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Re: Anyone have solar panels? Posted by Snowmobile [Email]  (#686)  [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Snowmobile) on Thu, 23 Mar 2017 08:46:38
In Reply to: Re: Anyone have solar panels?, JerseySaab  [Profile/Gallery]
, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 04:30:51
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When you say "if it were any good it would not need to be subsidized", that's maybe not entirely true...
There are lots of things that are good products, and desired by people, but have high up front costs which act as a disincentive to purchases being made... many people will go for a low upfront cost product with higher carrying cost vs a high upfront cost and low carrying cost, even if the low upfront cost product is an inferior product that will cost more in the long term.
There are many direct examples with competing technologies, but an example where the product is *identical*: locally, many people rent their hot water tank. You could spend $40/month to rent (for eternity) with $0 upfront, or $1000 once every 10 years (give or take)... what would you do? huge numbers of people (especially those at the lower end of the financial spectrum) choose to rent! The companies that rent them also have nasty exit clauses (eg you pay the cost of the tank and don't get to keep it, even if you've been renting the same tank for 10 years). The default for builders of new homes is to install a rental tank - after all, it costs the builder nothing!
Is subsidization the answer? Well, ideally no, but many many things are subsidized, including fossil fuels and conventional cars... you can read more about that here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
So if some things are going to be subsidized, subsidizing high upfront cost consumer items that are deemed more valuable to society (of course different people will have different opinions on what is "more valuable to society" but that is another matter), is probably better than subsidizing easily purchased items that are less valuable to society.
With electricity, the impression I got was that part of the reason for incentivizing PV was that the infrastructure costs for distributing peak demand was high, and that localized energy production in peak periods (eg summertime daytime) was valuable in reducing the infrastructure requirements. That said, I've also heard that many utilities are not keen on net metering for various reasons... The other solution has been to charge higher rates at higher usage times also as a way to deal with peak issues. This effectively also incentivizes PV even if it is not intended to.
I do agree that many implementations of solar are a bit ugly, and from a roofing perspective (coming from the land of ice and snow), problematic especially when it is time to re-roof. I have not heard of issues with fires from solar installations, though it might be possible, but is the risk any higher than with other sources of electricity? furnaces? fireplaces? etc? presumably one's house is insured... shade trees cut down? well again, smart people would analyze the cost/benefit of that... passive solar can be a pretty cheap aspect of home energy costs (cutting down the shade tree to run the PV powered AC more does not make sense)... of course a shade tree's roots in your foundation might justify it's removal!
This is still an industry that is developing and maturing technologically... one of the better ideals is integrated pv roofing, but it's had it's ups and downs in terms of product and installation with businesses failing in spite of customer interest... part of the difficulty with all of this is that you have roofers, and you have electrical work, and the 2 are really very different trades, so combining the two in a project generally requires some specialized expertise not only to install, but to market (and to compare market options - to get bids!)... eg when it is time to re-roof. Imho it makes a ton of sense to use a much longer lasting roofing material with solar, and quite frankly the combination of asphalt shingles and pv panels are not well matched: integration of PV into metal roofing looks most promising to me. Even better is to integrate PV and solar hot water heating into the roofing material/design stack up (see photo below)... But all this stuff is still in its infancy with many technical hurdles to overcome...
http://www.metalroofing.systems/solar-pv-metal-roofing-guide/
http://www.metalroofing.systems/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/thin-film-PV-solar-laminates.jpg">
1, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 17:27:54, Sat, 25 Mar 2017 15:45:21
, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 15:21:19, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 04:30:51, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 08:46:38 <-- Viewing This Message, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 15:36:32, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 18:34:48, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 19:37:43, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 10:49:57, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 11:32:48, Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:28:20
, Wed, 22 Mar 2017 20:20:29, Wed, 22 Mar 2017 17:12:43
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