Comment by himata4113
8 hours ago
Florida and most dry / sunny states having little to no solar panels is pretty damn wild.
I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy.
I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage.
The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.
Don’t underestimate how politicized renewables have become. You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself, but any time solar comes up in a rural community there’s a whole host of bad faith “but what about x?” comments
Maybe, but the data speaks for itself. Texas, a huge oil state, is loaded with wind and solar and is leading the country in battery storage right now.
Texas looks _almost_ as underserved by solar as AZ/NM in that map, TBH.
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Lot of people died for that pragmatism. Froze to death in the outages of winter storms or overheated in the summer ones. Sustainability was the last resort.
Idaho is as well.
AZ just has some of the dumbest rules in the US WRT to solar. It's a state where every home should have solar panels.
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I was shocked (pun) to hear how my relatives were each reacting to solar energy. One was rural and was concerned about nearby land getting turned into a solar farm. Another was concerned about farmland being edged out in favor of solar. And a third spent some time in emergency response on a solar farm and was off-put by their vastness and the electrical danger while traversing through them.
Coincidentally this video emerged within a day of my conversation with the three of them. I shared it; they probably didn't watch it but it sure was pertinent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
That video is imho his best work, the ending made all the more powerful by how reserved he normally is.
I was going to say that's weird because around here (I live in a rural community), all the new barns going up and many new houses, have solar panels on the roofs. Given the cost to run power hundreds, if not thousands of feet to an outbuilding, it's no wonder people are putting up solar.
However, my general area is somewhat upscale, so that might account for it.
I do have a funny story to share for this specific case:
A landowner wanted to run power to their land, they got quoted 100k and possibly 250k to run less than 2 miles of powerlines.
The land owner fired back with the question of installing solar panels instead as it would be cheaper and free.
The representitive replied with: "Look around you, there's no solar panels because they don't work."
Less than 100k later, the landowner had full off-grid power via solar and a backup generator.
I guess at the end of the day they saw all the sunshine around them and said: "You're right, all that sun is mine and mine alone."
2 miles of power line? 11k ft of line? For 100-250k$? About $10-23/ft?
Sounds about right. I’m guessing the land was far from the right of way. And a little bit off road.
Rural conservative areas in CA are highly pro-solar. Mostly because PG&E is a company many do not like.
I understand why.
The people excited about it turned it into a other-shaming morality issue. That kind of behavior creates opposition. It got obviously associated by the Democratic party and thus a target for opposition for Republicans. The attention economy feeds on making people upset at each other so the fire was stoked so we have a nonsensical moral battle over renewable energy.
If you want to ruin something and turn it into a needless battle, treat it like a moral imperative and start shaming people for not agreeing with you. No better way to harm a cause you care about.
>> You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself
I think it would if it was indeed “essentially free”. Rooftop solar is unfortunately a racket though, and companies price-gouge like crazy and also collude to keep prices inflated.
American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones. I got 3.9kW installed almost ten years ago for just £5500, including all the paperwork for feed-in-tariffs. It has long since paid for itself just in subsidy, let alone actual consumption.
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One of the things I like most about balcony solar is that you can DIY it (at least, in the places I know that have approved it) instead of getting scammed.
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There are so many scams in the solar industry. I feel like a ton of installers joined just to make a quick buck with no effort.
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Sure it isn't up front, and there's probably something to be said about scammers seeing green with subsidy money.
But the very idea of not being dependent on the grid or fossil fuels, if one can afford it and costs are comparable, should sell itself.
But my dad watches Fox News so he brings up lies like how bad wind turbines are for the environment (coal anyone?) or how we shouldn't make ourselves dependent on China for solar (as if we aren't dependent on a lot of bad hombres for our current energy mix or as if receiving solar makes us dependent at all).
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Edit: HN's conversation throttler childishly patronized me for "posting too fast". At least do me the honor of telling me you don't like what I'm saying, instead of telling me I'm posting too quickly when I'm making 1 message/hour.
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In response to dataflow below:
It still reveals an ignorant cult-like derision for renewables that isn't explained by reality. The people who gleefully mock the issues with renewables do it because they have been trained to want renewables to fail, and to see active support for renewables as a signal for softness and liberalism.
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In Florida, the irony is that hurricane is the reason for not having too many solar panels. For example, Miami-Dade county requires commercial solar panel installation to have hurricane-approved solar mounts, which can withstand up to 160mph+ winds. This means installation is very costly. Even for homes, many insurance company will not insure homes with roof solar panel because of hurricane.
That's a requirement for everything, not just solar panels. The price premium for it is not that big since that's the only type of mounts you can get in florida. All modern housing is mostly category 5 rated due to the fact that hurricane damage grows exponentially as it picks up mass.
Do they build a lot of cinder block homes with flat, tarred roofs?
I could have sworn that FL was like top five in solar production.
Edit : it is! It’s 3rd https://seia.org/solar-state-by-state/
Get out of here with facts! We're having a nice hate-session.
Hawaii is the one I don't get. Every building there should be festooned with panels. They have the best opportunity to be a world leader in electrification.
Instead they import bunker fuel. The tankers dock at the power station, which then burns it, to power the island.
Wasn't there an article years ago about how there was so much PV in Hawaii the power grid went negative causing problems for its operators?
The vast majority of natives have very little capital.
The industries with more capital (mostly tourism) don’t usually have a lot of land, or would prefer to use it for tourism activities. They also tend to be seasonal, which messes up the math.
But yes, it is silly.
In Alabama regulatory capture is such that installing solar panels attached to the grid incurs fees higher than just buying the electricity from Alabama Power.
Why not install and not attach to the grid? My understanding is if you have them attached to batteries and not feeding back it is considered off grid in some places.
I don't know anything about Alabama but in California you generally can't create off-grid developments without permission from a local authority, because it's a recognized problem that "off-grid" systems are often under specified, leading to danger for the occupants. And nobody really wants off-grid to proliferate because it would tend to concentrate the costs of the grid upon the remaining users who will be the ones least able to afford it.
For a place that was two miles from a power line, I would think anyone would approve of off-grid.
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I'm interested to read a source on this if you have it
Sure.
> Alabama Power, with approval from the Alabama PSC, charges residential solar customers a monthly fee of $5.41 per kilowatt based on the size of their solar system
> Alabama Power's residential electricity rates generally range from approximately 11 to 13 cents per kWh, plus a $14.50 monthly base charge
https://www.selc.org/press-release/court-allows-alabama-powe...
I know California has reduced the incentives to purchase solar panels. You have to also have a battery backup system which increases the costs considerably. I'm guessing we may have too much solar in the day and not enough storage for the energy created.
The battery increases the upfront cost but also increases the roi very much (at least where I am living). You get way less money for feeding energy to the grid than you have to pay for withdrawing energy(as you said some utilities even limit/forbid feeding during peak hours). In my case that means (Austria): Sell 1 kWh - 0,04€ Buy 1 kWh - 0,25€
Oh yeah, it's just the initial cost goes up and the payoff time becomes longer. And you were one of the people who had installed solar panels, the rewards for it are reduced.
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Don't you have to replace the batteries every few years though? That should be factored in the equation.
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A partly cloudy or partly sunny day produces some insane changes in output without a battery system to smooth them out
There is a limit to the size of the instantaneous increases and decreases in generation that the other generators on the grid can compensate for
I have said it before in another comment - on a related post.
It's wild that Southern US which gets most of the sun - has relatively little solar compared to the North - which gets less sun days - but has more solar.
the damage politics has done to the US is crazy n sad.
Is this blog potentially suspect/misleading? Up-thread someone pointed out another source for PV production with rankings:
https://seia.org/solar-state-by-state/
And here's a different source for residential PV:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1419901/us-residential-g...
Is there any chance that people are jumping to incorrect conclusions?
Sunbelt states are mostly pretty high
https://www.chooseenergy.com/solar-energy/solar-energy-produ...
Optimistically, I would expect to see more panels in raw numbers up north due to necessarily overbuilding the capacity to account for fewer sun-hours per year.
Well also the desert southwest is still relatively sparsely populated, so rooftop solar won't show up as much on a map like this. Plus their power is cheap(er) than CA.
But yeah, you'd expect some bigger utility-scale installations.
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