7 ms·

Requiem for a Solar Plant

141 points by akkartik 1y ago

stego-tech 1y ago
This is a good story that taps into a lot of the systemic failings in America that hinder progress. Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. Failure of utility companies to maintain their infrastructure to modern standards. Failure of governments to produce consistent and predictable business environments. Failure of bureaucracy to prepare creators and visionaries for success. All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  yes, but... if youre manufacturing plant with expected electricity usage, then build solar plant next / close to your manufacturing facility. or municipality or water treatment plant or .... build solar plant because you need electricity, do not build solar plant because you need money. same as with agriculture, it is nonprofit endevour, you are not getting rich from corn, you are rich from corn sirup, from tortillas... ( unless you are bill gates and divert tax breaks / subsidies away from agriculture and put them into your wallet instead, worsening situation forr every person inside of US borders ) solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working. build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic. "Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. " where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
  - Calwestjobs 1y ago
    or let me say it differently, my house needs as much energy to make it luxuriously comfortable in coldest of days, as my neighbors house loses just thru chimney, when there is no fire burning... ( he needs 50times more energy then me, but he is not comfortable, he wakes up into cold house ) there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many. less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house. or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
    - Spivak 1y ago
      I'm so confused by the chimney thing, a nice wood stove which I assume your neighbor is using because it's not practical or possible to heat your house with a fireplace can get you 70-80% efficiency and run overnight. They burn clean enough that I can't tell when my neighbors (presumably always) use theirs and they're directly across the street. The whole neighborhood knows when I use my fireplace. My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it. Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
      - Calwestjobs 1y ago
        that greyish blue haze around mountains is smog not fog. sometimes it is NOx from trees but most of times is from stoves "they both talked my ear off about their experiences." stockholm syndrome . so they talked how good their stoves are. or they talked about how bad their houses are that they need to spend any amount of time on stove, cleaning, dust, moving wood,... if you have bad "circumstances" then any betterment in that circumstances is welcomed. but you can change circumstances altogether and not have to improve on lessening of abuse. you can live without abuse. you burn to add energy into your house. better built house loses less energy so you need to add less energy. so you need less wood. if im to put two logs into "stove", my house is 120 f in half an hour. if i had stove. U/R value of materials also someone will inhale your smoke, 100% all the time. their smoke. everyone smokes everyones smoke. smoke does not go upwards towards mars. it goes little bit up then it will fall to ground and lurks 3-5 feet about ground and you inhale it. and im not even talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology)
- jeffbee 1y ago
  [flagged]
- cavisne 1y ago
  Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed on that windfall. Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him? Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project. EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play
  - xhkkffbf 1y ago
    These are all fair points. The extra costs and limits are ostensibly because of safety. Yes, I know that engineers can game the system, but they're listing real reasons why the plant should shoulder the costs to the larger grid.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- oezi 1y ago
  As a European three things stood out for me: - He didn't consult with somebody who had any experience in planning such a project, but a person who - while maybe personally impressive - had zero experience and started by writing scripts to find suitable properties. Isn't the project already doomed at this point? You are looking to invest 7m USD, who will you consult for this? - He wouldn't do the project unless he was able to get insurance for it. The whole issue of exploring and acquiring mineral rights was just to get insurance for the project. Why not forego insurance? EDIT: Okay, needed insurance for financing the project. I assumed the project would be financed through the crypto gains. - From ballpark numbers his projected cost of 1,37 USD per Watt DC seems very high (~2 USD per Watt Peak AC). In Europe large scale PV has reached 600 EUR / kWp so building a 4.5 MWp plant should cost more like 3m USD rather than his projected 9m USD. Of course 4.5 MW is small (10000 panels) so this might be part of the issue.
  - DamonHD 1y ago
    AFAIK, because of protectionism (even pre Trump), US solar is much more expensive than elsewhere.
- FpUser 1y ago
  >"good intentions being squandered" Relying on tax credits and otherwise "optimizing" tax payments and "good intentions" do not sleep well together in my opinion.
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    "Gambler attempts to convert lottery ticket winnings into clean energy to minimize taxes." is fine imho. It didn't work out, but if it had, the outcome would've been "good" and he still learned a lesson and shared with the rest of us. No different than a failed startup. You win or you learn.
    - FpUser 1y ago
      Oh, I am in no way judging them personally. Just do not bring that "we are doing it for the humanity" BS into what is in an essence a pure gamble.
nick238 1y ago
So with mineral rights in Texas, could you just buy/lease them out from under one of your rivals/enemies and just bulldoze their buildings for the lulz? "Sorry, I just really needed that teaspoon of dirt from under your multimillion dollar factory". I guess that's the whole idea of the insurance/waivers, so do you need 50% of the owners of the rights to agree? Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
- jeffbee 1y ago
  This is not only Texas. It is everywhere. It is why "real estate" is a descriptive term that exists.
- oezi 1y ago
  Well you need to find something to exercise the rights I would assume. He couldn't get insurance without a waiver. He couldn't get a mortgage without insurance. So he didn't want to invest his own cash exclusively.
AtlasBarfed 1y ago
Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  capital in capitalism.
- dhosek 1y ago
  If you give them the money after they do the favor, it’s legal, the supreme court said so. Plus, apparently trump feels that bribing foreign officials is essential to American competitiveness so FCPA is going unenforced. Welcome to the future.
- giblfiz 1y ago
  Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit. Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded) This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
NAHWheatCracker 1y ago
I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs. Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects. The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects. I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing. [1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-software/planning/pss-software/pss-e.html https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw... [2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/ https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/
- cwal37 1y ago
  imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11 it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or have the money you can make sure you have access to everything. It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction). Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced. [0] https://www.gridstatus.io/live https://www.gridstatus.io/live [1] https://potomaceconomics.com/ https://potomaceconomics.com/
hackernudes 1y ago
Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth it.
- bri3k 1y ago
  Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge on capital gains from said crypto money.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    In the same way that any business expansion is a tax dodge, sure.
    - bri3k 1y ago
      He started out to find ways to lower his tax burden. Found something with solar infrastructure in a different state. Went ahead with it in spite of having no experience with the local laws or infrastructure projects and wondered why it failed?
      - Dylan16807 1y ago
        I'm not shocked that it failed. But taking money that would have been profit and turning it into company creation/expansion is something that is taxed lower for a reason.
        Retric 1y ago
        > for a reason. Yea, corruption. Tax breaks on past gains are just handouts and everyone wants a handout.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        > past gains To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-year. To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a big objection, and it's not that way because of corruption.
buckle8017 1y ago
Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing. They should be requiring batteries with solar as well. His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  > Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing. It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over. > His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it. Oh come on.
  - kragen 1y ago
    Electrical generation is a competitive market. It's the expected and even desirable outcome that only the most efficient producers will remain profitable. You're not just plugging in solar panels; you're competing with other companies to see who can plug in the solar panels more cheaply. And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is. The conclusion in the post: > Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      I didn't even say profitable. He can't get the ability to just hook up all the panels.
      - kragen 1y ago
        He did get that ability. They just won't let him produce over 3 megawatts, making the plant unprofitable. It's a total clusterfuck.
joeblubaugh 1y ago
It’s too bad that Texas’ joke of an electrical grid defeated the project, but I think private profit on energy generation is really unlikely and produces a lot of bad incentives for plant operators. In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
travisgriggs 1y ago
Every time I learn something new about Texas, I like Texas less. At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
- spauldo 1y ago
  Try driving in Texas sometime. Roads are decent, speed limits are high, but the other drivers will make you borderline homicidal.
- bz_bz_bz 1y ago
  I'm curious what part of this you thought was an indictment on Texas. ERCOT has the most generator-friendly interconnection process in the nation and leads the country in both renewable generation and utility-scale solar installations. Mineral rights are dominant over surface rights in most jurisdictions, including other states like California. To call it "insane" just shows how little experience Mr. R has in land development. OP lost the game playing on easy mode because he was purely chasing tax breaks with zero experience. The area OP is trying to develop in is a QOZ for a reason; he should have expected there to be upgrades necessary to delivery that level of power to a substation in an area where nothing else is going on. OP is actually lucky that this project failed. Expecting to get the ISO-average solar PPA price for a project in Coleman County is nuts. This solar farm would have lost even more money had he continued.
  - herewego 1y ago
    Not arguing against your overall point, but Texas is a well-known lesson in failed power grid management, market design, and policy - which in combination is the driving force behind the current economic energy opportunities. I say this as someone in the energy industry who operates many renewable assets across the U.S., some in Texas, and participates in the markets. Texas is a power nightmare, worst in the country. Everyone in Texas is investing in desperate immediate need and toa lesser degree, future potential, but that potential isn’t here yet and the cost of wholesale power spikes to egregious levels regularly.
kragen 1y ago
This is a much better read than I expected. Normally I'd insert a diatribe here about the US's anti-renewable-energy regulatory regime, but the author tells the story far more persuasively and compellingly than I could ever hope to.
stevenzzzzzzz 1y ago
Many people even working in power/energy don't realize how much interconnection costs are a hinderance. Example: see study group DISIS-2021-001 in SPP (a grid region similar to ERCOT/Texas), a good 25 % of the planned capacity was hit with an interconnection cost approx > $300k/MW (which is similar to the cost of the OP). Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process https://www.interconnection.fyi/clusters/spp/disis-2021-001 https://www.interconnection.fyi/clusters/spp/disis-2021-001
gwern 1y ago
One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines trust. Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like. If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims? Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.) Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ https://7goldfish.com/ . > This is a much better read than I expected. Hm...
- kragen 1y ago
  I wonder if you're right, and if so, to what extent he used it. The site does at least predate ChatGPT: http://web.archive.org/web/20180316124237/http://7goldfish.com/Buddhist-monks-rules http://web.archive.org/web/20180316124237/http://7goldfish.c... I'd expect ChatGPT to make no typographical errors in a list of post titles.
- giblfiz 1y ago
  Hi Gwern, I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional comment I run into on Reddit. First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities) Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it. That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time. I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted". For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.
ur-whale 1y ago
If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?
- giblfiz 1y ago
  Hey, I'm the original author here. I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
  - ur-whale 1y ago
    Hey, sorry to hear about the predicament, when business collides with insane regulations, it's a very frustrating thing to be caught in. number 2, btc mining environmental impact, I generally disagree,but I can understand the argument, however ... number 1, the crypto exposure aspect a) what prevents your from selling the BTC the moment you mine them to pay for OPEX, and then invest what is leftover in tradfi? b) While many on this site will violently and deeply disagree in spite of being proven wrong over and over and over again (the definition of insanity, etc...), I'd argue that being "over-exposed to BTC" over the last 15 years has not exactly been a bad thing if you can stomach the volatility. And I'm very sorry to hear S'pore wasn't good to you, this is one of my very favourite place on Earth (in particular the food).
  - drewm1980 1y ago
    It's good that you repented and at least tried to do something good with the money, but it would have been even better to donate it to an environmental organization with better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.
  - zekrioca 1y ago
    As for (2), there are so many other ways to exploit that electricity. Mining Bitcoin isn’t the only way. But I agree, you should have considered batteries, and more flexible loads into your calculations as to how to be profitable. 3MWh is considerable for many usecases.
wglb 1y ago
This is an excellent writeup. This rhymes with the complexities noted in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-branch-there/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran.... Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
pshirshov 1y ago
Why to shut it down instead of opening an aluminum refinery or running any other industrial process with high energy requirements?
compiler_queen 1y ago
Zero sympathy from this quarter - what started as a tax dodge to, let's face it, defund schools, hospitals and social security, ended up as a "poor me" self-effacing blog post.
- N_Lens 1y ago
  Actually I believe the money you're talking about is being used to bomb many places on the planet.
- mattnewton 1y ago
  tax incentives to create solar infrastructure are designed to create solar infrastructure, I don't understand why it's being described as a pejorative "tax dodge" when the government directs funds this way rather than takes the money directly and buys those things.
  - cauch 1y ago
    I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit like a thing the government needs to do because of bad behaviors. As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society. Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.
    - mattnewton 1y ago
      I don’t think it’s because anyone has resigned themselves to thinking all rich people are cheaters who will win. I think we use tax incentives in the US primarily because of two beliefs - the first that the private market is often more efficient than public purchasing (which has a pretty poor showing from this article, as you point out!), and the other is that people can choose how to contribute some of their obligations back to society from the set of taxable deductions. We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others, and adjusting taxes work well as a lower risk lower force way to do that.
photochemsyn 1y ago
If you analyze the effects of doubling solar generation once in the United States on natural gas demand, then analyze the effect of another doubling, then it becomes clear why there isn't the kind of nationwide infrastructure, tax and regulatory support for expanding solar across the USA that exists in countries that have to import natural gas, eg China, Japan, Germany etc. Natural gas just has more resources to buy politicians in the USA than solar does, that's the nature of the problem. Maybe the investor in this story should have spent have his crypto fortune on buying Texas politicians before even beginning this project - but buying off a lot of politicians is expensive, it's more the province of billionaires than of millionaires.
codingbot3000 1y ago
I am always wondering why the US scores so well on these "ease of doing business" rankings??? Even taking into account that this was a risky business idea, relying on subsidies etc., both property and interconnection to me seem like areas where the legislation could be clear and predictable. Adding in the ever-present risk of litigation in the US, I wonder if my stock portfolio is maybe a bit too reliant on this market.
- holowoodman 1y ago
  Well, let me tell you (from some experience) how this would have gone in good old Germany: No mineral rights like Texas, except for the occasional lignite open-pit mining, but that is very limited to certain regions. And even then, you'd be reimbursed handsomely for your troubles and the torn down equipment and land. Grid connection would have been easier, because the electricity company is required to provide timely and cheap connections to the next sufficient connection point. However, there are exceptions, if they can prove that they cannot get contractors, so you have to wait some time, usually two to three years after you sign the contract for the connection. Before connection contract signing, you need to enter an auction for the price of the power you will be providing. Fixed for 20 years. However, those 20 years start at signature, so the first 2 to 3 are wasted because of no connection. And you are competing with tons of other solar installations, so you can't really predict your profits when planning. Btw. they can even fail to connect you after you already built your plant for the same reason, so you may either wait or risk it... Then you have to get approval from the local planning bureau. For that you need a number of assessments: You need to prove that there is no environmental impact, e.g. on rare species of vermin and weeds, no impact on nearby population e.g. through noise, reflection, or other annoyances. Then you have to get approval for the land-use change, because usually you are building on land zoned agrarian use, that has to be changed (and usually can never be changed back, so the land is worthless afterwards even if you don't actually build). You have to get approval from various environmental protection agencies that certify you are not in any kind of protected zone, or if you are (half of Germany is), then you are not affecting anything important (which is a 50/50 chance). Then your plans have to be submitted for public review, where local groups of busybodies, can enter their objections. If there are objections, the approval can be delayed or denied. You can of course "bribe" the public with a few well-placed donations to local groups, or by declaring your enterprise to be open to local investment for which you then sell shares and hand our corresponding parts of your profits. This of course necessitates a change in legal form, which of course needs another few rounds with lawyers, tax advisors, the tax office and a whole lot of due diligence because you are now handing out shares to small investors, which is kind of protected and therefore complicated... Believe me, the OP's story is very harmless compared to what this would take here, even though the above is the simplified process after a few rounds of laws that were intended to accelerate building green energy. P.S.: You need a fence and cameras. First because no insurance will allow it without the fence, some idiot kid could climb a panel and fall. Second because there are professional solar panel thieves around here, stealing them at night by the truckload.
abetusk 1y ago
Aside from all the turbulence of trying to get a project off the ground, the deciding factor was that the electrical transport infrastructure (aka wires) couldn't support the desired load of 4.5MW-10MW and was slashed to 3MW, making the project inviable? To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding, one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers. Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if someone is already discussing this idea?
- nasmorn 1y ago
  Urban land is expensive.
barnabyjones 1y ago
Reading this right after watching "Mountainhead" was enjoyable, but I do commend the guy for publishing it; sadly few case studies where things went wrong ever see the light of day. This part stood out: >"What's the tax treatment on crypto profits if I roll them into a Qualified Opportunity Zone investment?" I'd asked my accountant. His eyes had lit up—the first clue I was onto something interesting. If you find yourself in the position of giving tax advice to your accountant, he's either a crummy accountant or playing you to get more fees. And it looks like the most rosy estimate was -$1.5m NPV to gain ~$1.1m ($8.7m x 0.32 x 0.4) in tax benefits? I can't see what the plan was. > Mr. R's application stood out immediately...Our first Zoom call revealed a muscular man with a shaved head and a perpetually amused expression It seems that everyone involved had dollar signs in their eyes. The cherry on top was moving to a country he knew nothing about for "lower taxes."
raylad 1y ago
If the author is reading this, and hasn't looked into it yet, there is a reasonable probability that he has a parasite infection. My family lived in rural Malaysia for some time and some of us had similar symptoms for years before it was determined that parasites were at fault. Once they were killed, recovery was fairly quick.

141 points by akkartik 1y ago

This is a good story that taps into a lot of the systemic failings in America that hinder progress. Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. Failure of utility companies to maintain their infrastructure to modern standards. Failure of governments to produce consistent and predictable business environments. Failure of bureaucracy to prepare creators and visionaries for success. All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.

Calwestjobs 1y ago
yes, but... if youre manufacturing plant with expected electricity usage, then build solar plant next / close to your manufacturing facility. or municipality or water treatment plant or .... build solar plant because you need electricity, do not build solar plant because you need money. same as with agriculture, it is nonprofit endevour, you are not getting rich from corn, you are rich from corn sirup, from tortillas... ( unless you are bill gates and divert tax breaks / subsidies away from agriculture and put them into your wallet instead, worsening situation forr every person inside of US borders ) solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working. build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic. "Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. " where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
- Calwestjobs 1y ago
  or let me say it differently, my house needs as much energy to make it luxuriously comfortable in coldest of days, as my neighbors house loses just thru chimney, when there is no fire burning... ( he needs 50times more energy then me, but he is not comfortable, he wakes up into cold house ) there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many. less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house. or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
  - Spivak 1y ago
    I'm so confused by the chimney thing, a nice wood stove which I assume your neighbor is using because it's not practical or possible to heat your house with a fireplace can get you 70-80% efficiency and run overnight. They burn clean enough that I can't tell when my neighbors (presumably always) use theirs and they're directly across the street. The whole neighborhood knows when I use my fireplace. My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it. Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
    - Calwestjobs 1y ago
      that greyish blue haze around mountains is smog not fog. sometimes it is NOx from trees but most of times is from stoves "they both talked my ear off about their experiences." stockholm syndrome . so they talked how good their stoves are. or they talked about how bad their houses are that they need to spend any amount of time on stove, cleaning, dust, moving wood,... if you have bad "circumstances" then any betterment in that circumstances is welcomed. but you can change circumstances altogether and not have to improve on lessening of abuse. you can live without abuse. you burn to add energy into your house. better built house loses less energy so you need to add less energy. so you need less wood. if im to put two logs into "stove", my house is 120 f in half an hour. if i had stove. U/R value of materials also someone will inhale your smoke, 100% all the time. their smoke. everyone smokes everyones smoke. smoke does not go upwards towards mars. it goes little bit up then it will fall to ground and lurks 3-5 feet about ground and you inhale it. and im not even talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_(meteorology)
jeffbee 1y ago
[flagged]
cavisne 1y ago
Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed on that windfall. Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him? Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project. EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play
- xhkkffbf 1y ago
  These are all fair points. The extra costs and limits are ostensibly because of safety. Yes, I know that engineers can game the system, but they're listing real reasons why the plant should shoulder the costs to the larger grid.
- deleted 1y ago
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oezi 1y ago
As a European three things stood out for me: - He didn't consult with somebody who had any experience in planning such a project, but a person who - while maybe personally impressive - had zero experience and started by writing scripts to find suitable properties. Isn't the project already doomed at this point? You are looking to invest 7m USD, who will you consult for this? - He wouldn't do the project unless he was able to get insurance for it. The whole issue of exploring and acquiring mineral rights was just to get insurance for the project. Why not forego insurance? EDIT: Okay, needed insurance for financing the project. I assumed the project would be financed through the crypto gains. - From ballpark numbers his projected cost of 1,37 USD per Watt DC seems very high (~2 USD per Watt Peak AC). In Europe large scale PV has reached 600 EUR / kWp so building a 4.5 MWp plant should cost more like 3m USD rather than his projected 9m USD. Of course 4.5 MW is small (10000 panels) so this might be part of the issue.
- DamonHD 1y ago
  AFAIK, because of protectionism (even pre Trump), US solar is much more expensive than elsewhere.
FpUser 1y ago
>"good intentions being squandered" Relying on tax credits and otherwise "optimizing" tax payments and "good intentions" do not sleep well together in my opinion.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  "Gambler attempts to convert lottery ticket winnings into clean energy to minimize taxes." is fine imho. It didn't work out, but if it had, the outcome would've been "good" and he still learned a lesson and shared with the rest of us. No different than a failed startup. You win or you learn.
  - FpUser 1y ago
    Oh, I am in no way judging them personally. Just do not bring that "we are doing it for the humanity" BS into what is in an essence a pure gamble.

nick238 1y ago

So with mineral rights in Texas, could you just buy/lease them out from under one of your rivals/enemies and just bulldoze their buildings for the lulz? "Sorry, I just really needed that teaspoon of dirt from under your multimillion dollar factory". I guess that's the whole idea of the insurance/waivers, so do you need 50% of the owners of the rights to agree? Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)

jeffbee 1y ago
This is not only Texas. It is everywhere. It is why "real estate" is a descriptive term that exists.
oezi 1y ago
Well you need to find something to exercise the rights I would assume. He couldn't get insurance without a waiver. He couldn't get a mortgage without insurance. So he didn't want to invest his own cash exclusively.

AtlasBarfed 1y ago

Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?

Calwestjobs 1y ago
capital in capitalism.
dhosek 1y ago
If you give them the money after they do the favor, it’s legal, the supreme court said so. Plus, apparently trump feels that bribing foreign officials is essential to American competitiveness so FCPA is going unenforced. Welcome to the future.
giblfiz 1y ago
Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit. Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded) This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.

NAHWheatCracker 1y ago

I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs. Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects. The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects. I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing. [1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-software/planning/pss-software/pss-e.html https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw... [2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/ https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/

cwal37 1y ago
imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11 it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or have the money you can make sure you have access to everything. It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction). Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced. [0] https://www.gridstatus.io/live https://www.gridstatus.io/live [1] https://potomaceconomics.com/ https://potomaceconomics.com/

hackernudes 1y ago

Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth it.

bri3k 1y ago
Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge on capital gains from said crypto money.
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  In the same way that any business expansion is a tax dodge, sure.
  - bri3k 1y ago
    He started out to find ways to lower his tax burden. Found something with solar infrastructure in a different state. Went ahead with it in spite of having no experience with the local laws or infrastructure projects and wondered why it failed?
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      I'm not shocked that it failed. But taking money that would have been profit and turning it into company creation/expansion is something that is taxed lower for a reason.
      - Retric 1y ago
        > for a reason. Yea, corruption. Tax breaks on past gains are just handouts and everyone wants a handout.
        Dylan16807 1y ago
        > past gains To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-year. To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a big objection, and it's not that way because of corruption.

buckle8017 1y ago

Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing. They should be requiring batteries with solar as well. His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.

Dylan16807 1y ago
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing. It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over. > His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it. Oh come on.
- kragen 1y ago
  Electrical generation is a competitive market. It's the expected and even desirable outcome that only the most efficient producers will remain profitable. You're not just plugging in solar panels; you're competing with other companies to see who can plug in the solar panels more cheaply. And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is. The conclusion in the post: > Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    I didn't even say profitable. He can't get the ability to just hook up all the panels.
    - kragen 1y ago
      He did get that ability. They just won't let him produce over 3 megawatts, making the plant unprofitable. It's a total clusterfuck.

joeblubaugh 1y ago

It’s too bad that Texas’ joke of an electrical grid defeated the project, but I think private profit on energy generation is really unlikely and produces a lot of bad incentives for plant operators. In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.

travisgriggs 1y ago

Every time I learn something new about Texas, I like Texas less. At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.

spauldo 1y ago
Try driving in Texas sometime. Roads are decent, speed limits are high, but the other drivers will make you borderline homicidal.
bz_bz_bz 1y ago
I'm curious what part of this you thought was an indictment on Texas. ERCOT has the most generator-friendly interconnection process in the nation and leads the country in both renewable generation and utility-scale solar installations. Mineral rights are dominant over surface rights in most jurisdictions, including other states like California. To call it "insane" just shows how little experience Mr. R has in land development. OP lost the game playing on easy mode because he was purely chasing tax breaks with zero experience. The area OP is trying to develop in is a QOZ for a reason; he should have expected there to be upgrades necessary to delivery that level of power to a substation in an area where nothing else is going on. OP is actually lucky that this project failed. Expecting to get the ISO-average solar PPA price for a project in Coleman County is nuts. This solar farm would have lost even more money had he continued.
- herewego 1y ago
  Not arguing against your overall point, but Texas is a well-known lesson in failed power grid management, market design, and policy - which in combination is the driving force behind the current economic energy opportunities. I say this as someone in the energy industry who operates many renewable assets across the U.S., some in Texas, and participates in the markets. Texas is a power nightmare, worst in the country. Everyone in Texas is investing in desperate immediate need and toa lesser degree, future potential, but that potential isn’t here yet and the cost of wholesale power spikes to egregious levels regularly.

kragen 1y ago

This is a much better read than I expected. Normally I'd insert a diatribe here about the US's anti-renewable-energy regulatory regime, but the author tells the story far more persuasively and compellingly than I could ever hope to.

stevenzzzzzzz 1y ago

Many people even working in power/energy don't realize how much interconnection costs are a hinderance. Example: see study group DISIS-2021-001 in SPP (a grid region similar to ERCOT/Texas), a good 25 % of the planned capacity was hit with an interconnection cost approx > $300k/MW (which is similar to the cost of the OP). Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process https://www.interconnection.fyi/clusters/spp/disis-2021-001 https://www.interconnection.fyi/clusters/spp/disis-2021-001

gwern 1y ago

One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines trust. Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like. If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims? Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.) Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ https://7goldfish.com/ . > This is a much better read than I expected. Hm...

kragen 1y ago
I wonder if you're right, and if so, to what extent he used it. The site does at least predate ChatGPT: http://web.archive.org/web/20180316124237/http://7goldfish.com/Buddhist-monks-rules http://web.archive.org/web/20180316124237/http://7goldfish.c... I'd expect ChatGPT to make no typographical errors in a list of post titles.
giblfiz 1y ago
Hi Gwern, I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional comment I run into on Reddit. First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities) Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it. That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time. I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted". For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.

ur-whale 1y ago

If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?

giblfiz 1y ago
Hey, I'm the original author here. I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
- ur-whale 1y ago
  Hey, sorry to hear about the predicament, when business collides with insane regulations, it's a very frustrating thing to be caught in. number 2, btc mining environmental impact, I generally disagree,but I can understand the argument, however ... number 1, the crypto exposure aspect a) what prevents your from selling the BTC the moment you mine them to pay for OPEX, and then invest what is leftover in tradfi? b) While many on this site will violently and deeply disagree in spite of being proven wrong over and over and over again (the definition of insanity, etc...), I'd argue that being "over-exposed to BTC" over the last 15 years has not exactly been a bad thing if you can stomach the volatility. And I'm very sorry to hear S'pore wasn't good to you, this is one of my very favourite place on Earth (in particular the food).
- drewm1980 1y ago
  It's good that you repented and at least tried to do something good with the money, but it would have been even better to donate it to an environmental organization with better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.
- zekrioca 1y ago
  As for (2), there are so many other ways to exploit that electricity. Mining Bitcoin isn’t the only way. But I agree, you should have considered batteries, and more flexible loads into your calculations as to how to be profitable. 3MWh is considerable for many usecases.

wglb 1y ago

This is an excellent writeup. This rhymes with the complexities noted in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-branch-there/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran.... Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.

pshirshov 1y ago

Why to shut it down instead of opening an aluminum refinery or running any other industrial process with high energy requirements?

compiler_queen 1y ago

Zero sympathy from this quarter - what started as a tax dodge to, let's face it, defund schools, hospitals and social security, ended up as a "poor me" self-effacing blog post.

N_Lens 1y ago
Actually I believe the money you're talking about is being used to bomb many places on the planet.
mattnewton 1y ago
tax incentives to create solar infrastructure are designed to create solar infrastructure, I don't understand why it's being described as a pejorative "tax dodge" when the government directs funds this way rather than takes the money directly and buys those things.
- cauch 1y ago
  I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit like a thing the government needs to do because of bad behaviors. As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society. Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.
  - mattnewton 1y ago
    I don’t think it’s because anyone has resigned themselves to thinking all rich people are cheaters who will win. I think we use tax incentives in the US primarily because of two beliefs - the first that the private market is often more efficient than public purchasing (which has a pretty poor showing from this article, as you point out!), and the other is that people can choose how to contribute some of their obligations back to society from the set of taxable deductions. We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others, and adjusting taxes work well as a lower risk lower force way to do that.

photochemsyn 1y ago

If you analyze the effects of doubling solar generation once in the United States on natural gas demand, then analyze the effect of another doubling, then it becomes clear why there isn't the kind of nationwide infrastructure, tax and regulatory support for expanding solar across the USA that exists in countries that have to import natural gas, eg China, Japan, Germany etc. Natural gas just has more resources to buy politicians in the USA than solar does, that's the nature of the problem. Maybe the investor in this story should have spent have his crypto fortune on buying Texas politicians before even beginning this project - but buying off a lot of politicians is expensive, it's more the province of billionaires than of millionaires.

codingbot3000 1y ago

I am always wondering why the US scores so well on these "ease of doing business" rankings??? Even taking into account that this was a risky business idea, relying on subsidies etc., both property and interconnection to me seem like areas where the legislation could be clear and predictable. Adding in the ever-present risk of litigation in the US, I wonder if my stock portfolio is maybe a bit too reliant on this market.

holowoodman 1y ago
Well, let me tell you (from some experience) how this would have gone in good old Germany: No mineral rights like Texas, except for the occasional lignite open-pit mining, but that is very limited to certain regions. And even then, you'd be reimbursed handsomely for your troubles and the torn down equipment and land. Grid connection would have been easier, because the electricity company is required to provide timely and cheap connections to the next sufficient connection point. However, there are exceptions, if they can prove that they cannot get contractors, so you have to wait some time, usually two to three years after you sign the contract for the connection. Before connection contract signing, you need to enter an auction for the price of the power you will be providing. Fixed for 20 years. However, those 20 years start at signature, so the first 2 to 3 are wasted because of no connection. And you are competing with tons of other solar installations, so you can't really predict your profits when planning. Btw. they can even fail to connect you after you already built your plant for the same reason, so you may either wait or risk it... Then you have to get approval from the local planning bureau. For that you need a number of assessments: You need to prove that there is no environmental impact, e.g. on rare species of vermin and weeds, no impact on nearby population e.g. through noise, reflection, or other annoyances. Then you have to get approval for the land-use change, because usually you are building on land zoned agrarian use, that has to be changed (and usually can never be changed back, so the land is worthless afterwards even if you don't actually build). You have to get approval from various environmental protection agencies that certify you are not in any kind of protected zone, or if you are (half of Germany is), then you are not affecting anything important (which is a 50/50 chance). Then your plans have to be submitted for public review, where local groups of busybodies, can enter their objections. If there are objections, the approval can be delayed or denied. You can of course "bribe" the public with a few well-placed donations to local groups, or by declaring your enterprise to be open to local investment for which you then sell shares and hand our corresponding parts of your profits. This of course necessitates a change in legal form, which of course needs another few rounds with lawyers, tax advisors, the tax office and a whole lot of due diligence because you are now handing out shares to small investors, which is kind of protected and therefore complicated... Believe me, the OP's story is very harmless compared to what this would take here, even though the above is the simplified process after a few rounds of laws that were intended to accelerate building green energy. P.S.: You need a fence and cameras. First because no insurance will allow it without the fence, some idiot kid could climb a panel and fall. Second because there are professional solar panel thieves around here, stealing them at night by the truckload.

abetusk 1y ago

Aside from all the turbulence of trying to get a project off the ground, the deciding factor was that the electrical transport infrastructure (aka wires) couldn't support the desired load of 4.5MW-10MW and was slashed to 3MW, making the project inviable? To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding, one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers. Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if someone is already discussing this idea?

nasmorn 1y ago
Urban land is expensive.

barnabyjones 1y ago

Reading this right after watching "Mountainhead" was enjoyable, but I do commend the guy for publishing it; sadly few case studies where things went wrong ever see the light of day. This part stood out: >"What's the tax treatment on crypto profits if I roll them into a Qualified Opportunity Zone investment?" I'd asked my accountant. His eyes had lit up—the first clue I was onto something interesting. If you find yourself in the position of giving tax advice to your accountant, he's either a crummy accountant or playing you to get more fees. And it looks like the most rosy estimate was -$1.5m NPV to gain ~$1.1m ($8.7m x 0.32 x 0.4) in tax benefits? I can't see what the plan was. > Mr. R's application stood out immediately...Our first Zoom call revealed a muscular man with a shaved head and a perpetually amused expression It seems that everyone involved had dollar signs in their eyes. The cherry on top was moving to a country he knew nothing about for "lower taxes."

raylad 1y ago

If the author is reading this, and hasn't looked into it yet, there is a reasonable probability that he has a parasite infection. My family lived in rural Malaysia for some time and some of us had similar symptoms for years before it was determined that parasites were at fault. Once they were killed, recovery was fairly quick.