Thanks for doing the calculations here, very helpful. I do agree that tax rebates are less preferable to at-purchase rebates, though I wonder if there is an “e

Thanks for doing the calculations here, very helpful. I do agree that tax rebates are less preferable to at-purchase rebates, though I wonder if there is an “ease of implementation” accounting difference for the government that isn’t obvious. Eg securing funding to pay out a cash rebate has a budget effect different than reducing tax collection. More generally though, solar (and energy efficiency in general) has an interesting principal/agent problem - households in the bottom quartile or even half are not likely to have cash lying around to invest in 10-year ROI projects. So these efficiency gains often don’t get harvested. Solar financing is an option for these cases but it has its own implementation problems. The situation for renters is even worse; I’m sure that fixing the drafty windows in my apartment would pay off in 5 years, but it’s unlikely I’ll be here long enough to harvest that win, and there is no financial product that lets the landlord and me to coordinate on this.