I have the curse of having an mom who was a smart CPA.
All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.
> But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels to a large grid scale one.
But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra 12% of installed solar capacity.
Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now. But it's also almost free.
US costs for rooftop solar (at build time or retrofit) are misleadingly high.
In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.
To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the US only utility scale is competitive with that.
Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.
> Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar.
As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is very different when it comes out of a different account.
(everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers of new homes)
While true in general, I suspect that this won't change house prices as (I think) those are more driven by supply-demand imbalances rather than the actual costs, and that the increase in costs will go into someone else's profit margin, which may be some mix of the builders (although they're famously opaque from all the sub-contracting) and the land owners.
Regulations like these make the entire renewable energy sector seem like a crazy scam and greenwashing.
They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.
On the one hand, it's been obviously economically a good idea to require this for about a decade, both because PV is cheap and would pay for itself even at full price and also because doing it construction time is cheaper than doing it later.
Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards.
On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.
You can run the numbers the cost isn't that bad to do it that way.
I think South Africa gets most of its diesel from the Fischer–Tropsch process. You could use electrolytic hydrogen as an input for that. About 40% of the energy in gasoline is from hydrogen burning.
It's not great but it would allow you to run current vehicles off about 40% solar energy.
Counter point to 4. The Israeli's wouldn't be trying to kill the Iranian leaders if they hadn't spent the last 40 years waging a proxy war against Israel.
There was a man arrested in Santa Clara county because his DNA was tracked to a murder scene by the paramedics that treated him before they were called to the scene of the murder. He only got away with it because the public defender realized that he was in the hospitals detox at the time of the murder.
One problem I see is that LLMs have a more nuanced... well, model of how words and their meanings relate to each other than a dead-tree thesaurus could ever present, what with its simplified "synonym" and "antonym" categories. Online versions try to give some similarity metrics, but don't get into the nuance. (It's not as if someone who takes either approach would want to spend the time reading and understanding that, anyway.)
> she could tell when students were using it to make their writing more fancy pants
I had two teachers who called us out on this, and actually coached us on our writing, and I remember them fondly. (They were also fans of in-class essaying.)
Some seem to think that math is somehow above plumbing, but modern society couldn't exist without both, and I'd argue that modern plumbing is more critical to our health and well being than modern math.
The plumber knows how many inches per foot the pipe has to drop in order for the poop to flow away and not get stuck in the pipe. It's easy enough to either not drop it enough and everything gets stuck or for it to drop too much and the water flows away but the poop stays in place. And they're the ones that actually make it happen and their clients really do care about that in the end. Without knowing this the plumber is nothing. They don't necessarily need to know they why and especially don't need to calculate it out!
Some mathematician can probably calculate that properly. Some mathematician probably first did calculate that out to prove it. I'm not entirely certain that a mathematician was the reason that we know what drop we need. A lot of things in "real life" were "empirically discovered" and used and done for centuries before a mathematician proved it.
Exceptions prove the rule, like when we calculate(d) things out for space travel before ever attempting it ;)
I don't have a phrase to describe this concept. But it's when we blame one thing for a problem caused by another. Because placing the blame where is belongs is inconvenient.
You create a transport system where you're mixing incompatible modes of transport and carnage is what you get. What I see is instead of placing the blame on that everyone wants to place the blame on someone anyone else based on whatever moral anxiety they have.
Consider some people are drunks, you create a system where they have to drive you get drunk drivers. Don't want a bar walking distance from your quiet suburban neighborhood, again drunk drivers. Zoning that separates businesses and stores from low density housing. Driving, accidents. Mix pedestrian, bicycle, bus and car traffic, you get carnage.
No one really wants to blame the system and spend money to fix it. So blaming other individuals is what we do.
All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.
But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.
Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.
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