediate) money are the people that want external costs priced into retail energy prices, but that's just because they don't want environmental damage to be treated as a non-cost.
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Your point is that regulation is needed for people to make decisions that will save them more money. Basic econ/finance will tell you this isn't how the world works.
Well, the simplified Econ 101 models (which might be described as “basic econ”) will tell you that, but actual studies of human behavior will tell you those models don't represent reality in broad swathes of real economic activity.