Cost of solar energy dropped 30% in year; Trump's coal plan won't work

boing
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I mean, everything is domestically manufacturable. Those roof tiles are actually made by Solar City which of course Musk is a part of. It is hard to imagine that they won’t face competition quickly though - after all, they weren’t the first to come up with the idea of solar roofing tiles.

That said, I don’t know why you’d see a net-gain of manufacturing jobs even if they were all made in the US. We’re talking about a product though that is now competing with existing US manufacturers (roofing materials which I believe are currently made by a tons of little companies). Every house covered in solar tiles is one that isn’t covered with a traditional roof which was probably manufactured in the US.

Hell, you might even see a loss of jobs as solar installers would be replaced by roofers. Well… only if the tiles became The Way. I can see them being far more popular for new construction than anything else. Well unless the price ends up lower than a new roof (which is entirely possible as roofing is super overpriced). Then you’d see a market of upwards of 5 million homes/year in the US alone just for the people who are replacing their worn out roofs.

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You can only shingle over shingles one time before you have to tear it all off, per the UBC. Our house, upon next required shingling, would be a perfect candidate for solar tiles.

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What is it about solar roofing that would make it more likely to move offshore than traditional roof production?

In the case of SolarCity, they are set to manufacture in Buffalo, NY, starting next year. (Until they bought Silevo a couple years ago, SolarCity was not in the manufacturing part of the business.)

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I doubt they’ll come anywhere close to the price point of asphalt shingles. Maybe below clay tile, but asphalt singles are ridiculously cheap.

I don’t know if they are more likely to be done offshore or not. I just don’t think it would cause a net-gain in jobs since roofing is already made in the US. Sure photovoltaic cells would have to be built as well, but depending on the level of automation and centralization, it might require less people to build the average pv tile than the average clay tile.

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Ah, I see.

As a practical matter, few people want a PV system so large that it spans their entire roof (or even the entire south-facing pitch). That produces a lot of power, likely in excess of the homeowner’s need, and you then have to look at net-metering rules and feed-in tariffs and such, which varies a lot by state. You can do a smaller section by adding in “dummy shingles.” But… I’m just a bit skeptical about this BIPV stuff really taking off, for residential at least.

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That is only true in a very, very few places in the USA. Probably less than 2% of homes.

Most people don’t live in the desert southwest, and traditionally houses are aligned with the spine of the house running (true) north-south.

My entire south-facing pitch is 22 by 15 feet. That is the total for two large buildings. It will not produce a fraction of my power use, it won’t even charge all my existing vehicles.

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I have a friend who lives in the SW desert and he isn’t allowed to install all the panels he wants. Apparently he isn’t allowed to install panels that generate more electricity than he’s historically used. I guess the power company doesn’t want to buy electricity from him…

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Huh. Seems weird. I know some places don’t allow you to feed excess power to the grid, but I didn’t know they’d prevent you from going mostly off-the-grid.

That doesn’t really prevent him from installing solar panels. You don’t have to feed excess generation into the grid. Just get a Tesla Powerwall or equivalent for night-time use. It still ends up being cost effective in places like the Southwest even without net-metering.

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Without knowing the address I cannot be sure, but unless he’s trying to do batteryless grid-intertie in a place where the lines are insufficient to handle existing load, he’s almost certainly being lied to by local regulatory authorities.

That’s a joke, right? Power companies generally would rather burn their own children than support distributed power generation, because the huge military vulnerability that centralized power production creates essentially puts the power companies in the position of a goon holding a knife to the national throat.

###I will continue this post using infographics, as I understand little else.

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Oh come on. That’s hardly the reason why a lot of power companies have issues with distributed generation.

The real issue is the price a customer pays for electricity is a huge abstraction from the actual cost to deliver that power - much of which is fixed.

So when a customer generates power instead of consuming it, utilities costs don’t go down by anywhere near the amount they pay the customer for generating it. Heck, in certain areas where hydro or nuclear dominates, there are little variable costs at all which means a customer generating power doesn’t save the power company any money.

Now of course, that changes if solar installations can offset the cost of building a new power plant itself, but frankly that really necessitates solar installations buying large battery packs like the Tesla Powerwall and a significant smartening of the grid so that power companies can control when and how much power a customer’s home puts on the grid.

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Power companies (at least in my area) don’t actually generate any power. They just own the lines and meters. But curiously enough the same people who have ownership in the power companies also happen to have similar ownership in large centralized power plants… Exelon, ahoy! …that enjoy militarized protection.

In my region, we’re going to decoupling. Here’s how they pitch it:

our revenue will be collected through a fixed charge based on how much of the electric distribution system each customer uses during peak summer times instead of a variable amount based simply on the volume of electricity the customer uses. The electric distribution system is designed and built to meet summer peak usage. Linking the delivery portion of each customer’s bill to their peak usage assures that they contribute a fair share toward the costs associated with their demand on the system.

But wait, there’s more!

Under this proposal, the regulators continue to determine the amount of revenue needed by the company to maintain the electric system. And, just as before, regulators determine the amount that constitutes a fair return on the utility’s investment.

The regulators, as amply demonstrated by recent history, are both unbelievably incompetent and notably corrupt. So, now that our electric bills are explicitly not connected to actual volume usage it’s going to get real interesting (and expensive) around here…

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Eh.

Frankly, it sounds like all they’re doing is moving to a pricing similar to how commercial internet service is priced where you’re bill is based on one’s 95th percentile throughput.

If their major costs are related to being able to handle peak rather than average usage, then that pricing scheme makes perfect sense. You’re charging for adding capacity (new power plants, more transmission lines, more switching stations) rather than variable costs (fuel).

Frankly, I don’t think it would be possible to create a perfectly fair system for charging people that would make sense to customers since it would require three different charges based on three entirely different metrics.

First, you’d have to charge customers for the fixed cost of operating existing infrastructure. You could get away with dividing that evenly between every person who is connected to the grid. This would cover everything from power company employees to repairs that didn’t add capacity like fixing downed power lines.

They’d then take all the variable costs related to generating power and charge customers based on the percentage of power they consumed. To make it fair, you’d calculate how much that power cost on a 5-minute average and then charge someone based on the percentage of energy they are consuming during that 5-minutes. This is different from charging them per kWh since it properly reflects power generation waste that is dumped into the ground due power plants not being able to deliver exactly how much power is consumed.

Then they’d have to take new capital improvement costs for adding capacity (like say, building a new switching station) and charge customers based entirely on their peak usage for the year (since capacity is related to peaks). This of course means that if you build a new $30 million switching station, the people who spike the power during peak times would pay a larger share for it.

In this scenario, a person who was off-the-grid 364 days a year, but ran their A/C and drew from the grid for a few hours on one day would end up with total yearly bill that wasn’t that much less than his neighbors since the fuel cost for powerplant isn’t that great (maybe $0.02/kWh for natural gas). Heck, if he got his power from a nuclear power plant, his bill would be on average would be maybe $20 less per year than his neighbors who use power the rest of the year since actual fuel costs for uranium are so low.

The flip side to this is that in a net-generation world, you would pay someone monthly for what percentage of total power capacity they add as well as for their variable power generation. If they had a big enough battery to prevent any power spikes, they would enjoy low monthly power bills.

I mean, they are literally making it more cost-effective to invest in solar panels and a large battery system like a Tesla Powerwall since it would considerably drop your summer peak usage compared to your neighbors who didn’t have such a system.

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Sounds more like he is flat out not allowed to compete with the power company.

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Point of order Sir.
Big Miners actually do give birth to little minors

  • at least their wives have a hand in that.
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Not his fault, but gneiss tattoo there. Very uplifting.

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See? See? Obama’s war on coal! Trump is going to hire a bunch more guys to dig more coal! Then maybe we’ll all get some for Christmas, along with a book of coal crafts for the whole family! Maybe you can build cool black buildings out of it.

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I admire your logical apportionment scheme, and it’s far more understandable and somewhat less exploitable by the rich than our local “decoupling” scam, but I fear it would still founder on the rocks of predictable human behavior.

If we do anything based on peak power usage, the rich will either smooth out their peaks or draw zero energy during the measurement period, because they have the capital up front to do so (Tesla powerwalls, water towers with turbines, solar arrays, whatever) while the poor will have no such ability, or even knowledge of how to game the system. Thus, ending up once again with a system that tries to make the poor pay for the luxuries of the rich, which doesn’t work, because they’re poor. Of course the Rand Right will say “the poor will just turn off their air conditioning and sweat, it’ll be good for them!” which is both callous and nonsensical; it’s expecting the poor to behave in a fashion that they demonstrably don’t, can’t or won’t.

If you apportion the operational costs of the existing infrastructure equally among customers, the rich win again, since many of the poor live in high density urban environments where infrastructure is cheaper to provide and maintain, while the rich generally live in suburban compounds on cul-de-sacs, fed by long runs of wire through woodlands that are constantly being struck by falling limbs. The cost to maintain the “tree wire” next to my house is tremendously more than the cost of maintaining street wire anywhere else.

The same is true of capital expenditures; capital expenditures in densely populated areas benefit many people, but capital expenditures that disproportionately serve the rich (around here - I recognize that in other places the rich live in city apartments) are much more costly, so again allocating expenditures evenly is unfair subsidizing of the rich by the poor. Which doesn’t work, because they’re poor; blood from stones.

None of this matters at my local level, though, since our regulatory and governmental bodies have demonstrated massive and ongoing incompetence in dealing with power generation and distribution issues. They are widely assumed to be crooked, but the greater problem is they are incompetent to a profound and astonishing degree; if you asked Winslow, Drexler, Conaway or Karia to derive the twelve power laws, I doubt they’d be able to name the first two, much less understand the implications of infrastructure power factors on what they are supposedly regulating. Polls show that the people here overwhelmingly want offshore wind, and do not want things like giant multistate power generation zaibatsus that are beholden to no single state’s regulatory bodies; but we aren’t going to get the things we want, because the (Democrat* dominated) government’s corruption and incompetence is actively preventing it.

* Sadly, local Republicans are nearly all even worse than the Democrats.

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Reminds me of Florida’s industry-friendly anti-consumer “Rights of Electricity Consumers Regarding Solar Energy Choice” that surprisingly managed to be blatant enough to not pass.

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Given today’s permitting requirements and the ability of any NIMBY protest group with a mailing list and a few lawyers to tie up any major project for close to forever, I don’t think there will be a new major energy facility built for a couple of decades, whether it’s fossil, nuke, or renewable.

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