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Requiem for a Solar Plant

7goldfish.com

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Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#51

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Retric wrote: post #50
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business expenses are tax deductions because business taxes are on profits and profits are calculated as revenue minus expenses. Taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits doesn't work because it would bankrupt every business with slim margins, which is most of them, while effectively cutting taxes for the ones with the thickest margins and creating a massive tax subsidy for vertical integration. > It falls und…

> Business expenses Investment isn’t a business expense. > If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals. Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation. > But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions. Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P ga…

> Investment isn’t a business expense.

Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense today expecting a return in the future.

> Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation.

This is a defect in the tax code. Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.

> Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains.

And then those companies get a tax deduction. Or in many cases they do make those returns without doing those things, because a lot of those companies have high returns by buying off regulators to constrain competition and then charging high margins to captive customers, which is another thing we don't like to promote over the ones actually making productive investments.

> Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.

The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#52

Post by giblfiz »

gwern wrote: post #22

One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines trust. Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like. If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be u…

Hi Gwern, I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional comment I run into on Reddit.

First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities)

Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it.

That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time.

I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted".

For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#53

Post by giblfiz »

bri3k wrote: post #13
hackernudes wrote: post #8

Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth it.

Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge on capital gains from said crypto money.

I'm the original author. I'm not sure why you got down-voted for this, this was absolutely a "tax dodge". The polite term is "tax mitigation strategy", I'm also not sure why this is seen as an openly negative thing? The government wants a type of thing done, they say "hey, we won't pay people directly to do it, but we will subsidize it thru tax incentives"

I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"

Why exactly is that bad?

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#54

Post by giblfiz »

ur-whale wrote: post #25

If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?

Hey, I'm the original author here.

I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#55

Post by Dylan16807 »

kragen wrote: post #46
Dylan16807 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'll have to do your own calculations based on your own site data. I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is not a proper hookup. Straightforward math.

You're leaving out most of the relevant factors, presumably because you don't know them.

So are you.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#56

Post by giblfiz »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #4

Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?

Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit.

Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)

This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#57

Post by Retric »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51
Retric wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business expenses Investment isn’t a business expense. > If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals. Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation. > But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions. Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P ga…

> Investment isn’t a business expense. Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense today expecting a return in the future. > Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation. This is a defect in the tax code. Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous. > Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains. And then those companies get a tax deduction. Or in many cases the…

> Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense today expecting a return in the future.

Investments like land aren’t necessarily consumed. You can reasonably deduct when an actual expense happens, but buying steel etc to be used next year doesn’t guarantee it is actually used rather than sold.

> Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.

It’s a useful feature to discourage the exact wasteful approach you proposed.

> The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.

Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I can redirect money I would have spent to buy something else.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#58

Post by giblfiz »

buckle8017 wrote: post #9

Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing. They should be requiring batteries with solar as well. His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.

Hey, original author here.

  > Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
Yep, very much so. I was well aware that I didn't have a clue, and thought that I could make up for that with professional expert advice, elbow grease, a pretty good combination of tax advantages, and a willingness to learn.

The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.

Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.

You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#59

Post by Dylan16807 »

baking wrote: post #48
Dylan16807 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax credits aren't coming out of the grid somewhere else. The project is a negative to tax revenue, positive to the grid, and positive to CO2 levels.

He's using the tax credits to undersell projects with storage that would have been more positive for the grid. Solar without storage in Texas is coal to Newcastle. Subsidizing bare-bones solar is not good for the grid.

Projects with storage can take advantage of the cheaper solar power by shifting their balance, installing fewer panels and more storage. This leaves the grid better off overall.

Re: Requiem for a Solar Plant

#60

Post by giblfiz »

baking wrote: post #48
Dylan16807 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tax credits aren't coming out of the grid somewhere else. The project is a negative to tax revenue, positive to the grid, and positive to CO2 levels.

He's using the tax credits to undersell projects with storage that would have been more positive for the grid. Solar without storage in Texas is coal to Newcastle. Subsidizing bare-bones solar is not good for the grid.

Battery and and solar with battery have (nearly) the same tax credit advantage.
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