Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumJoe Biden's Solar Plan and the Prescience of Jimmy Carter
The Biden Administrations announcement on Wednesday of a plan that could set the country on a course to generate forty-five per cent of its electricity from solar panels by mid-century mightmightsomeday be remembered as one of those moments that mattered. Thats because it sets a physical target whose progress will be relatively easy to measureits the energy equivalent of announcing that before this decade is out we will achieve the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. This plan is much more ambitious, though: the Apollo project focussed all the nations technological might on moving one person; this is more akin to landing all of us somewhere very new. But physical targets are easier to track and understand than, say, the squishy and amorphous chatter about net zero emissions and so forth. Observers will be able to track with ease our progress and see if future Administrations are keeping up the pace.
By itself, of course, converting one countrys electricity system to run nearly half on solar is not going to curtail global warming. But an effort at this scale will move us fast along the learning curve: the cost of solar has regularly fallen about thirty per cent with each doubling of capacityso increasing its scale from less than four per cent, which it is at present, to forty-five per cent should make what is already the cheapest energy on Earth far cheaper still.
There are plenty of pitfalls. For one, a target is only as good as the money behind it; Congress needs to step up and start appropriating, and the $3.5-trillion budget plan could be the first down payment on that task. (A task made much more difficult by news that much of corporate America is throwing down hard to stop parts of it.) And the political problems only start there: siting solar farms often kicks up local opposition from people who dont want to look at them. Even in green Vermont, where I live, this is a budding problem.
And there are deep questions about whether weve even got the metals and other materials left to make it happenin a recent paper, Megan K. Seibert and William E. Rees argue that proponents have failed to address questions such as how gigatons of already severely depleted metals and minerals essential to building so-called RE technologies will be available in perpetuity. The London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, however, has recently made a case that material constraints will steadily become less of an issue; for the moment, the regularly falling cost of solar seems to make their case. And, as Saul Griffith, the author of the forthcoming book Electrify, says, using renewables requires far less in the way of materials than a fossil-fuel-based energy system.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/joe-bidens-solar-plan-and-the-prescience-of-jimmy-carter
Botany
(70,294 posts)... in our energy systems. Manchin and Sinema are willing to sell out the planet to protect the fossil
fuel industries because they are pulling in God only knows how much cash right now.
"The Biden Administrations announcement on Wednesday of a plan that could set the country on a course
to generate forty-five per cent of its electricity from solar panels by mid-century ..."
NNadir
(33,368 posts)The solar fantasy, now loudly reported for more than a half a century, did nothing to address climate change, is doing nothing to address climate change and will do nothing to address climate change.
We hit 420 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere this spring, less than 10 years after we first hit 400 ppm. We did this with all kinds of loud screaming cheering for solar energy all around the world.
Solar energy is a failure, an expensive failure to boot, and future generations will be tasked with cleaning up the intractable mess it leaves behind.
I love the President, but in a reactionary return to Jimmy Carter's ill fated rhetoric, he's making a big mistake. Quietly, without much fanfare, other agencies in the Department of Energy are doing much more important work, but because of fear and ignorance it is not publicly feasible to trumpet it.
orwell
(7,754 posts)...make the solar energy tax credit permanent AND refundable.
Nothing has fostered private solar ownership more than this credit.
Also increase the credit to 35% permanently.
You don't need to build large solar farms if you distribute the solar generation to every rooftop.
Also make the tax credit for off grid storage 35% AND refundable!
Make the off grid storage smart so it can feed the grid when it needs to.
Force utilities to pay at market rates instead of wholesale rates when they tap home storage.
NNadir
(33,368 posts)That's precisely what California, the solar "paradise" is doing.
August 20, 2021: California Will Add Gas-Fired Units to Increase Power Supply
There is no rational reason and no ethical reason to massively subsidize the solar industry, with the subsidies going to rich people at the expense of poor people.
The solar industry is not clean, it is not "green," and it is not sustainable, and all the pleading by bourgeois homeowners to get subsidies so that people living hand to mouth in tiny apartments cannot afford access to electricity.
It is true in a purely thermodynamic, and thus environmental sense, that continuous energy production is vastly superior to unreliable and discontinuous energy.
It's seldom noticed in all the bourgeois handwaving about solar PV energy that the sun goes down. When it is noticed, people begin fantasizing about batteries, again with bourgeois indifference to, for one example, whether the world will run out of cobalt for child slaves to dig in the DRC so we can all feel "green" in the United States.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)Incentivize donations for solar at non-profits (they are currently at a 28% disadvantage) - utilities are nothing but overhead for them.
Big push for community solar - many reasons for this
- your roof doesn't face South and doesn't have the optimum pitch
- People who haven't put down roots - the credits should follow them where-ever they go
- apt dwellers, people that live in places w deed restrictions
It would allow people to buy increments over time. A solar farm should be cheaper as it would reduce labor costs (but land costs would be more).
The more solar we buy the better and cheaper it gets. Solar takes a long time to break even on the cost but quality panels have great warranties - 80% output after 25 years.
edited to add - new solar is cheaper that the operational costs of coal or nuclear (maybe even gas plants too now that gas has gone above $5).
NNadir
(33,368 posts)There were many very good things about Jimmy Carter, especially the life he lived after being President.
His energy policies when he was President were not among them.
Finishline42
(1,091 posts)They obviously need to sell panels from their Buffalo plant
They have a natural user base that would buy
They could offer a discount on the use of their Supercharger network to those that bought in