Comment by parpfish
8 hours ago
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.
https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
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AZ/NM have highly concentrated populations, so I would expect to see only a couple of hexagons over Phoenix and Albuquerque. Texas looking like that is pretty bad, but I suspect this has more to do with the data set.
I would expect Texans to independently go for solar, given the... complications of their power market.
You're looking at the rooftop solar arrays heatmap. Page down for arrays and panels heatmap.
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.
Here is a source that claims that Arizona is the #2 state for residential solar.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1419901/us-residential-g...
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.
We had 18x510w panels (9.2kw), 2xZappi chargers, PW3 & Eddi (to heat hotwater) installed ~5 weeks ago. Total cost was £17k (inc. scaffolding, cert, etc), in the SE England, with a small recommended contractor. The UK solar market is full of rogues as well, charging massive sums, many for pretty questionable systems. We had 5 quotes to get there, 3 of which were crazy in one way or another.
We hit our first MW/h of power today. In England. In April. Total electricity bill for the last 6 weeks is about £30, and that includes our driving (previously £150 to £200 p/m) and most of our hot water. If you have the property for it and available investment, the ongoing savings are instant and obvious! My instant regret was not having done it sooner. Driving around on your own sunshine does feel magical as well!
In general, contractor overhead in America is obscene, compared to Europe. We have a lot of regularly capture working to keep it that way, too.
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> American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones
One of the reasons for this is that in many parts of the US, solar has sadly been market segmented as a luxury product, just like other high efficiency products like heat pumps or EVs.
This is enabled by both the prevailing cultural attitudes about efficiency and renewables as indulgences for the better off, and industries that are happy to keep captive high margin markets of those customers, i.e. the continued lack of a US produced low-cost EV.
The American cult of individualism is also at play, wherein collective solutions are shunned vs private ones, which is why renewables and storage are so popular among off grid libertarian types.
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.
The disruption from below cycle is coming on hard here. I'm so excited for balcony solar. This is going to expand solar access for so many people & be such a great thing!
It's also such radically better priced equipment when it's consumer focused. My little Bluetti Elite 100 v2 was $400. It's a 1kWh battery. But as much as anything I bought it because it takes 800W of solar input! On this tiny cheap thing! That's better solar input density than most of these stations, but also, the other guys don't really have an excuse: if you are making a power station like this, it's such a minimal extra cost to integrate a decent solar buck MPPT controller controller on too. 60v 20a capable mosfets transistors have become unfathomably high performance & affordable.
There's all sorts of really amazing units being built. Zendure SolarFlow 2400 Pro doesn't come with batteries but is ~ 1500$ for a 3000w input unit. Not quite as good a proposition (2W:$1 again, but no battery) but is more home sized, to put down another data point. Lots of players & competition, vs the "buy Victron" age! (Still, that Victron reliability.) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Zendure-SolarFlow-2400-Pro-rev...
When there's so many contractors involved, it's like, yeah, give me the good expensive electronics; the marginal cost is whatever. I like how balcony solar is so disruptive from below though, how it breeds a cost conscious
I have one of those terrible fake balconies on the front of my house.
I am working on replacing it with a real deck/carport combo and will probably put 600w solar over it, should be room for 4-6 of them.
That will be a 2-3kw solar install, not enough to replace my entire draw by a long shot, but enough to carve a pretty big dent out of it.
I'm already going to be spending $10k-$15k on the deck/carport install plus the french doors to replace the window looking over the fake balcony, so what's another $3k-$5k for a modest solar install?
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.
This tends to happen when a lot of government “free money” is on the table.
See also: War profiteering.
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.
My local town Facebook group gleefully mocks local solar each time it snows/is cloudy, as if. There’s never been anything (eg, a war in the Mideast) that could disrupting fossil fuels pricing and availability…
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