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Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

seanobannon.substack.com

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Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#91

Post by epistasis »

sightbroke wrote: post #61
epistasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google AI is not really useful, but going to an actual reliable source from that such as California's emissions inventory: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/ghg-inventory-graphs The graphs seem to contradict those in the article, as the article has a huge annual variability not shown in the government data, and also the article does not show the decline in the "Electric Power" sector that's shown so clearly in the CA government…

Texas has both less people and lower GDP than California yet emits more. How is that not a bit of a disaster?

Well, the status is a disaster but it's an ever decreasing disaster, and when evaluating "do lots of renewables help?" I think it makes more sense to look at the direction of where the puck is going rather than where it started from before the renewables were added. (And one note, Texas' power sector emissions also include lots of "extra" emissions from fossil fuel consumption that should be attributed to the downstream consumers of those fossil fuels).

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#92

Post by tuatoru »

kragen wrote: post #76
_bin_ wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because we cannot afford, geopolitically, to have a hostile rival nation with whom we may in the next decade be at war control our energy. There is no if, and, or but about that. Of course, most of said solar and battery tech was originally developed by Americans; chinese bought old patents, bought companies out of bankruptcy, and threw obscene amounts of state capital at developing it further. and now we're stuck wi…

You can't afford to go to war with an industrialized nation whose energy is immensely cheaper than your own, nor with a nuclear-armed nation. Solar panels are different from oil in that their producers cannot turn them off, so importing them now would increase your energy security, not decrease it. For EVs the situation is more complex because of potential backdoors in firmware, but PV modules do not have any firmwar…

Security is not provided by having stuff, it's provided by having the capacity to make stuff.

Importing now does not increase security.

Edit: one thing the Trump-Vance administration has done is tear through the tissue-paper screen of "rules based international order" rhetoric, exposing to plain view that we live in a world of great powers and international anarchy. As we have always done, but somehow allowed ourselves to believe naive falsehoods.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#93

Post by dingnuts »

chowells wrote: post #62
epistasis wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very true, and I think an underappreciated point specifically for utilities, so I hope you don't mind if I expand quite a bit on your excellent point. What "deregulation" means in Texas is that there's a competitive market for electricity generation, and that those who invest in the cheapest methods of production can make profits, and those who made poor investments can lose money. This "deregulation" is mere…

I can't believe people are using Texas as a positive example of deregulation after they demonstrated quite enthusiastically how broken their system is. A competent electrical system can handle sustained freezing temperatures without massive blackouts. Texas can't. (No, I can't believe they'll do any better next time. There were no market consequences for incompetence.)

if one blackout from a freak storm in thirty years is your litmus test, I'd like to know where you live because I'm willing to bet the track record isn't substantially different -- except maybe in how it was covered.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#94

Post by RUnconcerned »

dingnuts wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it signals that the person is opposed to US foreign policy because they consider it imperialist, but in this case it seems to signal that the person favors an explicitly imperialist foreign policy for the US. Horseshoe theory, I suppose.

no, the commentator is simply proposing actually responding to the imperialism of China by protecting US assets and national security instead of rolling over and taking it because of misguided principles about free trade and intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses. It is China that is imperialist and that…

Imperialism is when you take all the resources capitalists poured into your country because you had horrendously low labor costs and use them to develop yourself into an economic superpower rather than meekly continuing to be the factory for cheap crap for western nations. Got it.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#95

Post by lakis »

IN https://blog.gridstatus.io/caiso-beats-the-heat/ , there is a very interesting quote. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has also been lauded for its growth in storage, but when put into perspective of load, the gap remains quite large. Comparing all-time peak load and peak storage discharge (non-coincident), ERCOT's battery fleet would have met less than 5% of demand, while CAISO's battery fleet would have met about 16%, more than triple the value in Texas."

Absolute numbers are not the right metric when one of the states doesn't care about efficiency and decides to generate more and more electricity. Then absolute number are huge but percentages of renewal are very low.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#96

Post by colechristensen »

dingnuts wrote: post #87
kragen wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually it signals that the person is opposed to US foreign policy because they consider it imperialist, but in this case it seems to signal that the person favors an explicitly imperialist foreign policy for the US. Horseshoe theory, I suppose.

no, the commentator is simply proposing actually responding to the imperialism of China by protecting US assets and national security instead of rolling over and taking it because of misguided principles about free trade and intellectual property that the CCP has undermined for forty years to arrive in a position where they can undercut us on price through human rights abuses. It is China that is imperialist and that…

Eh.

Nixon helped bring China into the global community and the economic ties help bring (hundreds of?) millions out of extreme poverty and built up a major trade partner. Now with China's success the very free trade policy between our countries needs to be adjusted and slowly dialed back towards fairness.

The problem being there are plenty of actors whose motivation isn't "balancing what's best for my country and the world" in a fair way but just "whatever is best for me right now", and the shortsighted selfishness (which in different actors both supports and opposed similar policies for different reasons) really gets in the way of arriving at an optimal outcome for everyone.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#97

Post by philipkglass »

colechristensen wrote: post #79
kragen wrote: post #21

The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world. Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determ…

Regardless of tariffs, solar is still the cheapest energy source in the US and the fastest growing even in absolute terms. We shoudln't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market. We're trying to not repeat the energy dependence on unfriendly foreign powers. We don't want the Chinese Solar Embargo of 2026.

We shouldn't let China overproduce and dump excess solar productions in its own attempts to control the market.

I think that this misreads how the Chinese solar industry works. It's one of the less government-controlled industries in China. It's fiercely competitive, which leads to low prices, rapid change, and periodic bankruptcies. Chinese-made solar panels became popular for the same reason their T-shirts and microwave ovens became popular: acceptable quality offered at unbeatable prices.

I also think that there's low risk of lock-in from buying Chinese solar products now. Solar panels have a typical operating lifetime about equivalent to 5 years at 100% of rated power. In practice this means something more like 20 years in a solar farm in a very sunny climate or 35 years in a cloudy climate. The steady state replacement rate to maintain a nation's solar capacity is therefore about 3%-5% of the initial installation rate. If China prohibited solar panel exports, Western countries could maintain existing solar farm capacity with only tiny outside-of-China solar manufacturing capacity. There would be plenty of time for not-China countries to determine if the embargo were temporary or persistent before investing in more expensive but more dependable domestic factories.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#98

Post by r00fus »

leetharris wrote: post #9
makotech221 wrote: post #5

Gimme a break. Compare China's centralized economy's solar/wind/nuclear production to the entirety of the west's decentralized, privatized economy. not even close.

Good, all we need to do is become China and we're set!

No, but the US needs to actually compete with China. Instead the reaction from leadership has been to utter fail to compete and lambast China as an enemy instead of a competitor.

None of this serves anyone but the ruling class and deep state. War with China is going to be one that the US loses.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#99

Post by kragen »

gamblor956 wrote: post #68
kragen wrote: post #21

The most significant US regulations in the area aren't even mentioned in this article: the prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese solar modules and electric vehicles, which at least double the cost of solar panels and EVs in the US compared to much of the rest of the world. Current US elites grew up in the energy crisis that started with the Arab oil embargo of 01973 cutting off US energy imports, and they seem determ…

China's solar panels are cheap because the Chinese government is subsidizing solar panel production with the express purpose of destroying solar panel industries in other nations. Hence, many countries impose tariffs on Chinese solar panels. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/07/business/china-solar-ener...

More trustworthy link for the article: https://archive.fo/oD56w

This is basically nonsense. Chinese solar panels are cheap because they are produced efficiently, with orders of magnitude less materials and energy than were required in 02012, when the US started imposing "anti-dumping" tariffs on them.

I've read many of the US Department of Commerce filings on the topic attempting to argue that the current prices are unfairly subsidized. The arguments are embarrassingly bad, arguing over things like what the fair price of solar glass should be, or whether the fair price of the labor of Chinese solar panel assembly workers should be determined by comparing to Malaysian electronics assembly labor or Romanian electronics assembly labor. (They settled on Turkish labor.)

Even when resorting to such absurd arguments, the countervailing tariffs the DoC decided it could justify were only in the range of 10-15%:

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/07/11/2023-14...

Finding the original filings in these cases, spanning 13 years at this point, took a fair bit of digging, but it was very eye-opening. See for example https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2014-12-23/pdf/2014-3... and Barcode:4426784-02 C-570-011 (not linkable by any URL).

But, basically, you have to ask, if subsidies are the reason Chinese solar module prices today are lower than module prices were in 02012, when they cost €0.64 per peak watt instead of today's €0.110, does that mean that Chinese taxpayers are paying 82% of the cost of installing solar panels around the world? China is just exporting €100 billion a year of its tax revenues in the form of solar panels, with the intent of at some point raising the prices to above where they were in 02012, say €0.75 per peak watt? When should we expect that other shoe to drop?

Because the solar panel industries in other nations are pretty thoroughly destroyed, except for those created by Chinese companies seeking ways around US tariffs.

It just isn't a plausible story, even if it is being promoted by the same newspaper that promoted the story of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" to justify invading Iraq.

Re: Deregulated energy markets accelerate solar adoption

#100

Post by sightbroke »

epistasis wrote: post #91
sightbroke wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas has both less people and lower GDP than California yet emits more. How is that not a bit of a disaster?

Well, the status is a disaster but it's an ever decreasing disaster, and when evaluating "do lots of renewables help?" I think it makes more sense to look at the direction of where the puck is going rather than where it started from before the renewables were added. (And one note, Texas' power sector emissions also include lots of "extra" emissions from fossil fuel consumption that should be attributed to the downstr…

> (And one note, Texas' power sector emissions also include lots of "extra" emissions from fossil fuel consumption that should be attributed to the downstream consumers of those fossil fuels).

Are you saying it includes the USE of fossil fuels produced in the State outside of the State OR the emissions related to the production of fossil fuels in the State?

The former does not in my opinion sound accurate while the latter I fail to see changes anything because surely emissions from other industries (steel/construction/etc) are included for the State that they are made in.

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