401–410 of 427 posts
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There's also the electricity transport costs. We're talking about the pure electricity cost here.
Yeah, I guess this is covered by "grid charge" which keeps going up with more solar.
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> When I lived in Beijing, the apartment buildings I lived in usually had solar hot water was that recently? I lived there from 2011-2017 and solar power was virtually unheard of, much less powering any buildings. But yeah, China is that kind of place that the city decides when you get heating in your apartment (Nov 15 IIRC, so early Nov could be _really_ cold inside; we wore our coats).
That was way back in 2008! Solar has been in China for a long time, but they were using it directly to warm the water, not via photovalic panels (which is why the results were so bad).
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> often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months "[I]n winter months"? My stupid northern hemisphere brain did a double take; I needed to remind myself that Christmas (December) is summer!
It's got nothing to do with the hemisphere. Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.
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Loans for non-trivially profitable investments don't require government interest subsidies.
The recipient doesn't necessarily know ahead of time how profitable the investment will be. Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high. By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk so that individual loan recipients hesitate less to make the positive-expectation investment.
Neither does the government.
> Risk aversion will cause them to avoid investments that are profitable in expectation if they believe the chance of ending up worse off is too high.
Risk aversion works both ways. The risk of not making the investment is that electricity prices in the evening get too high and then you have to pay them. If you install the batteries then you have a known fixed loan payment. If you don't you have an unpredictable variable electric bill. Which one triggers more risk aversion?
> By offering interest-free loans, the government can pool that risk
Risk pools don't work for correlated risk. The primary financial risk is that too many people install batteries -- which subsidies make more likely -- causing the price differential between various times of day to become too small to justify the investment. And that can happen even with interest subsidies. So then you have the government expending tax money to not just cause the people who would have installed them anyway to end up underwater, but to increase the number of such people.
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Loans for non-trivially profitable investments don't require government interest subsidies.
Well... >>> If it has a $100/mo loan payment and saves $150/mo on the electric bill then you take out a loan or buy it on an installment plan and don't need to have any accumulated capital in order to do it. This depends on whether you'll pay back the loan. Just because paying the loan back saves you $50 / month forever starting immediately doesn't mean you'll do it. You might be the kind of person who takes out a lo…
In which case you shouldn't be able to get the loan regardless of an interest subsidy, because you won't pay it back.
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I'm honestly having trouble comprehending what your position is supposed to be here. It really seems to be that using the money to lower taxes on ordinary people rather than providing them with subsidies is a thing that could never happen. As if the prospect that their taxes could be lower than they are now, rather than only the same or higher, is something you can't even imagine.
Well off people do not allocate capital in a way that's socially or economically (on a national level) optimal. So the government has to do that for them (even if those who the majority of taxes personally benefit less from that than if they were allowed to keep that money). I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. After all there are hardly any personal incentives for individuals to invest into infrastructure, ed…
But we're talking about a government subsidy for something people do have a personal incentive to invest in.
On top of that, the misalignment of incentives applies even more to government officials, who have perverse incentives to enrich cronies, make inefficient transfers to special interests in a specific range of "not currently voting for them but close enough to the line to be worth paying off" at the expense of the public at large, or just not care about getting a given thing right because their position is being secured by something unrelated.
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> In my mind it's all a coordination problem. But that's the point. It isn't. Electricity costs more in the evening than during the day and there is a technology that can profitably be used to arbitrage the difference. There is no coordination problem at all, people have the direct individual incentive to buy the technology, on credit if necessary, without any form of government subsidy or involvement whatsoever.
That cow is looking too spherical for my tastes. Credit is another thing which is highly intertwined with goverment involvement.
Its because they have NO economical way to store it to sell for night time usage.
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But it’s also environmentally better for you to take the resistive heating thing. As long as you never need to heat it up outside of the noon-window that’s strictly positive. Because the “additional” solar panels will be necessary anyways to cover the night/late evening usage. The optimal buildout will always have superfluous energy at noon. That’s fine. We just need to get over the whole “energy costs anything” thin…
But it not entirely true. While renewables can cover well over 100% of daytime usage on most days in summer in my region, we are down to about 40% during winter. We need lots more solar panels and wind turbines and enough battery to get us through energy droughts, and installation and maintenance has economic and environmental costs. Much less than other forms of generation, but costs nonetheless. If everyone stops c…
If that’s the case, then we really don’t have to care about usage amounts _during the surplus time_. That in turn will enable completely different patterns. I think the correct analogy is the movement from candles/gas lights to electric lights. Before electricity was widely available nearly everything in life had to be done during daylight hours. Today we don’t even think twice about whether a meal can be cooked “after dark” or to move to a different location or ...
And yes that means I say: We will provide electric power for free [2], just like we do with street lighting
[1] let’s just call all replacements of cells and inverters maintenance for this discussion here [2] at the point of consumption. But that happens if the cost is smaller than the implementation of the sales system
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> often had negative quarterly invoices (i.e. got paid by our retailer) ... esp. in winter months "[I]n winter months"? My stupid northern hemisphere brain did a double take; I needed to remind myself that Christmas (December) is summer!
It's got nothing to do with the hemisphere. Most likely the aircon is running less in winter so they don't use as much power. There is not much of a winter in the tropics.