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I Bought a House with Solar Panels

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Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#191

Post by ChuckMcM »

vkou wrote: post #175
skybrian wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without explicit subsidies, it seems like rooftop solar is still getting hidden subsidies? If homeowners were paid wholesale rates for the power they provide, with prices based on the spot market, would any of it make sense financially?

No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

I like this argument but I disagree with it.

I will stipulate that PG&E qualifies as a 'poorly run, centralized utility' and based on its billing it cannot provide power to residential homes for less money than a locally installed solar system can.

The reasons for this are worth considering.

PG&E has to maintain a power transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure has a high inspection cost, land use cost, equipment costs, and insurance risk cost (witness that the threat of the being found liable that their transmission line maintenance (or lack thereof) contributed to the most expensive wild fire in CA history).

Then there are the externalities which we don't account for as much in either scenario. Whether it is the cost of scrubbers on a coal plant, the waste storage costs of nuclear, or the gas pipeline infrastructure for natural gas plants that leaks methane into the air.

What solar does it centralizes the manufacture of the energy production equipment with finite externalitie. It provides highly granular capacity that can be deployed without large step wise changes in capacity (this is the 'nearly unused plant' problem where you have to run a plant because the instantaneous need occasionally exceeds your current generate capacity while the average need is staying below that level (this is where Teslas battery farms help energy companies cut costs).

So when comparing systems dollars to systems dollars, Solar with the current economics of about $3.25/watt installed is actually cheaper than poorly run centralized power plants.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#192

Post by wlesieutre »

dragonwriter wrote: post #143
wlesieutre wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a good value if you're launching them into space

Launching a rooftop residential installation into space is kind of a niche use case, though.

Elon Musk needs one up there to charge his Roadster

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#193

Post by Negitivefrags »

merpnderp wrote: post #118
diafygi wrote: post #19

Not trying to discredit or de-emphasize the conclusion, but the ironic thing here is that the utility cost escalation rates that Sunrun had initially calculated were likely based off of pre-solar boom tariff increases. As renewables have started becoming competitive (both utility-scale and distributed), utilities have been able to avoid building more expensive fossil-based power plants and transmission lines as quick…

I'm curious how solar could have put a dent in overall power production needs as peek energy usage comes around 6-8pm when solar panels are producing almost no power. And since utilities need to plan their production around peak usage far more than around overall usage, has solar really done that much to lower utility production requirements?

You might still need to build as many coal power plants, but you don't need to do as much actual coal burning. It's still a win in terms of carbon released.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#194

Post by 01100011 »

A friend was a salesman for SunRun back in 2011 and at the time I was growing pot so I was looking to reduce my energy costs. I got an 8.8kW system(a bit large for my house). I spent probably $1k/year extra for electricity during the first year. Over time, the system started to actually save me money, but it took about 5 years. I also had a bunch of power I was obligated to buy, so I lost the incentive to conserve and ran my central A/C nearly all the time. When I had to sell my house after a divorce, I realized what a pain in the ass it would be. I had to convince the buyer that it was a good idea to assume the lease. I found out things like the requirement to pay thousands to remove the system if the roof needed replacement(one SunRun rep, not my friend, hinted during sign-up that they maintained the roof). The system only saved money if you consumed a lot of electricity. If you didn't need the power, you're stuck paying for it anyway. Fortunately the buyer went for it and I escaped the lease.

Another annoyance was the inverter box that SunRun installed right outside my bedroom. Every morning and night, the system would turn on and off several times as the light levels were close to the threshold. This meant some rather large relays were clicking repeatedly, waking me up at dawn a lot of the time. On the plus side, I got a new breaker panel and had my service rating upgraded from 100A to 150A.

If I had to sum it up, I'd say that SunRun isn't absolutely evil, but if I ever do it again I would buy the system outright, assuming it was economically viable. My personal opinion is that residential solar is a misallocation of resources as long as there are commercial rooftops without solar.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#195

Post by dmix »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #158
Someone1234 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I won't pretend it never happens. But you have to admit there's a contrast between abusing negative emotions (like fear, hate, anger, and distrust) and trying to connect with positive emotions (joy, interest, hope, enjoyment, etc). If for no other reason that it is much harder to get someone to do something they wouldn't otherwise do while prodding at the positive, but almost easy while prodding the negative. The onl…

"Did you know you're a horrible looking person. You're ugly, and we can see your pimples. And your eyelashes look like thin straw. And your mouth and lips look dry and colorless. Your hair is a tangled dry-ends mess. But our products can make you look human again." This is what women are subjected to day in and out by all the media targeting them. They're told how ugly they are, how inhuman they look, how they stink,…

There are enough real world examples of women with and without make up on where it's obviously not entirely a manufactured cost/benefit ratio. There is a real ROI for women who purchase those products.

Not to say there isn't real anxiety and pressures generated but at the same time it's not all some grand fiction created by the advertising industry like some Fight Club reductionist style ideologies like to promote.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#196

Post by pdonis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #154
pdonis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pretty much all sales and advertising is built around creating a perception of pain and/or fear and offering relief for that. No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves (or solves better than their current solution). But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear--let alone pain and fear that is a perception…

> No, pretty much all sales and advertising is built around finding some problem the customer has that the product or service being sold solves “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts . > But there's no need for the problem to be pain and fear “Pain” (outside of it's narrow use for physical pain )…

> “Finding a problem” in sales is very commonly a euphemism for creating the perception of a problem that the customer did not perceive before the sellers efforts.

Yes, but that just omits the crucial distinction between an actual problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts, and a spurious problem that the customer did not perceive before the seller's efforts.

> The distinction you propose is vacuous.

If that's the way you are using the words "pain and fear", that's your choice. But it's not the way I understood those words. I took those words to be referring to a particular kind of problem, the kind for which the customer can be made to feel that they absolutely need a solution, instead of just that they would like to have one. And that distinction is not vacuous, because it explains why the tactic of convincing the customer to perceive a spurious problem might work a lot better if the perceived (but spurious) problem is of the first kind rather than the second.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#197

Post by dmix »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #139
jrnichols wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's terrifying that California legalized this in such a fashion and seems to have handed companies like Sunrun a huge victory.

And again and again, @AOC is completely correct. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNjckHXBNBI There's no laws federally preventing corporate collusion and corruption regarding federal congress. And I would also make the claim it's also true for states as well. This Sunrun contract they peddle isn't good for anyone, except for their wallet books. Just how many homes will have unattachable liens from this debauchery?

People like AOC love pushing these types of these well-intentioned top-down gov economic engineering policies which claim to help the little guy (or the environment in this case) but ultimately either do the opposite and largely just create inefficient systems, promoting graft and cronyism, and generally making us worse-off than before. Often they work for a short period of time before the entire marketplace figures out how to exploit it or work around it. Rinse and Repeat.

Despite constant evidence that it continually fails to do what they claimed and keeps profiting large politically connect companies, at what point to we start rejecting the whole concept in the first place?

Are we continually supposed to believe the next time will be better? The next politician will be more honest and competent? The next batch of over-committed way-too-late patch work of policy with fix the thousand leaks of the boat which they largely generated in the first place?

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#198

Post by vkou »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #191
vkou wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it wouldn't. For the same reason that me operating a coal power plant in my backyard wouldn't provide me with cheaper electricity then just buying from the grid. A centralized utility, even a poorly run one, will always provide electricity safer, cheaper, and more consistently then thousands of tiny private installations.

I like this argument but I disagree with it. I will stipulate that PG&E qualifies as a 'poorly run, centralized utility' and based on its billing it cannot provide power to residential homes for less money than a locally installed solar system can. The reasons for this are worth considering. PG&E has to maintain a power transmission infrastructure. That infrastructure has a high inspection cost, land use cost, equipm…

Oh, don't get me wrong - solar power generation is fantastic in areas that can support it (Which is most of the world.)

Rooftop solar power generation is what I have an issue with. Utility-scale solar has all the advantage that you cited, without the disadvantages of being incredibly labour-intensive, overcomplicating the electric grid, and offloading long-term maintenance to non-experts.

If you are going 100% off-the grid, then yes, local installations may be cheaper (Because they don't include the cost of maintaining the grid.)

However, you'll still have to maintain a national grid - because not all buildings or businesses have the rooftop capacity, or the hundreds of thousands of dollars in capital to install enormous battery blocks.

So, what ends up happening, is that a few people drop off the system, and raise prices for everyone else - including people who don't have the option to drop off the grid. My building, for instance, houses 40 units. It has four times the rooftop capacity of an average home. No amount of battery storage is ever going to let it be grid-independent. Other residences dropping off the grid, completely, just shift costs around - they wont reduce overall costs.

Re: I Bought a House with Solar Panels

#199

Post by linuxftw »

rebuilder wrote: post #177

The article says Sunrun's shares rose when California decided to mandate solar panels on new constructions starting 2020. This doesn't really make sense to me. The reason stated was that developers don't like to install solar because it inflates the sticker price, but if you're taking out a mortgage, then you're probably looking at a payback timeline similar to the 20 year lease Sunrun offers. I don't really see how…

People don't buy houses, they buy payments. Specifically, whatever their lender will give them. Any additional principal balance is more they have to qualify for and more money required for down payment.

If you're thinking "Wow, that's nuts that people would spend 100% of what a lender will qualify them for," then, I say to you "Welcome to America."

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