Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

e360.yale.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 809 posts

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#211

Post by matthewdgreen »

apexalpha wrote: post #173
testing22321 wrote: post #4

Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.72Mwh per year, worth $1000. Tight valley, tons of snow. We put that on the loan for 8 years, then get $1000 per year free money for 20 years or so. Biggest no brainer of all time. Dad in Victoria Australia just got 1…

>Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. €13.000 for this still seems expensive. Are there tariffs on Chinese PV in Canada?

Most rooftop install costs are labor. The PV is now a minimal slice of it. Which is why mandating solar on new construction is such an important policy: don't make two sets of laborers clamber around the same roof.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#212

Post by swsieber »

simion314 wrote: post #191
_aavaa_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads? Yes, and people should be annoyed by this given the underfunding, poor urban planning, and outright hostility by many local governments against anything that dares encroach on the sanctity of car culture.

>Yes, and people should be annoyed by this So you do not use busses,taxi or road travel? do you fly all the time? Do you have stuff delivered by truck/cars or only by air? What about shopping? do you think the items you buy or the things needed to make those items use roads ? In a perfect extremist capitalist word there would be a road tax included in the products and services so you would still pay the text for the…

No, in a perfect world, there would be a use tax, and those doing the delivery would pay the cost, and then pass that cost on to you. You might have meant it that way, but it sounded more like a gov. imposed tax based on the price of goods or something.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#213

Post by mekdoonggi »

pranavj wrote: post #113

The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a f…

I looked into sodium-ion batteries for which factories are coming online in China. The theoretical manufacturing cost of those is very very low, which will make solar + batteries very cheap. I suspect China will reach those costs ahead of schedule.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#214

Post by pjc50 »

altern8 wrote: post #96
torlok wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables lead to energy independence and a more distributed energy grid. It's fundamental to security, and can't be so easily measured in terms of money. The EU is increasing its independence from China via initiatives like the Net-Zero Industry Act. And this talk of "politicians being bought by Chinese companies" is laughable in the face of what oil companies are doing, to the benefit of exporters like USA, Russia…

I'm not sure, I'm in Poland and all we had was coal. Now it will take a few decades to have our own source of power again. Maybe 20-30 years..? What are oil companies doing to drive European companies out of business (not saying they aren't, I just don't know)?

Poland still has majority coal power production! It's one of last places you can possibly blame renewables for pricing.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#215

Post by vegadw »

sneak wrote: post #187
embedding-shape wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there. I'm a…

There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them. > Seems like a no brainer deal This is opinion, not fact. I happen to share your opinion, but enshrining opinions in law is almost always going to violate someone’s consent.

> This is opinion, not fact

Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.

> There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them

Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.

Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#216

Post by micromacrofoot »

DetectDefect wrote: post #22
testing22321 wrote: post #4

Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. It makes 7.72Mwh per year, worth $1000. Tight valley, tons of snow. We put that on the loan for 8 years, then get $1000 per year free money for 20 years or so. Biggest no brainer of all time. Dad in Victoria Australia just got 1…

Missing from your calculus is the cost of creating, cleaning, maintaining and eventually replacing the hardware. None of that is "free" - it is merely externalized to a vulnerable population or to your future self.

I've had my system for 10 years and maintenance has literally been 0. Rain and snow clean the panels. Panels themselves warrantied for 30 years but will likely last longer.

Roof-based panels also take on some roof wear, increasing longevity of roofing as well.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#217

Post by woodruffw »

embedding-shape wrote: post #179
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. >Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. This very well may be true, but taken at face value Canada seems to be paying you around $7k to install solar panels on your roof (that's 8k interest free loan is losing out to inflation + any interest it would have earned). D…

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there. I'm a…

As a renter, I'm moderately more in favor of utility-scale solar subsidies rather than subsidizing private solar. It seems like another way to make the arrangement more "fair" is to subsidize private solar, but credit the grid up to the original grant's amount. In other words, in the GP's case, they would only get $1000/year in free money for 15 years instead of 20.

(This is very low on my list of things that I care about, to be clear.)

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#218

Post by ApolloFortyNine »

testing22321 wrote: post #170
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians. >Canada here. 7.6kw on our roof for $0 out of pocket thanks to $5k grant and $8k interest free loan. This very well may be true, but taken at face value Canada seems to be paying you around $7k to install solar panels on your roof (that's 8k interest free loan is losing out to inflation + any interest it would have earned). D…

> if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads? Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn? Would you be annoyed if people got subsidized life saving health care? It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things. What a shame.

Why are you acting like subsidizing a homeowners free power is like any of these?

If I instead phrase it as "I'd rather subsidize someone's health care than pay for your free electricity", would that help you understand that there tends to be a priority system when spending tax dollars?

You don't have infinite tax dollars to spend after all.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#219

Post by tialaramex »

llm_nerd wrote: post #143
tialaramex wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the UK (which mothballed and eventually tore down its coal power stations) there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada. Lingan Generating Station would be a typical example. Big thermal power station, built to burn local coal, realistically the transition for them is to non-coal thermal power, burning LNG or Oil, or trees or whatever else can be set on fire. If they burned trash (which isn't re…

>there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada. Ontario, Quebec, BC and Alberta, the four largest provinces by population and a heady percentage of the land area, have zero coal power generation facilities. Ontario is mostly nuclear supported by hydro, with an absolute fallback of natural gas. Quebec is overwhelmingly hydro + wind. BC is mostly hydro. Alberta is mostly non-renewables like natural gas, b…

To me "a bunch" is when it'd be tedious to list them. For a few years the UK had few enough that you could list their names, then gradually four, three, two, one, none. Canada as a whole isn't in that place yet, though it doesn't have plans to build more of these plants and they will gradually reach end of life or transition to burning something else.

Coal isn't one of the "convenient" fossil fuels where you might choose to run electrical generation off this fuel rather than figure out how to deliver electricity to a remote site, coal is bulky and annoying. Amundsen Scott (the permanent base at the South Pole, IMO definition of remote) runs on JP-8 (ie basically kerosene, jet fuel), some places use gasoline or LNG. I don't expect hold outs in terms of practicality for coal, it's just about political will.

Re: In Europe, wind and solar overtake fossil fuels

#220

Post by embedding-shape »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #209
embedding-shape wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however. What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there. I'm a…

>I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting? There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a n…

Why not both? One works better for people not living in cities, and the other one better for high-density areas.
Post reply on HN