401–410 of 510 posts
In Australia a 6.6kw system with 5kw inverter runs about 3500-4500AUD installed and grid connected.
The rebates in WA are fairly low for exported power (about 5c/kwh) but you can fully offset your usage during the sunny parts of the day running aircon/washing machine.
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What we need is a fundamental change in electricity billing. The value in a grid connection is in its reliability, availability and demand response (you can demand anything from 1 Amp to 200 Amps at any time, with no notice). The current usage-only billing model is broken. What we should do is pay a large flat monthly fee for the grid connection, then a lower rate for generation/usage, rather than bundling the delive…
In the Netherlands you a fixed price for being connected. The amount varies on the size of the connection. Usually 1 phase 40A is as expensive as 3 phase 25A. Anything above that easily triples in price. Aside from this you have net metering still and you pay for what you consume. No “usage bundle” is included in the connection fee. Also, the companies for infrastructure and that provide the actual energy are separat…
That's...not a lot of power. O_o Is it common to get that little amount of power?
I have 200 amps going to my house, but the master breaker on my panel is 160 amps. My car charger alone is 48 amps. When I had an electric stove, that was on a 40 amp breaker.
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Net metering just doesn't make sense though. Everyone who wants to rely on the grid for power availability ought to pay for grid upkeep costs. Net metering would make sense if it came on top of a baseline "connectivity fee" that covered grid maintenance, but that's not the current policy, would likely be politically infeasible, and would hurt rooftop solar customers financially anyway. Subsidizing solar is a perfectl…
Agreed, at some point the grid will need to spend on storage to enable more solar users. So either you need to have a fee to pay for that, or push the storage burden onto the end users. Make that cost apparent and force people to deal with it and we will find creative ways to do so (like more EV vehicles that can act as storage, as the Ford Lightning can)
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Net metering means utilities sell the power your system produces at full price to your neighbor. They pocket the avoided cost of producing and delivering that power (and during price spikes the cost of fuel can be higher than the value of producing power). Net metering does create stranded assets if everyone does it. But not everyone does. Further, the idea that the utility gains NO benefit from net metering is wrong…
Your solar panels tend to produce power at times when power is cheap - because there is so much solar power. When you do net metering, the utility has to pay on top: They have to sell the power that you produce on the spot market, but the price they get for it is less than what they have to pay to you. It's not a scalable approach.
There’s many ways to do net metering, but regulations are setup to maintain profitable local utilities. Utilities hate it because they make less money by selling less electricity not because it’s ever going to drive them to unprofitability.
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>Would anyone like to subsidize my next restaurant visit by paying for my entree? No? But making someone unknown working class person pay for my $25,000 solar install through inflation is ok? It's amazing how ignorant people can be to the world around them. Let's assume you live in the US, since the article is dealing with those subsidies. The food you're eating - c. 20% of US farm income is subsidies [0] The employe…
>The car you drove to the restaurant in - the US Federal government subsidized your gas (ever wonder why US gas is cheaper than Canada/EU?) US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply and, more importantly, b) US fuel taxes are less. If you actually read the EESI paper you cited, you see that the "subsidies", whether direct or indirect, are actually…
Let's go through your argument (would you believe I did both read and understand the document I linked!?), but before we do that, let's look at some more traditional subsidies that O&G gets in America: [0]
The GAO has reported extensively that taxpayers have not received a fair rate of return due to outdated fiscal terms. For example, Federal onshore oil and gas royalty rates are consistently lower than on State-issued leases and Federal offshore leases (see Tables 1 and 2); in fact, onshore royalty rates have never been raised. Likewise, bonding levels have not been raised for 60 years, and minimum bids and rents have been the same for over 30 years. If a lease is not sold competitively at auction, for two years it can be sold non-competitively for a modest administrative fee, with no bonus bid required. These noncompetitive leases are frequently less diligently developed as competitively issued leases. From 2013 to 2019, average revenues from competitive leases were nearly three times greater than revenues from noncompetitive leases.
Underpriced use of public land sure sounds like a subsidy to me!
Ok back to your comment, let's cherry-pick some arguments you made then get into accounting.
>US gas is cheaper than elsewhere in the developed world because a) the US is self-sufficient in terms of supply
Oh, I was unaware that the cheap gas phenomenon started in 2008 when we started approaching energy independence. Thanks Obama, I guess.
>b) US fuel taxes are less.
You're getting dangerously close to agreeing with me on the subsidy point, but I know we won't agree on the politics of pricing externalities, so I'll just move on.
> the paper does not claim that tax revenue would rise more than about $40 billion over about a decade. $4 billion a year is a pittance for a federal government that collected $4.9 trillion in 2022.
It's an amazing logical fallacy to say "one number is smaller than another unrelated number, so the smaller number is unimportant," but even ignoring that, its still a subsidy and that's my entire point. Subsidies big and small are everywhere and this is one of them. I nowhere made an argument that O&G subsidies are going to bankrupt the US, just wanted to make OP aware of the fact that their gas is subsidized.
OK, now on to my favorite topic: why GAAP and cashflow accounting are different and why that actually matters, especially in CAPEX-driven balance sheet businesses.
1) The Intangible Drilling Costs Deduction - You are 100% wrong here. Depreciation and Amortization schedules exist for a reason, it's not just made up to keep EY busy footing 3-statement models. Let's run with this hypothetical: a business looks to build a well when prices are $100/barrel. In that first year of pumping, they successfully discover that the well is wet and they pay way less tax than they otherwise would because they got to amortize everything all at once. Now in year 2, that wet well is still producing but oil prices fall and it no longer makes sense to keep pumping. So now they have a known wet well (a balance sheet asset that they can restart at any time) and all the retained earnings from year 1 that the government never gets to claw back.
Compare this to a world without this subsidy where those expenses are amortized on expected useful life of the well. In this case, not only does the driller have incentive to keep producing even if prices fall, they absorb some of the pricing risk that the US government currently takes on.
If the US government intentionally absorbing pricing risk (arguably free insurance for O&G companies) is not a subsidy to you then again, we just disagree.
2) Percentage Depletion - In contrast, percentage depletion allows firms to deduct a set percentage from their taxable income. Because percentage depletion is not based on capital costs, total deductions can exceed capital costs. 3) Foreign tax - Instead of claiming royalty payments as deductions, oil and gas companies are able to treat them as fully deductible foreign income tax. tax already paid)
So yeah, not only are these real honest to goodness subsidies, they amount to billions of dollars a year!
[0]https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/report-on-the-federa...
Damn, solar panels are expensive in the USA... In Australia a 6.6kw system with 5kw inverter runs about 3500-4500AUD installed and grid connected. The rebates in WA are fairly low for exported power (about 5c/kwh) but you can fully offset your usage during the sunny parts of the day running aircon/washing machine.
But that said, Western Power's inflexible blanket ban on any feed-in above 5kW (single phase) has had a wonderful side benefit of enabling solar companies to be ultra competitive with the 6.6/5 kW system installs because basically everybody wants the same equipment, allowing much greater standardisation.
Electricity is still dirt cheap in WA (30c/kWh) but that will soon change.
Interestingly, solar has penetrated so far in WA that there's almost no value to the grid operator of putting more daytime solar onto the grid.
(At the very end of the article, some hint is given as to where the author is located.)
Those numbers - for USA, and for 2022 - seem very high.
Author obtained 7.56 kW of panels with a single phase inverter for a list price of USD$26k - which was reduced via subsidies down to USD$19k actual.
Here in Australia, 24 months ago I had 12kW of panels with a 10kW three-phase inverter installed for an on-paper price of AUD$13k (USD$9k), similarly subsidised with government incentives down to AUD$8k (USD$5k).
I'm about 200km north-west of Sydney ('regional' by any definition), and installation involved 3 guys for one full day (presumably they were a multi-day loop to customers in the area, as we're 3h from their base).
In any case, ignoring post-subsidy delta, why are the list prices so savagely different? I know all these panels and inverters come out of China, but I'd have expected stateside pricing to be much more competitive a year ago than rural Straya pricing two years ago.
In terms of finances / payback - author seems to overlook one (mostly positive) feature, which is the behavioural changes of 'free' power. It's summer here now which means regular 40C+ temperatures, and so the air conditioners (3 x 500W max draw) go on daily, automatically, for 10:00/17:00. This obviously improves QoL but also some non-obvious benefits - extends shelf life of food, takes a significant load off the fridge, etc.
Basically, a raw comparison of before/after often won't be as compelling as it assumes no changes to how you consumer power. I've got $0.33 export / $0.07 per kWh, so the trade-off is slightly simpler to calculate -- along with the installation of an $80 timer switch for the 1800W HWS (only draws power during the middle of the day) I calculate effective payback for me is in the order of 3-4 years.
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Just bake new panels into the cost of a new roof. It's probably time for both after 25 years.
Eh? My crappy roof was installed in 1945 and has some life left. What sort of roofing lasts 25 years?
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In my state, generation is still pretty "regulated" and the cost of generation is a separate line item on my bill, technically from a different company, from distribution. There's no reason at all I shouldn't be paid the same price per kWh for generation.
That depends what "generation" includes. It probably also includes the transmission and stepping up and all of the equipment to deliver it to the distributor. If you are grid tied, you are still using that system as a backup at minimum and should contribute to its upkeep. Therefore you should be paid accordingly. I don't think there is much objection to paying for solar excess at the bulk rate.
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> You can still totally offset your own actual consumption at retail rate AFAIK, most home solar is not set up this way. You don't use the energy from your solar panels. The solar panels feed directly into the grid, and your usage comes directly out of the grid. So if you use 100kwh, and generate 100kwh, then you will pay 100kwh at retail rate, and receive 100kwh at wholesale rate.
Hmm, I've never heard of such a setup, actually. Usually these kinds of generators are called "behind-the-meter" because they are literally behind the electric meter, so any generation you make is directly used by your house, and any excess crosses the meter. At least this web page (from a utility in NE-ISO) indicates that solar generation is still behind the meter even in a net generation setting: https://www.boston…