You must log in or # to comment.
Lack of capitalist imagination
We own the land you need to build the solar panels on.
We own the factories that build the solar panels
We own the solar farms.
If it were feasible, it would have been done as quickly and easily as poking holes in the ground in 1859.
TIL modern medicine isn’t feasible because you couldn’t do it in 1859
Here’s the article this is responding to if anyone wants to read it. Here’s the study it’s reporting on.
I’d say the tweet is at least a little bit disingenuous because the article is not arguing against the adoption of solar power, rather the focus is on what the challenges to California’s solar goals are and what possible solutions might be. The tone is “economic constraints might slow down solar, how can that be addressed?” This is all from 2021, and it looks like since then the slowdown in solar capacity increase it cites as a concern has not materialized, still lots of consistent growth since then. I haven’t read enough to know whether this is because the study was wrong somehow, or that it’s premise that solar installation costs might not continue to drop just didn’t pan out, or that the increased subsidies it suggested came through, but it’s an interesting topic.
It’s colosally stupid to tie solar power generation to It’s economic value. We are quickly heading to a future with climate extremes without doing something different.
Well there is one problem with negative electricity prices though. It’s that you’re gonna have to pay to produce electricity, charge batteries you might not have, or disconnect from the grid. I suspect fancy new inverters allow doing the latter automatically, but people with older setups will have to either do it manually by the hour when prices go negative, or upgrade their setup.
Good news is that negative electricity prices also apply to fossil fuels so there’s incentive to reduce production there too.
Here is an idea.
What if we do something becsuse its a net food, and who cares if there is a positive or negative price because tying everything ever to monitary value is cancer on society.
The reason the price goes negative is that there’s too much electricity being produced and not enough being used. The grid isn’t a magical electricity sink. Things will break if the frequency raises too much due to overvoltage. I hate money and capitalism as much as the next guy here, but this dynamic is based on material realities, not market scheming.
Okay but you’re still free to do that. Put up solar panels and PAY for the privilege of producing electricity when there’s not enough demand.
If you do it on a large enough scale, you can probably bankrupt some coal plants or something.
The good thing about the old systems that are too dumb to take curtailment orders is they are small
Inverters made in the last few years can respond to curtailment orders or could after a software update
It’s not stupid to acknowledge that individuals and businesses make decisions on the basis of money. That isn’t the same thing as giving climate concerns a lower relative priority. You can have climate as your highest priority, and still pursue that priority much more effectively by considering financial incentives and their effects, and to me that is what this article and connected study seem to be doing.
Nothing matters if the planet is nearly uninhabitable.
I’m not sure what your point is
Im saying its insane to worry about the economy when we are facing down making parts of the earth uninhabitable.
I see, but I’m saying that nobody is worrying about the economy here except as a means to make sure more solar power is deployed, in service of not making parts of the earth uninhabitable, and I don’t see how there could be an objection to that.
Because we aren’t deploying it enough, because we are entertaining a return to coal or and fighting wars over oil still.
When we should be converting to solar and wind, reguardless of cost or return on investment.
When the last tree has fallen and the rivers are poisoned, you cannot eat money.
You are missing the point. Why have you, RamenJunkie not personally set up enough solar panels to provide everyone with all the energy they need? You can’t afford it? Well, surely there must be a bank somewhere that would loan you the money. All that electricity would be really valuable. Oh, the bank doesn’t think the economics make sense.
One way or another the economic problems need to be addressed and, in order to do that, they must first be acknowledged and understood. That’s what the article was trying to do. You can’t just sweep it under the rug and figure some sucker will pay for it for the rest of us.
If the private sector can’t handle it then the government should do it, preferably with bull shit war machine funds, and provide it to the populace.
And you don’t think some kind of economic analysis is necessary before deciding if the private sector can “handle it” or exactly how the government can beat interveine?
You’re not exactly wrong about anything, but understanding exactly how the economics break down is important, regardless of how we break down responsibility between the public and private sectors.
Of course this is all academic when the country elects Republicans and the Democrats keep nominating neoliberals. At least with a private marketplace solution it wouldn’t get shredded the moment Republicans win power.
I mean, we have had like a decade or more now to prove out that the private sector can’t handle converting society to solar.
My unscientific personal experience answer to your last paragraph’s question:
The study didn’t anticipate that California power companies would be so unbelievably corrupt and that the price of electricity would nearly double since 2021. We pay $.40-$.60/kWh while the national average is like $.12-$.16 so us Californians are willing to do literally anything to get away from the PG&E cartel. There is supposed to be a governing body that reins in the prices but it’s controlled by the Governor. In this case that’s Gavin Newsom who just happens to own hundreds of millions worth of shares in the utility companies….🤔
Solar panels costs continued to drop. A bit slower, but still. https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication/2025/Jul/IRENA_TEC_RPGC_in_2024_2025.pdf#p91
deleted by creator
Can you clarify how the recycling works? We had BP solar panels and after 6-7 years they all cracked (the crystalline silicon couldn’t handle the sun or heat) and stopped working
If they cracked, your installer may have fucked up. You need to leave a gap between panels because they expand with humidity and heat, kinda like flooring.
They were installed correctly and BP said they were faulty. They offered to replace them if an NDA was signed
deleted by creator
I used to genuinely be against solar because the carbon costs barely break even,
Carbon costs are not break even. The monetary costs include all economic inputs including the dirty energy used to produce the panels. So even if 100% of the $1000 cost to create a panel was from burning coal, that means once the panel has generated $1k in electricity, it has recouped all the carbon output. Because the alternative to $1k in burning coal to make a solar panel is $1k in burning coal for electricity.
Solar takes 10 years to break even and lasts a minimum of 20 years. And 20 years it hasn’t stopped working but is only outputting at worst 80% less power. There are 40 year old panels outputting 80% of what they did when new.
It’s so efficient that I can’t fit my money cog into the machine!
There is literally limitless energy available to us. But as long as the people in charge benefit from people believing the supply is limited, people will be made to believe the supply is limited.
Well, not “literally”, since the sun will one day stop working (it will take a while, though) plus even it is not a limitless source of energy.
But yeah, in practice at the moment given the amount of energy our society consumes is there is limitless energy available to us.
Just not “literally” 🤪
There literally was limitless energy available to the literal ancient Egyptians, as well as literally 19th century literal London.
Why did it take fossil energy to literally reach our present state?
That limitless energy is presumably also literally available to you, why aren’t you literally using it now and why are you limited?
That’s why we need a way to store the power overnight, this is a well known and obvious problem, and there are solutions. Batteries, flywheels, sand bins, etc. Solutions which should also raise the price of the electrons produced, just to make the fuckers happier.
Not everyone who writes under the banner of MIT is sincere.
Screen caps need dates. These tweets are pretty old from memory. It feels like making a joke about rotary phones not fitting in your pocket, it’s out of date.
Your mom needs dates, like even if she’s happily married to your father, great lady.
I dated his mom for a while
I mean, a surplus in the electricity grid is actually sort of a problem, especially if you don’t have any way to store the extra energy.
we can just put a white blanket on top of the panels…
I’m ignorant of the mechanism of solar panels and electrical grids…do they just explode if they are set up and not draining power?
Because why can’t you just cut the inflow of electricity on a signal? I’d appreciate actual answers.
Edit: In fact, I don’t see why “just don’t send the power if it isn’t needed” doesn’t work for any power generation source. In lieu of answers, I can imagine the issue is with the non-renewable resources. Maybe you want to spin down burning generators, if you don’t need the extra energy. So it’s a planning problem to know when you don’t need energy, so you know when you don’t need to burn resources.
But you don’t waste wind if you just let the turbines keep spinning while blocking of energy output. Sunlight isn’t burnt up if solar panels keep slurping while the downstream draw is blocked.
Is this a problem being baked in because it’s assuming “burnable fuel” restrictions?
We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.
Solar panels have no problem if nothing consumes the power they can produce.
Wind turbines can be feathered and the turbine break engaged until they stop, at which point they’re not generating anything.
So negative energy prices are not really a technical problem of renewables, rather they’re due to the way the decision of “who stops their generation” being left to market systems - rather than there being some kind of centralized control, possibly with agreements in place, that decides which generators are stopped first when there is excess generation, market prices just float as offer and demand float and individual suppliers are left to individually decide if it’s worth it for them to generate for a given price or not and thus if they should reduce or stop their generation.
There are delays and inertia in the whole process of signalling demand/supply balance via market prices, so there result is that the price can overshot and undershot, the latter being sometimes all the way down to negative prices.
Can’t it go to some AI datacenter or smth?
Problem counter: 0
Someone should tell MIT about battery storage.
Yeah but once people see the balance sheet in the red that’s a big no no. If only someone smart, like maybe went to MIT could explain how it could be profitable overall…like humans living being a profitiable side effect.
deleted by creator
germany is developing a lot of hydrogen options, which is a surprisingly good strategy in a lot of fields. like, steel and cement can be produced with hydrogen alone, and germany is learning how to store and transport hydrogen through pipelines quickly.
I want those salt batteries to kick off for mass home storage. Less likely to explode like lithium.
the best solar and wind ad you can imagine is russian energy grid attacks and how communities had built diverse workarounds to mitigate the grid going down here and there. it also spawned local businesses to maintain these stations which greatly helps local economies.
There are two parts of this problem:
- If you are connected to the grid and using it you need to pay for it somehow. This is not a capitalisim thing this is a maintenance issue. Deploying lots of rooftop solar reduces the amount people are paying the grid operators for the same infrastructure as before while they are still using it. This could be solved by making the grid operators public utilities again and charging taxes instead of billing electric rates. Either way rooftop solar owners are going to need to pay grid fees unless they are entirely disconnected from the grid (this is rarely ever the case).
- It creates issues where generation may outstrip load as well as transmission and storage capacity. A lot of this can be solved with more investment but if you are earning less of power sales and still need to maintain everything this can be financially challenging.
There is also a third problem where home solar isn’t centrally planned resulting in cases where utilities need to delay homeowners’ solar installations while they figure out grid capacity.
Uh, most countries have a base utility fee that’s charged, and then usage on top of that.
Tried that one?
Most of summer our bills are negative use because we have a fuckoff huge solar array, but we still pay “property charges”
How about just decoupling grid fees from electricity costs? As in a base fee and in turn a cheaper price on electricity used
That seems to be what is happening in some states. They have a minimum price which is effectively the cost of hooking up to the grid.
Then separate the infrastructure fee, my family switched to solar and has since paid $0 on usage, but still pays electricity bill in form of the minimum cost to maintain infrastructure.
Also with a big grid, there’s will be enough industry consuming large amount of power during daylight hours for a long time, that’s why with variable power rates power is still more expensive during daylight hours, you don’t have to worry about the generation outstripping load for a long time, and if we hit that it would be a good news as we can all focus on storing power and phase out fossil fuels.
I don’t see a problem with being disconnected from the grid. That’s even preferable I think. The only reason that isn’t already the case is bcz of calitalism.
I addition to what others noted, this can also create an equality issue. Say you are a working class renter in a town of well-off home owners who have solar panels on their houses. They are likely as dependent as you on the grid when the sun isnt shining, but because they can sell back to the grid. They contribute much less to paying for the grid.
The grid that everyone relies on is therefore disproportionately funded by poorer individuals. Its the same problem with all the subsidies on electric cars and solar installations; you have to be decently wealthy to be able to take advantage.
At least in my area, solar roofs still have to pay the usual service fee, an extra fee for grid-tie, taxes and fees on all the power they consume, without deduction for power they deliver. I know many utilities buy power at the same rate they sell it, but mine only pays 85% (before taxes). Solar people pay just fine for grid maintenance.
Is that 85% based on the flat rate, or an actively changing rate? If it’s the flat rate, thats a super good deal. The cost of generation can easily vary by 10x throughout the day, so if the average price is $0.15/kWh, they might be paying you 13 during the times it only costs 1.
I know in some places the meters are smart enough to track when the usage is occurring, though.
85% of the flat retail rate. AFAIK, no company with a rooftop solar program puts them through spot wholesale market prices. I don’t think my provider even participates in the spot market - they own all their own generation with plenty of excess capacity and essentially no net interchange. They also cap participation in net metering at 0.2% of system-wide peak demand, so there’s very little chance they’ll take much of a loss, regardless.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term. Improved technology and greater marketshare among new EVs today means more and better used EV options in the future, with the effect increasing as the economics of scale make budget models more viable.
It’s not that we shouldn’t subsidize solar and EV, it’s that we should also use incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters. We should be requiring rental properties to add outlets to parking spaces. We should be pushing policies aimed at getting solar on apartment buildings for the benefit of the tenants.
Honestly, we should be working towards getting every building to have solar and battery and reducing our dependence on the grid.
Transitioning to EVs is better for everyone in the long term.
I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.
incentives and regulations to make these options work for renters
Yeah, strongly agreed there. I basically just want my tax dollars to go towards equality and resilience. Instead, it seems that the best the party not 100% controlled by fossil fuels can do is enact policies that still disproportionately benefit the wealthy. I’ve heard a lot of well-off people talking about getting a $7500 dollar rebate on an EV, which seems silly when there’s a lot of people who have never even owned a car worth that much.
I dont believe this (but I’m open to being wrong). I think giving the same amount of money invested into EVs to public transit and ebikes instead, we’d be better off.
I’m all for investing in public transportation, and ebikes certainly have their place as well. But realistically, those will reduce the need for cars, not replace them entirely. We aren’t going to have trains and buses constantly running between every small town in the US. People will still need to haul big items or large amounts of stuff. And even where public transit is readily available, there is still going to be an advantage to being able to go where you want, when you want, in a vehicle you already own. Unless we ban private ownership of cars, people will still buy them because they offer much greater flexibility than public transportation.
I also don’t like that most incentives aren’t set up in a way to support poor people buying EVs. But that wasn’t going to be a realistic possibility until cheaper EVs hit the market and enough older EVs declined in value to the point that there could be truly cheap options out there. Unfortunately, the political will does not exist to simply mandate the switch to EVs. And even if we had done it that way, without developing the market for EVs the transition likely would have meant raising costs at the low end instead of gradually lowering costs at the high end.
Regardless of how we accomplish the transition from internal combustion to electric, it is better for everyone if the vehicles we use are electric. Even if we ignore the environmental side of things, EVs are much cheaper to operate and are much lower maintenance. If that first beat up old rust bucket that someone buys is an EV, that car will cost less to own and maintain, and will be less likely to die because of some hidden mechanical issue.
And of course, there’s also the massive amount that we as a society spend supporting ICE vehicles. There’s the obscene amount of money that goes into finding, extracting, refining, and distributing oil, and the billions in profits that the fossil fuel companies pocket on top of that. And then there’s the added cost to everything else because of the increased transportation costs. And the geopolitical costs. Every dollar saved by someone driving an EV is a dollar not being drained out of us by the fossil fuel industry.
I wish there was a place where smart people could gather to solve problems like this. You know, maybe invent a device that takes the electricity when it is cheap (when the invisible hand of the free market wants it) and gives it back to the grid when the price has risen because there is no longer that much sunshine.
Won’t someone PLEASE think of the prices?!
