"solar doesn't make sense in many places in the US. You want somewhere dry and bright, which cuts off the pacific northwest, and most of the north*"
Can you explain with numbers how you arrive at this conclusion? (Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe, so it surprises me to read it)
Most of the US is in fact better for solar than most of Europe (Iberia is fairly good).
However, energy prices in the US are considerably lower, so the bar for profitability is much higher.
The EU also has colossal subsidies for renewables, which obviously skew the market. In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.
In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in.
I understand your point, I just take issue with the phrasing that subsidies for renewables are skewing the market, since in fact they are rather correcting it. Secondly because the oil industry is subsidised as well.
> In a purely market driven world oil would have been phased out decades ago because of all the negative externalities that the pure and perfect market would have priced in.
People who say this don't seem to realize that it was only 70 years ago we were just stopping the use of horses and other beasts of burden to do the majority of farming, and of course, replacing them with tractors... or the impact this had on productivity and availability.
Yes.. oil has negative "externalities." It also had massive benefits and created opportunities for expansion that we might not have otherwise had. The purpose of a market isn't to achieve perfect tyranny in the use of all resources, it's to make the best compromise out of the available choices.
Finally, it may just be that we haven't exactly factored in all the negative external components of our new energy choices. The market, if anything, has shown that it is willing to brazenly lie to the entire world if it senses that there is massive profit to be made in it. I don't know why people would expect the elites of green energy to operate any differently than the elites of oil energy have in the past, particularly when the market has made no efforts to induce the kind of perfection you have imagined here.
You don't need to put "externalities" in quotes as though it's a suspect concept.
It's fine to be suspicious of any entity. But it's not easy to hide externalities. Your suspicion should lead pretty directly to evidence. As it does with fossil fuels. Those who profited from fossil fuels brazenly lied about their own knowledge of their externalities, but the rest of the world could see them in real time. They weren't trying to hide the externalities as much as they were mitigating their legal exposure and improving their propaganda.
I don’t imagine the market is perfect, quite the opposite.
Unless external entities like the government introduce a way for the market to take all available information (or as much as possible) into account, the decisions the market makes will be deeply flawed.
I do realise the enormous positive effects the ICE has had on growth, labour intensity and general wellbeing.
But it also has bad effects and we can move past the ICE now, and in fact we could and should have a lot sooner.
Most of the emissions come from electricity generation though, so no romanticising of the ICE will save us there.
The world panicked about nuclear power 30 years ago because of a Soviet screwup but that was a mistake. Nuclear and renewables should have been our focus all the time since.
And yes I absolutely realise there are negative externalities in cobolt extractions and whatever. That’s why we need the carbon taxes and similar regulations :)
> In a purely market-driven world Europe would not be investing in solar.
Well, maybe, but there's more to a market than buy and sell price. There is also the cost of external energy dependency, for example, or environmental degradation.
Yes, I just got a quote for a solar system here in the US, the price for the system was right around $40,000. Add in the cost of reinstallation when I need a roof replacement, and the break even is when the warranty expires.
Domestic rooftop solar no longer makes financial sense. Panels have gotten so cheap that installation costs now dominate. Utility scale solar can be built outright for the 30% subsidy offered on domestic solar.
So if you installed a 10kW residential system it might cost $29,400 which would make you eligible for a 30% federal tax credit at a cost to the government of $8,820.
However if the government instead spent that $8,820 on utility scale solar it could pay outright for the construction of 11.5kW of solar generation capacity.
> I have a ton of sunlight all throughout the year (almost). What do I do to harness it ?
So as an individual it might make sense for you to take advantage of the government subsidy and have them help pay for a residential system for you! It just makes no sense at a societal level to spend money on small expensive systems when we could instead be spending it on large cheap systems.
Panels cost 4 times as much when installed individually instead of at a community scale. I agree the economy of scale here is just too good to be wasted away like this.
As a consumer though, I see two practical choices (1) keep paying PG&E their increasing cost for electricity or (2) eat that initial high cost of solar install and keep outgoing cost constant for a decade.
And some impractical ones like convince a bunch of people to setup a grid at community scale or do a DIY solar install to keep the install cost low.
They're saying don't bother. The same panels can be installed more cheaply in a utility scale solar farm, and the sunlight hitting your roof is not itself a valuable commodity.
When panel costs dominate the difference in installation costs between residential and utility scale solar don’t matter as much. Those subsidies encouraged investment and helped drive down the cost of panels in the long run by expanding the market.
Now that panels are cheap the installation costs dominate. Residential installation is basically never going to get substantially cheaper so it no longer makes sense to subsidise such systems when the subsidy alone would pay for more efficiently installed utility scale solar.
It seems like we should shift the subsidy to expansion of grid connectivity as that now seems to be the blocker for projects.
The Pacific Northwest is near-desert just east of the Cascades, and transmission lines could carry power to Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC from the dry sunny parts.
The cascade rain shadow is helpful but the PNW is far enough north that you're not getting direct sunlight. And unfortunately the Pacific Northwest is also relatively low population. 4 million for the Seattle metro, 2.5 in Portland. Even if you built out enough solar for Washington and Oregon, we're only 3 percent of the US population. Plus these states have pretty good hydro already. While there are arguments about the ecological impacts of hydro, I think reasonable people will agree that those are now sunk costs and there's not much reason to retire them early.
There seems to be a better argument in the southwest, where we have less agriculture and the hydro power Lake Mead provides is now questionable. which is why there are already massive farms there. Though, without that water I'm not sure who would want to live in Vegas at all. The best place for solar seems to be California rooftops. Lots of population, far enough south to have closer to optimal solar incidence, and arid climate that wont interfere too much.
But all of this means that you shouldn't expect a unified, cohesive federal energy plan. I don't, at least. Instead we should expect different geographies to find different niches, and a much more diversified plan spread across many more forms: wind, solar, hydro, fission, fusion, geothermal, etc. Plus anyone complaining the US underinvests in R&D has to contend with the fact that this publication came from MIT, and was funded in part by the NSF.
> Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe
popular? yes.
viable? not as much. all of the contiguous US is further south than the UK. That means shorter winter days, but also incident angles are bad year round.
Can you explain with numbers how you arrive at this conclusion? (Solar is extremely popular and viable in Northern Europe, so it surprises me to read it)