Next Texas Energy Boom: Solar 327
Layzej writes: The Wall Street Journal reports: "Solar power has gotten so cheap to produce—and so competitively priced in the electricity market—that it is taking hold even in a state that, unlike California, doesn't offer incentives to utilities to buy or build sun-powered generation." Falling cost is one factor driving investment. "Another reason for the boom: Texas recently wrapped up construction of $6.9 billion worth of new transmission lines, many connecting West Texas to the state's large cities. These massive power lines enabled Texas to become, by far, the largest U.S. wind producer. Solar developers plan to move electricity on the same lines, taking advantage of a lull in wind generation during the heat of the day when solar output is at its highest."
In "oil" country no less! (Score:5, Insightful)
If I felt so inclined, I'm sure I could dig up post-upon-post from previous slashdot stories about how unlikely solar (and wind) power is to take off in any meaningful way, and how electric cars will never be a thing. We are just at the beginning, and the economic incentives took only a few year to become reality. I'm guessing that is due in no small part to subsidies paving the way for investment and growth that so many complained about. An industry, and really a way of life, is slowly being built from the ground-up. It's pretty exciting to watch!
Re:In "oil" country no less! (Score:5, Interesting)
I just wish people would hold other people accountable for their rank hypocrisy. Here's another commercial example... Chevy has aluminum trucks coming in 2018 but they're slagging Ford for selling them right now. What astonishing douchebags. But people will just buy those trucks in a few years...
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Yeah. In the car industry that is pretty standard. I think it was Ford who was a year or two behind on the dual sliding doors on minivans and ran ads about how unsafe that was... until theirs was available. And the execs rotate around and they use different ad companies so they can all blame it on the last guy if anyone does ask.
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What happened to fibreglass cars? They used to the next big thing, no rust etc.
Re:In "oil" country no less! (Score:5, Informative)
What happened to fibreglass cars? They used to the next big thing, no rust etc.
Too easy to damage, too hard to repair. Even Aluminum is easier than fiberglass, you just weld in a new section. Also, a fiberglass body is just landfill when you're done with it, aluminum or steel is highly recyclable — aluminum actually moreso, because the resulting alloy is more similar to what you started with. Recycled steel is brittle. We used to make cars out of mild steel here and then when they got crushed they would make them into harder steel and make Japanese cars out of them. Now we make cars out of hard steel too, and when they get crushed, they make dishwashers and shipping containers. But Aluminum cars will just get made into more cars.
Aluminum is more of a PITA to repair than steel, but no plan is perfect.
We don't use space frames wrapped in non-structural body panels because that's an inefficient use of space. It's cool for a race car but doesn't make much sense for a street car. You can only really build a sports car that way, which is why only sports cars are (or were) built that way; Corvette, some Ferraris, etc.
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Yes ... lying bastards making dubious claims as if they were factual, with the intent of furthering their own interests, and with a willingness to deceive the customer.
But never lose track of this point ... lying bastards.
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Oh please! You do understand the nature of marketing, don't you? You gotta go with what works.
What astonishing douchebags.
Clearly, he understands it completely [dilbert.com].
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Considering most of the well priced solar panels are coming from China these days, are these government subsidies being sent over there? That definitely would be something to complain about.
Or are the subsidies just trying to get the US to play catchup? That would also be something to complain about.
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Must be a scary thing to sit on the board of an oil or coal company trying to figure how to dig up every last ounce before you're effectively relegated a niche product.
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"is texas oil country? they have refineries in california too"
You might think of solar development as being more ideologically 'California' than it is 'Texas,' but the crucial difference is you can still get things built in Texas.
Why are solar and wind not on the same land? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's something I've never understood here.
if you have land for wind power, why would you not want solar spread around it in the safety zone of the tower? Same lines can carry all of the power. Lower real estate cost. Why is it that I only ever see or hear about a solar farm or a wind farm and never an energy farm?
Maybe someone here more familiar with the topic can help me out, or tell me that it's being done and just not talked about much.
And a regional electrolysis plant (Score:2)
They could probably add in a plant to do hydrogen generation with the "overflow" electricity not needed for grid purposes and pretty easily tie it into the existing natural gas network while they're at it.
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I don't know about Texas, but in Denmark it is extremely common to use the land next to the towers to collect solar energy. But mostly using photosynthesis, for growing food.
PV panels on the ground is great for deserts or other places where there are not a lot of alternative uses for the land. In farmable areas it might be a better idea to place the PV panels on rooftops, where you can't grow crops and you also have a connection to the grid nearby. One day we may run out of empty rooftops but we still have
Re:Why are solar and wind not on the same land? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I drive through a lot of massive wind farms in Texas a lot and that land usually IS being used.
Usually for agriculture. Lots of cotton, corn, soybeans, cattle, etc. are raised around turbines.
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This. I'm from Kansas and we have a lot of wind power as well...a family friend has leased some of his land as part of a substantial wind farm (I think his property only has 2 or 3 turbines on it though).
Basically, most of this land is leased in long-term contracts which include both a periodic guaranteed payments as well as a small cut of the wholesale cost of the power generated. However, as I understand it, the actual land used is negligible and farmers typically continue to farm and/or ranch on the po
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There are some drawbacks to colocating wind and solar:
- It's not always the case that a single parcel of land is optimal for both wind and solar
- Wind turbines will cast shadows onto the solar panels if placed together, reducing the solar panels' output somewhat
Which isn't to say that placing both together isn't a good idea, only that there are some tradeoffs. I suspect that doing them separately also keeps the projects simpler to implement on both the regulatory and technical sides.
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"The eagle and condor carcasses falling down from the chopping blades foul up the solar collectors."
Solar grills right below the wind towers!
Wind energy is such shit (Score:3)
Wind turbine generation is such shit. If you have a lot of constant, unending wind, it seems like a good idea; typically, solar outclasses it by far.
My analysis of solar has changed in the past month. I last looked half a decade or so ago, when the ROI for solar was 19 years; it's now 2.5 years. Seriously. What the fuck? The arrays are more efficient, and they're down from like $3.84/W for shit-efficiency panels that degrade rapidly to $1.81/W for high-efficiency panels that degrade by less than 0.7% per year and are guaranteed to have above 80.7% efficiency 25 years into their lifespan--with god damn microinverters and advanced monitoring systems. When did this shit happen? I can generate 9,800kWh/year with optimal placement, 9,200kWh/year with simple placement, and thus about $1500 of electricity and $1700 of SRECs.
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Wind turbine generation is such shit. If you have a lot of constant, unending wind, it seems like a good idea; typically, solar outclasses it by far.
...as evidenced by the great many solar-installations being built at sea.
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They're some of the least-efficient plants. A few at 37 acres/MW, some at 100+ acres/MW.
There's actually a comparison of land usage for a nuclear power plant as a wind farm or solar farm [entergy-arkansas.com].
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Yeah, my observation is that land-usage by windfarms is going away, as countries are now placing them at sea - meanwhile, I've not heard of any "oceanic solarfarms", and I'm thinking spray and saline might work against that concept.
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Off-shore wind farms, as I've said, cost twice as much per unit power generated as solar. Solar's land usage is much smaller (2%-13%, depending on who you ask).
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This [learnfiberoptic.com] really [eletaen.gr] looks [wikimedia.org] like [digitaltrends.com] a [efficientgreenpower.com] farm [wordpress.com].
The only actual farmland I've seen with wind turbines eschew dense packing for broad spread, making wind power not only opportunistic, but low-density. Not inefficient, but ineffective: generating a megawatt here or there is different than generating hundreds of megawatts.
In other words: faced with dedicating a square of land to a wind farm or dedicating a square of land to solar, a dedicated solar array will produce 8 times as much output. Faced with not dedicating a s
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The problem is output per area. Large solar installations use 8 acres per MW, with the sun only out for part of the day, and varying insolation per year; while large wind installations use, at the extreme, 14 acres per MW. Wind average is 85 acres per MW; the most efficient are 14, 23, 25, 29, 30, 37, and so forth. There are a handful under 50 acres per MW, and many over 100, some as high as 300 acres per MW.
As for the fluffy argument, solar is predictable for the whole year; wind is not.
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The problem is output per area.
That's only a problem for solar. Most of the land under a turbine can still be used for agriculture.
As for predictable, wind in Texas is very predictable and available far more than sunshine.
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You can't pack wind turbines closely together to create a dense, purposed wind farm. To produce a wind farm, you must secure mineral rights (the mineral being wind) to an enormous land area--say, 300,000 acres instead of about 13,000. That means you must either lease the right to use the footprint of the windmill, or dual-purpose your farm. Farm equipment can't just roll clear through a wind turbine, so will need to navigate around the turbine; this means more labor, and possibly difficult problems if t
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That is a reasonable argument, but consider that a nuclear plant is closer to 8 acres per GW, and that is 1GW 95% of the time, not some pitiful fraction of renewable nameplate capacity. Together, these factors give nuclear a footprint many thousands of times less than renewables. Please, let us not pave the world to harvest the sparse energy of wind and the sun, when there are better alternatives.
Once one considers the resources that wind and solar require, including land, materials, and the fossil fuels
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It has gotten better. FWIW, I'm getting solar installed (using a small business contractor, almost 30% less than the larger corporate companies), and the one thing that they don't include in their economic analysis is value added to the home. The panels have a 25 year guarantee, I may live in my house that long, I don't know, but it's certain to be a separator in the real estate market to a comparable home. It adds an asterisk to the 7 year payback...I'll probably get it all back if I should sell prior
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I'm getting a 7kW kit with microinverters [gogreensolar.com] (fuck string inverters). According to PVWatts [nrel.gov], which my state uses to decide how many energy credits to give you for generation (rather than reading your actual generation statistics) for arrays under 10kW, I'll generate 9,842kWh/year on average, saving $1772 in electricity costs (including transmission fees, per-kWh taxes, etc.), plus about 10 SRECs selling for between $150 and $200 each (they're selling for $200 now!)--another $1500.
With the 30% ITC and the $1
Interesting (Score:2, Troll)
How many GOP Texans were screaming about how solar, wind and other renewables were nothing but communist liberal bullshit and yet.. here we are.
Bread and circuses.
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GOP Texans object when they are required to pay higher taxes to subsidize unprofitable energy projects whose only stated benefit is cooling the planet. We, unlike many, can see that the only true objective is lip service to environmentalist, and greater money/control running through their fingers. Grow up!
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
This is classic misunderstanding of Republican ideals. They're not against renewables per se. They're against subsidizing the sale of technologies which can't self-support themselves. If/when the technology is able to compete economically on its own with existing technologies, they are more than happy to use it.
The error is actually in the environmentalists' thinking. They support wind and solar unconditionally regardless of cost. They then assume everyone else thinks like they do. Since the GOP opposed wind and solar in the past, they erroneously assume the GOP must oppose wind and solar unconditionally. (I narrow it down to environmentalists because most of the people on the left are aware of cost constraints.)
In fairness, there is a non-monetary cost associated with pollution which many GOPers leave out. But if you factor that in, then nuclear ends up being the best choice of power source at present. And most environmentalists oppose nuclear so I can't give them credit for correctly factoring in pollution costs.
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True Benefits to Solar (Score:4, Insightful)
While taking over a desert to lay out a giant solar power farm, roof top units are probably more ideal. A large portion of power is lost through transit. I have heard calculations from 65% to 84% of power produced being lost from generation to the time where a device is powered. I don't much care for those kind of losses. Smaller and distributed sources of power generation help to create a more robust power grid.
Re:True Benefits to Solar (Score:4, Informative)
Texas Prayer (Score:2)
Storage (Score:2)
Yes PV solar plant are becoming less expensive if they dump all their power directly to the grid. If they are required to have a storage system so that they can base production on demand rather than supply the costs rise greatly. A molten salt plant is much more expensive to build and maintain than a field of PVs. Otherwise we get conventional plants that ramp way down during the day and back up at night. Both those ramps waste a lot of money and CO2.
More thought and money needs to go into storage. I don't
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Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
Moving water up hills (or not letting it down -- letting hydro reservoirs fill up) is quite a good storage option on this scale.
Demand can also be shifted to some extent. You can within certain limits, choose when to cool a refrigerated warehouse, or charge an electric car. I imagine tarifs that make electricity cheap in the few hours after dawn and expensive in the few hours
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Demand is generally higher during the day, so at least for a while this will mean a less variable demand on other supplies, not more.
That is true until the daytime solar production approaches total daytime demand. Previously, base demand is supplied by coal and other slow ramping systems. During the day this base load supplies about 50% and almost 100% at night. The ramp up for daytime demand was handles by faster ramping systems such as gas and hydro. The problem comes when solar makes up for more than 50% of daytime usage. Without storage one would start ramping down the conventional production to make room for the solar production. It
Call me in two years (Score:3)
About time (Score:2)
I own 4 Community Solar units even way up north here in Seattle, and my last electric bill, before I got more efficient washer, dryer, fridge, showed $81 for electricity used, but I had $43 per unit, which means show me the money, baby!
Adapt. Because nobody's waiting for you to get your rear in gear.
Note: Passive solar is 10 times cheaper than active solar, so do that when you buy a new house and build it to allow for active solar. Here at the UW we have patents for solar film (like car wraps), window scree
TX Solar Field construction (Score:2)
I know a small company in S.E. of San Antonio that has been building solar farms in that area for a while for themselves to manage. It's a boom everywhere in the state & has been going on for years.
The federal subsidies help.
Wow (Score:4, Informative)
"On a sunny summer afternoon, the facility could provide more than 5% of the city’s power needs at a price—$50 per megawatt hour—considerably below other solar projects. In July, Austin Energy announced bids for a new round of solar construction that were below $40 a megawatt hour."
That's 4 cents per kWh.
Wow.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
So when the economics make sense, investments follow, without the need for governments to step in and choose winners and losers. Who'd have guessed?
That's true. But it's ALSO true that government subsidies can accelerate the development of practical cost-effective technologies, by getting them scaled up earlier.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
But it's ALSO true that government subsidies can accelerate the development of practical cost-effective technologies
It's ALSO true that government subsidies can slow development by pushing inferior technologies into mass production before they are ready. Subsidies can occasionally be justified, but in the case of solar, the billions spent on subsidies would have been far better employed on R&D to find technology that made economic sense, rather than mass deployment of technology that did not.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also true the private sector can block development of new technologies when it seems too risky or threatens an existing profit center. E.g. the way GM killed off the EV-1 electric car.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think Solar could have gotten the critical mass without the incentives. Even with incentives, it took several decades to be a meaningful contributor. Quite honestly, the R&D incentive money is best spent on the challenge that follows, not the first-mover challenge: energy storage. By subsidizing the PV panels up front, you get the industry moving which will create its own R&D investment. By increasing non-dispatchable generation on the grid, you need to have improved energy storage and demand control solutions.
From the small view I have on where money was being spent, 6-12 years ago a tremendous amount of investment was being placed into these areas for technologies that are viable now.
Granted, not all $$ are spent with the same efficacy. That is the nature of R&D though.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get why americans always repeat such myth.
Just because your first government was the english king, there is no reason to distrust every government. Well, Nixxon might have been an exception.
Subsidies can occasionally be justified, but in the case of solar, the billions spent on subsidies would have been far better employed on R&D to find technology that made economic sense, rather than mass deployment of technology that did not.
First: which technology besides solar is "better"? Or makes economically more sense? When we clearly right now are at the point where solar makes economical sense?
Second: the billions spend where likely not the US american billions but the European, notable German, so why do you care?
I guess you had preferred to wait till the oil runs out, that might be in 20 years? The oil price right now is something like $45. The highest price the last 5 years was something like $135 (or was it $150?).
With current usage patterns the oil price in 20 years might be something like $5000 per barrel. Obviously that won't be the case as demand will drop rapidly the closer we come to the "empty wells".
Anyway, in 20 years every solar panel -- regardless how efficient or cheap -- will be cheaper than oil. Without any development at all.
So: what benefit would have from that?
None ... you had wasted 20 years paying "to much" for oil/energy.
I rather have a cheap competitive panel right now. And what I and my fellow europeans expect from a government is exactly that: lay the legal framework and funding for new futur technologies. Fuck your stupid brain dead idea of "the free market fixes all", it took Obama to give you affordable healthcare for every one. By crafting a law! There was no free market fixing your third world problems. And there will never be a free market building you the next Fighter Air Plane, Carrier or other thing where the development cost is 100ds of billions!
Can't be so hard to grasp that there is no company on the planet, no investor, no consortium that could have propelled the progress in solar technology we made in the last 30 years further than the government funding did.
Re: Wow (Score:3)
How do you remove the NIMBY bullshit? And the troops in?
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
If solar made economical sense, it would not need subsidies. Maybe it will not in the future ... but we're not in the future.
You missed the headline, or the article or the summary or all of it.
Solar energy is now the cheapest energy on the planet.
Oil will not run out in 20 years.
With current usage, it will. That is a no brainer. With replacement of current cars by electric cars it, won't. That is a no brainer, too. So try to comprehend what I write instead of jumping to knee jerk reactions and making a fool of yourself.
We are 10 years beyond "peak oil" ...
America's government has subsidized green technologies with billions of dollars Did it? Any proof of that? Over what course of years?
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Re: Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes government subsides sure did accelerate ethanol production capabilities, didn't they? And that boondoggle may have slowed the development of alternatives. Like solar.
It's central economic planning, period. Why are we debating this ignorance?
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You are again failing to understand even the simplest principles of diversified investment. Since we aren't magically omniscient and can't see into the future, it is necessary to invest in every kind of renewable energy technology in order to find out which ones are the most useful. Many people always held the opinion that corn ethanol in particular was stupid, but it was still just an opinion when not supported by real world data. Also note that if oil prices had stayed as high as they were during the Bush
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Sorry, but it was evident from the start that corn based ethanol production was grossly inefficient. It *did* turn out worse than it might have, based on what was known at the start, but even at the start it was clearly uneconomic.
What ethanol fuel via corn was, was pork for certain Senators that held important positions. And it could be painted green, so it had some political benefit. It wasn't a reasonable approach, and it wasn't prototyped as reasonable approaches have been.
Governments CAN do good eco
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The chance of "accelerating" into a wrong direction is prohibitively high. For just one example, consider the case of telephony — by granting AT&T the official monopoly on phone service, the US has "accelerated" wired connections (by mandating that even remotest dwellings be connected upon owners' request).
This delayed the onset of wireless communications by decades... The technology for tiny portable cell-phones of today did not exist, but a sta
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Without the AT&T monopoly Unix and by extension Linux would probably not exist.
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Why?
There are two pizzerias on my block today. Should the government grant one of them a monopoly — for great justice?
The survivor would then be able to use the increased economies of scale and improved bargaining powers to negotiate better prices on supplies to reduce prices. Oh, wait, their supplier would also have to become a monopoly, if we follow
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Because you can't just randomly call *anyone* specific, like you can with a phone.
If each pizzeria had to build their own road to your house another road to each and every house that they delivered to, YES.
Haven't you seen the old photos of tons of separate telephone wires from many different companies?
Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes and No.
(Disclosure: I used to work for Solarworld [solarworld.de]).
I partially agree because it was the introduction of *massive* tax/tariff subsidies from the EU member governments (most notably Germany) that drove a lot of development and growth, which led to the rise of solar-panel makers like Solarworld, Q-Cells, etc. (all based in Germany). I think only First Solar is the only big boy that's based in the US.
I disagree mostly because solar really didn't get cheap until the Chinese began to flood the market with panels, around 2010-2011 or so. Before China, solar panels cost around $2.50/Wp; after China started the flood, they could be had for as cheap as $0.75/Wp.
All that said, you get what you pay for... Solarworld for instance has the 25-year power output warranty, 17-18% conversion, and high wattage densities (255+ watts per panel), whereas the real low-end Chinese stuff is barely warrantied for a year, might get 10-12% conversion, and might get you 160-200-watt panels (in real-life testing; forget the label's claims).
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Actually the price of PV cells dropped at an amazingly consistent rate since 1987 (the oldest figures I could find) when it was $15 per watt.
The inflection in price occurred in 1987. Prior to that the price was declining geometrically. Without the space program, it would probably be several years behind the current prices.
The price as of 2015 is 30 cents per watt.
At current rates of decline, the price will be under 10 cents per watt by 2020.
However, as you say -- quality panels will cost more, outperform,
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
Solar cells are a major piece of the puzzle, and arguably the biggest piece.
There are other things falling into place as well.
Relatively inexpensive MPPT controllers. Yes, these require an inductor coil to get the voltage from the panels (100+ volts) to a usable voltage/amperage combination for the battery bank. To boot, most MPPT CCs are multi-stage, so batteries are not boiled when near 100% SoC.
PWM controllers are cheaper, and because solar panel technology is so relatively cheap, it might be cheaper to throw more panels on as opposed to using a smarter charge controller. In fact, I bought a decent 60 amp, 12 volt, multistage CC with a voltmeter and ammeter for $8.
Inverters are not standing still. One can have a choice between charging solar batteries for off-grid use, using inverters to feed the grid, or anywhere in between.
The component that sucks the most is still batteries. They don't hold much energy relatively, and need to be replaced every 5-10 years. Even here, there is progress. For "drop in" batteries, there is a "Smart Battery" brand that goes where flooded lead-acid batteries are used. A battery charger that works with LiFePO4 is required, but since the special discharging circuitry is on the battery, this not just provides a longer usable life, but lead-acid batteries get damaged if drawn below 50% SoC, while lithium batteries can be drawn down a lot further (3-10%) before suffering ill effects.
What is happening with solar is a combination of the above factors, which gives energy independence, which builds momentum behind it. It used to be that solar power was for hippies, but both the far right and far left have embraced the concept, and it is more of a mainstream, "why not?" as opposed to "why" concept, especially with RVs, camping, and boating.
When Solar Got Cheap (Score:4, Informative)
> I disagree mostly because solar really didn't get cheap until the Chinese began to flood the market with panels, around 2010-2011 or so.
It wasn't the Chinese so much as solar grade silicon production. Prior to about 2009, demand for silicon for solar cells was smaller than for electronics. So solar piggy-backed on existing silicon foundries. But electronics-grade silicon is expensive (~$400/kg) because even one defect can ruin a chip. Eventually solar cell production got big enough that solar-grade silicon was worth it's own foundry lines. Defects in a solar cell just degrade the output a little bit, they still function just fine. The lower quality product was much cheaper to make ($18/kg last time I looked). Since the raw silicon was a major component of final panel cost, you had dramatic cost reductions for a few years.
Now we are back to more incremental cost reductions, but the panels are now so cheap that the "balance of system" (panel mounts, labor, wiring, inverters or transformers, permits, etc.) is the majority of the cost, and that's where work is being done to reduce them more.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
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Like those "green" scams Obama on which wasted money? No, the norm is for taxpayer money to be poured into sewer
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
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Where the model broke down is that we let them fail. We are supposed to keep sending them orders for stuff and park the products in the Mojave desert. It works for the defense industry, but the government screwed up and actually let Solyndra die rather than converting it into a perpetual contractor like so many defense companies.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully, Solar City is doing it right. They got the infrastructure in place for putting up panels, got the costs down, and now, is focused on lowering the costs of panels by manufacturing their own. And yes, they will come down.
What is going to be a problem, is that China is going to manipulate the money again and dump on the west to revive their economy that is a total disaster.
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I've tried that argument and the usual response is that if private individuals were allowed to keep the money they could have made even higher profits than the government, and also tax is just theft etc. All incredibly short sighted complaints.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Government and civilization go hand in hand. Can you name one civilization that has ever existed that didn't have some form of government? Can you name one civilization that has ever existed that didn't not have taxation in one form or another? Yes, governments change from time to time by internal or external force but that's usually accompanied by a lot of turmoil and change in the underlying civilization.
Re: Wow (Score:2)
Do you understand risk? At all? If you play Russian roulette with 5 out of 6 chambers full, and if you love you get $100... And then it turns out you actually hit the empty chamber and end up making money, does that mean it was a good idea for you to play? Does the fact that it worked out change the correctness of the decision at all? And by I don't accept your premise that it worked out, but rather than fight that battle I have decided to explain that it doesn't matter if it worked out.
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The lab where you used to work? Well, I'm convinced!
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Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
First off, what magical world do you live in where every investment in a higher-risk financial product pays off? What I couldn't give if I could invest in the world you envision ;) The program as a whole already broke even after just three years in play. All of the outstanding loans are now just profit for the government.
Is this the highest interest rate investment the government could have earned money with? Of course not. But that was never the point; it helped the companies that succeeded vastly scale up. While making money. And not only do they get the interest payments, but they also indirectly get the tax revenue from all of these much larger companies and all of the knock-on effects.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
And clearly the massive government investment in both R&D and incentives that let companies achieve economies of scale did nothing to create the current environment where, with the technology developed and economies of scale on hand, companies can make an unsubsidized profit even without subsidies - right? The two things are totally disconnected.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
And this helped by funding chinese solar manufacturers.... how?
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The Chinese had to do it because US investment in solar and wind power was slashed in the early 80's
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Not entirely true; there were plenty of domestic and euorpean manufacturers. The Chinese did scale up faster, in part by dumping capacity, which likely is part of the equation.
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Clearly you neglected the bit where previous alternative energy interests were directly pandered to. Without that, this new solar project would have no way to transmit it's power.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Informative)
Full disclosure, I work for Nextera Energy. [nexteraenergy.com] Parent company of Lone Star Transmission [lonestar-t...ission.com] who operates a stretch of those transmission lines.
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Government subsidies are what keep petroleum 'competitive'. Where would we have been without them?
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
governments to step in and choose winners and losers
I get so fucking tired of this "picking winners and losers" bullshit. Venture capitalists do this all the time. Do you think the people who do analysis for the Department of Energy are bunch of drooling morons? Backing technology development that is in the public interest is exactly what governments are for. Just like venture capital, some of it is going to pan out and some of it isn't.
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Yeah because someone investing their own money is the same as a congressman earmarking for donors.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
It sounds like you want a level of perfection out of government that is not humanly possible to attain.
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Yeah because there are no federal subsidies for solar.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because there are no subsidies for fossil fuels.... oh, wait... about $5 trillion a year.
http://www.theguardian.com/env... [theguardian.com]
Re: (Score:2)
5 trillion/ year that's not bad for a federal budget of 3.8trillion/year.
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Believe it or not Texas is part of the U.S.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, the government never should have sunk all that money into ARPANET, it would have just happened by Immaculate Conception when the economics made sense. Come to think of it, all that money the government sunk into quantum mechanics made no sense until there was use for it, then it would have miraculously evolved from its primordial ooze by bootstrapping itself into usefulness.
Wow, economics is truly miraculous, able to conjure...well...just about anything out of nothing.
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FTFA:
"Local officials have welcomed solar developers, offering 10-year tax abatements."
How does this differ from tax credits for house top panels?
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Who said economics had to be the reason for "governments to chose winners"?
Investors would happily enrich themselves all the way into a dead planet if that's where the money lies.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Call it what you want it isn't green (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we all just start to admit that wind and solar farms have their own negative environmental implications just like everything else.
Straw man argument -- nobody ever claimed otherwise. Obviously, anything humans do has environmental implications.
The claim is that wind and solar farms have less environmental impact than the use of coal and other fossil fuels they intend to replace.
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That's not a straw man, it's a false equivalency. Solar and wind have dramatically lower environmental costs than coal, oil or even gas. The impacts aren't equivalent and shouldn't be compared as such.
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Like what?
Re:More corporate welfare! (Score:4, Informative)
If you had read the article you would know that Texas doesn't subsidize solar. The made a vast improvement to their power grid that would allow private businesses to do what they will with it. In fact you will probably find that this measure is quite popular in Texas as they are quite proud that their state has its own energy grid. The key difference here is that Texas owns its own power lines, and any investment in their lines directly benefits everyone.
Energy as a whole is very well done in Texas. When I lived their for 5 years I had a choice between at least 5 power companies at any address I chose, and I could select the source of my power, be it hydro, wind or solar. Renewables isn't some crazy conspiracy to the people there. Just another option.
Re:If only... (Score:5, Funny)
They're working on it, but it's difficult.
Re: (Score:2)
Some utilities really should be metered this way. Our city started a big initiative to cut water usage. We have a huge surplus of fresh water, so there's no reason to limit usage, but it was an effort that made them look good to the uninformed public. Since they bill on usage, when the water usage went down, the amount they collected in usage fees went down. However, the cost of operating water treatment did not go down. Water treatment is mostly fixed costs, with very little of the cost varying with the am
Re: (Score:3)
As if millions of birds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly burned to a crisp.
Unfortunately most of them ran into windows and cats before they got there. A few managed to land on a live wire, get hit by a car or eat some poisoned plants first. One amazing bird managed to successfully fly through a wind turbine to reach its destination of concentrated solar power. http://www.usatoday.com/story/... [usatoday.com]