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Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy

Wow, that's a long reach to get to the OP's "de facto ban on rooftop solar". If we take the OP at face value, then, it seems to be declaring that solar energy is completely impractical, and can't survive without life support. I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar.

vinceguidry 11y ago
It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people putting it in, the company developing the technology, over around 30 years before it's really worth it. Even then, normal consumers won't bother unless it's actually making their net energy expenditures lower. So you also need a finance company to come in and finance everything so the consumer isn't coming out of pocket for the installation. All of this is viable, only so long as the power companies are paying retail rates for excess electricity. There's enough money so everyone gets paid. What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. This sucks enough profit potential from the industry that it makes more sense for them to go elsewhere to put together a workable business model than to stick around and deal with decimated revenues. The power companies are using their political muscle to stamp out competition. If they were to play fair, then they'd be forced to compete with solar. They don't want to compete, so they're using lobbyists to warp the political process.
- dpark 11y ago
  >Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. Why should they pay retail? As a consumer thinking about solar, I like that, but it makes no economical sense. What business can afford to buy and sell for the same price? You don't sell a car to the dealership for the price they will sell it for. That would be absurd.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    I don't think they should pay retail either. But a power company is not a normal company, it's a government-supported effectual monopoly. So what they should pay for stuff is going to be by nature more political than economic. My guess is that they're going to compromise at around 75% of the difference between retail and wholesale. Nobody, except the power companies, really wants to see solar disappear, so the solar side is going to have more political might in this fight.
    - dpark 11y ago
      A discounted rate is certainly reasonable, maybe not wholesale if the goal is to encourage solar. Wholesale rate plus high fees is ridiculous, though. That seems to serve no purpose except to make solar nonviable. That could easily make it more expensive to have solar than not (without even accounting for procurement and installation costs).
  - deathhand 11y ago
    Electricity is covered under something as defined by the government as a "Utility" and thus not a private organization. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utilities http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utiliti...
  - logfromblammo 11y ago
    The solar power is inherently less valuable to the grid than the wholesale power it can get from on-demand variable-output plants, or even the wholesale power it gets from always-on baseload power plants. If they are forced to buy the uncontrollably variable distributed solar energy, it will be at the expense of the peaking plant, and possibly even the baseload plant, if there is a large enough gap between peak solar production and peak energy consumption. So it should pay, at most, the price it would have otherwise paid from the power plants if distributed small-time solar installations weren't forcing their excess production back onto the grid. That means paying less than wholesale. So those solar installations end up paying a bit for the service of using the grid a like a storage battery--as they should. If you're going to demand equal compensation for your solar power as the peaking power plant, you will have to install equipment on your end that allows the grid to control how much power it chooses to buy from you. Otherwise, it's like haggling over the price of a meal that is already eaten.
- pkaye 11y ago
  What would happen if more and more people start using solar along with the net metering? Who would pay for the infrastructure costs?
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    That's up to Nevada to decide. Won't happen for some number of years, what the world's going to look like then is going to be very different. No problem kicking that can down the road.
    - pkaye 11y ago
      Well it seems like they decided it right now. They are splitting up the net meeting costs into infrastructure and production costs and expect those who connected to the grid to contribute to the infrastructure costs.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Which works, until it doesn't. The price of solar will continue downward, the price of batteries will continue downward, and eventually it'll be cheaper to disconnect from the grid regardless. That's what's going on in Hawaii right now. The utility started to push back against users interconnecting their solar panels, so people went entirely off the grid instead.
        pkaye 11y ago
        A few places have plenty of sun throughout the year. Hawaii might be ideal for this. But what about many parts of the US where you deal with winter rains and snow? No battery will be sufficient to store energy in those situations. So the reality is most people will continue to connect to the grid for some time to come and someone has to pay the costs of that infrastructure. However if people manage to be truly self sufficient then that is great and I fully support them.
        11y ago
- phkahler 11y ago
  >> Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. >>So you need something to do with excess capacity. The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery. The alternative of course is to up the installation cost a bit and install an actual battery system in the home. Much like those available from Juicebox: http://www.juiceboxsolar.com/home/ http://www.juiceboxsolar.com/home/ So this whole thing about net metering is really just delaying the problem the power companies are experiencing. Hardware prices will continue to fall, and at some point the solar installation plus battery will cost the same as today's installation and the demand will return. At that point we're likely to see some fees just for connecting to the grid. And after that, we'll see larger batteries and more panels so that people can unplug from the grid completely.
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    > The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery. That's effectively making the power company pay retail.
    - greendesk 11y ago
      Not where I live. It is not in USA, but I imagine the same is true for Nevada. There is an additional charge for consumers, for 'electric grid distribution' charge. This distorts the symmetry of net metering. The result is that a grid company makes money even at retail prices.
  - new_hackers 11y ago
    The time of day matters, the cost is usually more when you need it (i.e. in the morning when you are taking a shower and making your coffee and evening when you get home from work and kick on your AC). So putting power on at a low usage time (10 am) is not the same as using at a high usage time (10 pm).
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  > What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? The power companies (normally) have enough power to supply everyone; they buy that power at wholesale prices and sell it to the customer at retail prices. So why, if they can always buy power at wholesale prices, should they deliberately pay retail prices instead? Doing so increases their costs, which then potentially raises rates for others. So, asking power companies to buy power back at retail rates amounts to having power customers pay to subsidize the solar power generated by other power customers. Looking at it as a subsidy, though, suggests a useful way to bring it about. Many power companies have a program where you can pay extra per kWh for "green" power, paying for the use of wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable zero-pollution power sources. Why not use a program like that to allow customers to subsidize solar power if they want to, and use the resulting funds to pay customers higher-than-wholesale rates for solar power?
  - themartorana 11y ago
    Because if you, as a consumer who can't pay wholesale, take a watt and then put back a watt, are still out some rent money.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      > Because if you, as a consumer who can't pay wholesale, take a watt and then put back a watt, are still out some rent money. And in that same case, the power company is out some infrastructure and maintenance costs. But either way, you state that as though power grids have some fundamental property that necessitates the same rates for purchase and sale, a property that most other exchanges do not have.
      - svachalek 11y ago
        > And in that same case, the power company is out some infrastructure and maintenance costs. As I understand my bill, PG&E still bills you for that as a separate item. > But either way, you state that as though power grids have some fundamental property that necessitates the same rates for purchase and sale, a property that most other exchanges do not have. That property would be "legal monopoly".
- baldfat 11y ago
  > over around 30 years before it's really worth it That is ANCIENT Solar Technology. If you care to read this it actually is Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf I think you need to re-research solar technology.
  - encoderer 11y ago
    Wait. I have solar and love it. But if your electric bills over a 4 year period do not amount to the install cost of the solar, the technology used is meaningless? And because install costs do not decrease with more efficient tech, and things like the inverters are just as expensive, I certainly cannot pay off my system in 1 year. More like 10 years.
    - ghaff 11y ago
      10-ish years are the kind of payback I saw when I looked into it. My electricity bill is about $100/month--so ~$1K/year is about the most I could save if I bought solar panels. Companies like SolarCity can make the math more complicated. And in all fairness they can probably take advantage of various breaks and subsidies I may not have access to as a consumer. However, it's like a car purchase. I'm skeptical that some lease agreement suddenly makes a purchase sensible that wouldn't be with a straightforward cash on the barrel buy.
    - Retric 11y ago
      Energy costs are a small fraction of installation costs. EX: You had someone walking around on the roof, which cost a lot more than the 200w or so they where burning doing so.
- rsync 11y ago
  "It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs." Doesn't the Tesla home battery change all of that ? Solar on the roof and one or two Tesla batteries in the house and ... no grid usage whatsoever, correct ?
- oppositelock 11y ago
  Allowing flow of power from rooftop solar into the grid isn't free. The cheapest power to generate is the base load - long running gas, nuclear, coal, whatever. These are plants that take days or weeks to spin up and down and produce the most cost effective, efficient power. Since supply on the grid must exactly meet, always, these efficient plants can only be used to provide the base load - the amount of load below which the grid never drops. Any power required beyond the base load comes from generation designed to be used periodically. It's not as efficient. There are stages to this too - you can have generators which take hours to come up which are more efficient than those which take minutes. Residential power generation can cause the base load to drop, and require more peak load generation, increasing the production cost of power. The power which customers generate must also go through transformers, rectifiers, and all that good stuff to be usable by others, and that equipment isn't free either. Whether the company buys in wholesale quantities doesn't really matter, since the costs incurred from supporting residential net-metering aren't zero. It makes sense that they pay less for power they buy than what the sell, otherwise, that cost is shifted to someone else.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. As long as it is always above your household needs it would still be OK, but that's not the case, is it?
- ilaksh 11y ago
  > Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. Build a smaller, energy efficient house, get lots of batteries, and stop wasting so much electricity. You also don't have to go 100% solar all at once. You can get panels and kits off of Amazon or from Home Depot and incrementally add capacity. Actually I believe with current prices and so many individuals out there that you can hire to help do installs now, at this point you should start small and go incremental rather than getting a loan. Otherwise you are wasting money, and just feeding into the racket that solar installers have set up. Your information is outdated.
sbierwagen 11y ago
Parsing NVenergy's rate tables, it looks like the cheapest retail rate is $0.044/kWh, while the wholesale rate is $0.004/kWh. I defy you to find a low-margin business that can actually survive a ten-fold reduction of per-sale revenue.
toyg 11y ago
Not completely impractical as much as not economically advantageous at this point in time. You have to invest money to install solar panels; the expectation is that you can make that money back either by saving on running costs or by selling back electricity. If your running costs are projected to be the same (not worse, the same) and selling back is not profitable, then the fixed installation costs make the investment overall unprofitable, and the industry dies.
criddell 11y ago
> can't survive without life support Unless they have to, power companies are not going to buy your excess solar power from you at all. So yes, regulation is required to prevent monopoly (or oligopoly) providers from abusing their position.
- xixi77 11y ago
  they might -- after all they are buying electricity from other suppliers, so why not from me? The question is more like, why should I be in a privileged position related to these other suppliers, and why should I be able to freely exchange something cheap (off-peak, unpredictable power) for something expensive (peak, on-demand power)? This is of course assuming that my usage of the grid is fully accounted for in fees, otherwise there is a separate issue there. Ultimately, since public utilities are not exactly an investor goldmine, this comes down to the question of how much other electricity consumers should spend to subsidize those with solar installations.
r00fus 11y ago
> I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar. If solar had even a tenth the subsidies that coal and oil have gotten for the past decades, it'd be on every rooftop by now (especially the nice flat commercial rooftops) and we'd have as many concentrated-solar facilities as coal plants.

vinceguidry 11y ago

It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. So you need something to do with excess capacity. All by itself, units of power aren't all that expensive. But a solar installation is very expensive. You need to amortize the cost of the installation, the people putting it in, the company developing the technology, over around 30 years before it's really worth it. Even then, normal consumers won't bother unless it's actually making their net energy expenditures lower. So you also need a finance company to come in and finance everything so the consumer isn't coming out of pocket for the installation. All of this is viable, only so long as the power companies are paying retail rates for excess electricity. There's enough money so everyone gets paid. What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. This sucks enough profit potential from the industry that it makes more sense for them to go elsewhere to put together a workable business model than to stick around and deal with decimated revenues. The power companies are using their political muscle to stamp out competition. If they were to play fair, then they'd be forced to compete with solar. They don't want to compete, so they're using lobbyists to warp the political process.

dpark 11y ago
>Why should they pay wholesale? They're not buying in wholesale quantities from each consumer. Why should they pay retail? As a consumer thinking about solar, I like that, but it makes no economical sense. What business can afford to buy and sell for the same price? You don't sell a car to the dealership for the price they will sell it for. That would be absurd.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  I don't think they should pay retail either. But a power company is not a normal company, it's a government-supported effectual monopoly. So what they should pay for stuff is going to be by nature more political than economic. My guess is that they're going to compromise at around 75% of the difference between retail and wholesale. Nobody, except the power companies, really wants to see solar disappear, so the solar side is going to have more political might in this fight.
  - dpark 11y ago
    A discounted rate is certainly reasonable, maybe not wholesale if the goal is to encourage solar. Wholesale rate plus high fees is ridiculous, though. That seems to serve no purpose except to make solar nonviable. That could easily make it more expensive to have solar than not (without even accounting for procurement and installation costs).
- deathhand 11y ago
  Electricity is covered under something as defined by the government as a "Utility" and thus not a private organization. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utilities http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utiliti...
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  The solar power is inherently less valuable to the grid than the wholesale power it can get from on-demand variable-output plants, or even the wholesale power it gets from always-on baseload power plants. If they are forced to buy the uncontrollably variable distributed solar energy, it will be at the expense of the peaking plant, and possibly even the baseload plant, if there is a large enough gap between peak solar production and peak energy consumption. So it should pay, at most, the price it would have otherwise paid from the power plants if distributed small-time solar installations weren't forcing their excess production back onto the grid. That means paying less than wholesale. So those solar installations end up paying a bit for the service of using the grid a like a storage battery--as they should. If you're going to demand equal compensation for your solar power as the peaking power plant, you will have to install equipment on your end that allows the grid to control how much power it chooses to buy from you. Otherwise, it's like haggling over the price of a meal that is already eaten.
pkaye 11y ago
What would happen if more and more people start using solar along with the net metering? Who would pay for the infrastructure costs?
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  That's up to Nevada to decide. Won't happen for some number of years, what the world's going to look like then is going to be very different. No problem kicking that can down the road.
  - pkaye 11y ago
    Well it seems like they decided it right now. They are splitting up the net meeting costs into infrastructure and production costs and expect those who connected to the grid to contribute to the infrastructure costs.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Which works, until it doesn't. The price of solar will continue downward, the price of batteries will continue downward, and eventually it'll be cheaper to disconnect from the grid regardless. That's what's going on in Hawaii right now. The utility started to push back against users interconnecting their solar panels, so people went entirely off the grid instead.
      - pkaye 11y ago
        A few places have plenty of sun throughout the year. Hawaii might be ideal for this. But what about many parts of the US where you deal with winter rains and snow? No battery will be sufficient to store energy in those situations. So the reality is most people will continue to connect to the grid for some time to come and someone has to pay the costs of that infrastructure. However if people manage to be truly self sufficient then that is great and I fully support them.
        11y ago
phkahler 11y ago
>> Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. >>So you need something to do with excess capacity. The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery. The alternative of course is to up the installation cost a bit and install an actual battery system in the home. Much like those available from Juicebox: http://www.juiceboxsolar.com/home/ http://www.juiceboxsolar.com/home/ So this whole thing about net metering is really just delaying the problem the power companies are experiencing. Hardware prices will continue to fall, and at some point the solar installation plus battery will cost the same as today's installation and the demand will return. At that point we're likely to see some fees just for connecting to the grid. And after that, we'll see larger batteries and more panels so that people can unplug from the grid completely.
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  > The simplest solution is to push it onto the grid. With net metering you can get the energy back later at not cost. It's like using the grid as a battery. That's effectively making the power company pay retail.
  - greendesk 11y ago
    Not where I live. It is not in USA, but I imagine the same is true for Nevada. There is an additional charge for consumers, for 'electric grid distribution' charge. This distorts the symmetry of net metering. The result is that a grid company makes money even at retail prices.
- new_hackers 11y ago
  The time of day matters, the cost is usually more when you need it (i.e. in the morning when you are taking a shower and making your coffee and evening when you get home from work and kick on your AC). So putting power on at a low usage time (10 am) is not the same as using at a high usage time (10 pm).
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> What this is all about is the power companies are suddenly deciding they want to pay wholesale for excess power. Why should they pay wholesale? The power companies (normally) have enough power to supply everyone; they buy that power at wholesale prices and sell it to the customer at retail prices. So why, if they can always buy power at wholesale prices, should they deliberately pay retail prices instead? Doing so increases their costs, which then potentially raises rates for others. So, asking power companies to buy power back at retail rates amounts to having power customers pay to subsidize the solar power generated by other power customers. Looking at it as a subsidy, though, suggests a useful way to bring it about. Many power companies have a program where you can pay extra per kWh for "green" power, paying for the use of wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and other renewable zero-pollution power sources. Why not use a program like that to allow customers to subsidize solar power if they want to, and use the resulting funds to pay customers higher-than-wholesale rates for solar power?
- themartorana 11y ago
  Because if you, as a consumer who can't pay wholesale, take a watt and then put back a watt, are still out some rent money.
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    > Because if you, as a consumer who can't pay wholesale, take a watt and then put back a watt, are still out some rent money. And in that same case, the power company is out some infrastructure and maintenance costs. But either way, you state that as though power grids have some fundamental property that necessitates the same rates for purchase and sale, a property that most other exchanges do not have.
    - svachalek 11y ago
      > And in that same case, the power company is out some infrastructure and maintenance costs. As I understand my bill, PG&E still bills you for that as a separate item. > But either way, you state that as though power grids have some fundamental property that necessitates the same rates for purchase and sale, a property that most other exchanges do not have. That property would be "legal monopoly".
baldfat 11y ago
> over around 30 years before it's really worth it That is ANCIENT Solar Technology. If you care to read this it actually is Energy payback estimates for rooftop PV systems are 4, 3, 2, and 1 years: 4 years for systems using current multicrystalline-silicon PV modules, 3 years for current thin-film modules, 2 years for anticipated multicrystalline modules, and 1 year for anticipated thin-film modules http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf I think you need to re-research solar technology.
- encoderer 11y ago
  Wait. I have solar and love it. But if your electric bills over a 4 year period do not amount to the install cost of the solar, the technology used is meaningless? And because install costs do not decrease with more efficient tech, and things like the inverters are just as expensive, I certainly cannot pay off my system in 1 year. More like 10 years.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    10-ish years are the kind of payback I saw when I looked into it. My electricity bill is about $100/month--so ~$1K/year is about the most I could save if I bought solar panels. Companies like SolarCity can make the math more complicated. And in all fairness they can probably take advantage of various breaks and subsidies I may not have access to as a consumer. However, it's like a car purchase. I'm skeptical that some lease agreement suddenly makes a purchase sensible that wouldn't be with a straightforward cash on the barrel buy.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Energy costs are a small fraction of installation costs. EX: You had someone walking around on the roof, which cost a lot more than the 200w or so they where burning doing so.
rsync 11y ago
"It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs." Doesn't the Tesla home battery change all of that ? Solar on the roof and one or two Tesla batteries in the house and ... no grid usage whatsoever, correct ?
oppositelock 11y ago
Allowing flow of power from rooftop solar into the grid isn't free. The cheapest power to generate is the base load - long running gas, nuclear, coal, whatever. These are plants that take days or weeks to spin up and down and produce the most cost effective, efficient power. Since supply on the grid must exactly meet, always, these efficient plants can only be used to provide the base load - the amount of load below which the grid never drops. Any power required beyond the base load comes from generation designed to be used periodically. It's not as efficient. There are stages to this too - you can have generators which take hours to come up which are more efficient than those which take minutes. Residential power generation can cause the base load to drop, and require more peak load generation, increasing the production cost of power. The power which customers generate must also go through transformers, rectifiers, and all that good stuff to be usable by others, and that equipment isn't free either. Whether the company buys in wholesale quantities doesn't really matter, since the costs incurred from supporting residential net-metering aren't zero. It makes sense that they pay less for power they buy than what the sell, otherwise, that cost is shifted to someone else.
coldtea 11y ago
>It's not that simple. Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. As long as it is always above your household needs it would still be OK, but that's not the case, is it?
ilaksh 11y ago
> Solar is only really practical if it fits into the grid system, otherwise there's no real point. The energy it gives you goes up and down, and not in sync with your own household needs. Build a smaller, energy efficient house, get lots of batteries, and stop wasting so much electricity. You also don't have to go 100% solar all at once. You can get panels and kits off of Amazon or from Home Depot and incrementally add capacity. Actually I believe with current prices and so many individuals out there that you can hire to help do installs now, at this point you should start small and go incremental rather than getting a loan. Otherwise you are wasting money, and just feeding into the racket that solar installers have set up. Your information is outdated.

sbierwagen 11y ago

Parsing NVenergy's rate tables, it looks like the cheapest retail rate is $0.044/kWh, while the wholesale rate is $0.004/kWh. I defy you to find a low-margin business that can actually survive a ten-fold reduction of per-sale revenue.

toyg 11y ago

Not completely impractical as much as not economically advantageous at this point in time. You have to invest money to install solar panels; the expectation is that you can make that money back either by saving on running costs or by selling back electricity. If your running costs are projected to be the same (not worse, the same) and selling back is not profitable, then the fixed installation costs make the investment overall unprofitable, and the industry dies.

criddell 11y ago

> can't survive without life support Unless they have to, power companies are not going to buy your excess solar power from you at all. So yes, regulation is required to prevent monopoly (or oligopoly) providers from abusing their position.

xixi77 11y ago
they might -- after all they are buying electricity from other suppliers, so why not from me? The question is more like, why should I be in a privileged position related to these other suppliers, and why should I be able to freely exchange something cheap (off-peak, unpredictable power) for something expensive (peak, on-demand power)? This is of course assuming that my usage of the grid is fully accounted for in fees, otherwise there is a separate issue there. Ultimately, since public utilities are not exactly an investor goldmine, this comes down to the question of how much other electricity consumers should spend to subsidize those with solar installations.

r00fus 11y ago

> I realize that other forms of energy generation are all subsidized in various ways, so it's clearly not as serious as my above interpretation, but still, it doesn't speak well of solar. If solar had even a tenth the subsidies that coal and oil have gotten for the past decades, it'd be on every rooftop by now (especially the nice flat commercial rooftops) and we'd have as many concentrated-solar facilities as coal plants.