I'm kinda tired of the argument where we only focus on some bad actors when it comes to online influencing.

Our countries absolutely do the same if not more to influence voters both here and in these other countries, especially online.

Here in California, they drastically cut back on the price that you get for solar powered electricity from homeowners. It used to be around $0.30/kWh at any time of day and now it's can drop to $0.00-$0.05/kWh during the day when the state is sunny. If you can afford to have a battery installed, the rates are far better as you can either run off the battery when rates are the highest in the evening, or you can export it back to the grid when prices are much higher.

I agree wholeheartedly, and the technocrats are complicit with the GOP here.

It's funny how “free markets” keep producing the most expensive solar prices in the developed world. Don't get me started on Healthcare (I just moved back to the U.S. a couple years ago after 18 years in Canada, what a cluster*ck).

Oil and gas buy politicians, foreign oil money buys media influence, and social-media bots keep voters angry at the wrong targets.

Saudi capital helps shape the messaging, Russia helps amplify the noise, and Americans get stuck paying more for clean energy while being told it’s patriotic.

But hey, Make America Great Again, right?

The list of the oil producers listed and omitted on a given forum in these contexts is always interesting. On HN it is often SA or Russia, and almost never Qatar or Iran.

Your last argument could apply to anything really.

Why should I subsidize farmers if they can't compete?

Why do I have subsidize our own manufacturing companies if they can't compete so their workers have a job, at my expense?

Why do I need to subsidize car owners to have yet another lane but can't get a decent train instead?

Here in Poland suddenly all miners pretend to be subsidized by the state, even if they work for private companies.

Why do I need to subsidize them if the companies they work for can't turn a profit, or when they did for decades chose to pay dividends and do buybacks instead of investing? And now I pay the bill?

I mean, at some point you need to cope with the fact that money has to be spent and circulate in some fashion to promote economic activity and projects.

You could argue that subsidizing solar brings energy prices down in any case.

> Definitely a great deal if you own a home, if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.

What kind of selfish point of view is this? Don't you want people to use energy sources that are better for our entire world, even if it costs you like $10 more in taxes per year? Seems like a no brainer deal if you like "the outside" and you want it to still be there.

I'm a renter, been all my life, I'd be happy to pay more in taxes if it means more solar panels for everyone except me. But I also feel the same about elder care, health care and a bunch of other things, do you feel the same for those things too, or this is specifically about solar or owning vs renting?

In Germany you are allowed to install solar to your balcony as a renter.

> if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.

As a non car owner are you annoyed everyone gets subsidized roads?

Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?

Would you be annoyed if people got subsidized life saving health care?

It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.

What a shame.

> if I was a renter/condo owner I'd be annoyed that everyone is subsidizing your free solar however.

You probably wouldn’t. I hear more people complaining about hypothetical government spending than actual government spending.

If you're a renter/condo then you're probably getting excess solar generation delivered to you from homeowners with nearby solar roofs. So presumably there is some benefit to you in terms of cheap generation.

Yeah, truly awful. Unlimited electricity that barely contaminates, and at the lowest possible cost for everyone. Just terrible.

Be less annoyed because utility demand declines.

In Scotland one issue is that the UK electricity market is national (unlike in eg norway). So even if local supply is very high and interconnects are not large enough to export to england - we must pay the higher national rate. As octopus ceo suggested if the UK energy market has regional pricing then electricity in scotland would often be a lot cheaper and in some cases industrial demand would move there. But that would disadvantage the SE of England so will never happen.

Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!

Related to UK energy I read this interesting article on transmission congestion between Scotland and England and how this is increasing energy costs due to curtailment of renewables.

https://ukerc.ac.uk/news/transmission-network-unavailability...

TL;DR - Until new interconnectors between Scotland and England are finished in 2029, there will be significant curtailment of Scottish wind power which increases costs.

This is also an interesting site for seeing curtailment per wind farm - https://windtable.co.uk/data?farm=Seagreen

Everything that I learned about energy in Scotland comes from Still Game, so I must ask -- how many bars?

There is enough wind potential in Europe to power the world [1]. Combined with interconnects to Europe and battery storage, there is no reason power costs can't be driven down. To not do so is a lack of will. Scotland currently generates a surplus of renewables [2], exported. kieranmaine's sibling comment citations dives into the lack of will part.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38722022 (citations)

[2] In Scotland, Renewable Power Has Outstripped Demand - https://e360.yale.edu/digest/scotland-renewable-energy-100-p... - January 30th, 2024

(at the rate it takes to deploy transmission, might as well start dropping TBMs in the ground and let them grind towards each other from interconnect landings, potentially faster than the approval grind, complaints from locals about land use and right of ways, etc)

I’m wondering out loud if you might be able to purchase what would essentially be the component parts of a solar panel but deconstructed (eg frame, cells, glass, wires; maybe the cells need further deconstructing) and do final assembly in Canada such that the final panel meets criteria to be “built locally”, potentially built of local and imported parts.

Surely local manufacturers don’t use 100% Canadian made parts.

Some provincial grants remain ($5k in BC last time I checked), but yes - Canada can and should do more. Balcony solar seems like such an easy win. Hopefully tariffs get dropped now that we’re talking to China again. And federal Liberals could force municipalities and provinces to reduce some of the red tape surrounding solar installations. Come on Canada, unlocking clean energy shouldn’t have to be a fight!

It may slightly help with capacity, but it causes bigger problems financially. Even if a home uses next to no power, it still must be connected to the grid. The total number of such homes ends up meaning a lot of power lines, transformer stations, monitoring equipment, and people to do all the work.

If you have all of that expense, and suddenly people have solar panels so pay $0 for an energy bill - do you see the problem? The actual cost of fuel/generation is very small compared to the fixed costs.

The more people use solar, the more in the red the utility becomes. You can 'fix' this by making it so every home has a fixed 'connection cost' and then a smaller 'usage cost' on top, but that destroys the incentive for solar panels - they'd never break even for the average buyer.

Solar is great, fantastic even. But it should be done centrally, or people will have to get used to the idea that they will never pay themselves off and are just doing it for the environment.

If there is no in-house storage to match, how does it help the grid? It is still needed for cold winter nights, where demand is high and solar panels produce nothing. Hydro can provide the power, but the grid will be running at full load.

Solar does basically nothing to help with grid capacity.

The price of panels is falling so fast I don’t think anyone truly understands.

I paid nearly double that for our 450w panels 18 months ago.

The panel price doesn't matter. It's the installation and the surroundings (electrical setup, converter, battery) that determine the price nowadays.

All covered in that price.

Government incentives. Spend tax dollars putting solar on literally every roof in the country instead of more coal or nuke plants.

Those numbers are meaningless unless you specify what you get in return.

It is like saying that you pay $30,000 for a car. But the most important question is: For which car?

Also, if the installation services are so expensive, you can always install everything yourself.

Study how to do it, get the tools and materials, and then do it. It would be time-consuming, challenging and perhaps it would carry extra risks. Absolutely.

But it is not rocket science. It can be done. As long as there is a motivation to do it, i.e. a good value you will get out of it in return, it should be a valid approach to consider, in my opinion.

They are in Canada.

Most rooftop install costs are labor. The PV is now a minimal slice of it. Which is why mandating solar on new construction is such an important policy: don't make two sets of laborers clamber around the same roof.

13k CAD is €8.000

One could hope with improving tech and decreasing regulations we could have decreasing (nominal) energy prices in the future. That would be progress.

They’re already locked in approved to go up at least 6% a year here. It just went up 16% this year for people out of town.

Anything under $2.25/watt would put it within under a 4 year payback period, Alberta has good rates for solar. Rooftop solar doesn't have operating costs that I can think of unless you want to clean them and clear snow which is optional. And inverters usually have a 20-25 year warranty.

Largely agree, with one big nitpick.

Canada is a massive exporter of electricity to the USA. The more clean energy CND produces the more there is to displace North East's coal.

Of course, solar on Canadians' roof is a joke. A proper regulatory regime would encourage solar in Arizona and encourage lettuce Canada; not vice versa.

You know, when I was researching my system and if it would be worthwhile there were literally dozens and dozens of people who were adamant it couldn’t work here. Too much snow, too tight a valley, electricity already kinda cheap.

I went ahead anyway because I’m a “I’d rather have hard numbers than speculation“ person, and it was literally $0 of my money.

Here we are 18 months later. I have all the hard data, numbers and proof that this system will cost me $0 in the short term, make me over $20,000 in the long term, requires no maintenance and is great.

And yet there are still people like you telling me it can’t work.

I’m proving it does, very well. Panel prices are falling so fast your “last time I looked into it” is woefully out of date.

Why are you denying reality?

I’m really happy Canada just dropped the Chinese EV tariffs.

Europe has to import both, and the sellers tend to abuse Europe's dependency on it. Europe has what is becoming a survival interest to replace oil and gas as soon as possible.

A few things

If enough people adopt solar, it gets cheaper, and everyone get cheaper power, or even free like Australia.

Tax dollars could be spent on new coal or nuke plants, or to incentivize solar installs. Which one is the right future? Do new coal and nuke plants result in free power like Australia?

Oil and gas subsidies in Canada dwarf whatever pittance is tossed out to renewable energy. People getting an interest free loan for rooftop solar may be well off (they own houses), but I guarantee the CEO of TC Energy is doing even better.

Mostly by giving people free money to install them so they go on the internet to say how cheap they are.

It's mostly due to higher "soft costs" such as complicated/slow permitting and high customer acquisition costs. Australia has a higher minimum wage but much lower costs to get a rooftop system installed.

"How to cut U.S. residential solar costs in half"

https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/07/11/how-to-cut-u-s-reside...

Birch points to Australia, where he said the average 7 kW solar array with a 7 kW battery costs $14,000. That equates to $2.02 per W, with batteries included.

“You can sell it on Tuesday and install it on Wednesday, there’s no red tape, no permitting delays,” said Birch.

...

In the United States, that same solar and battery installation averages $36,000, said Birch. Permitting alone can take two to six months, and the cost per watt of a solar plus storage installation is up to 2.5 times the Australian price, landing at $5.18 per W.

New panels are much less impacted by shade. Friends out of town just installed the same setup as ours, didn’t want to cut down three monster Doug firs shading their roof in summer.

Made 6.9Mwh in 2025, only just less than ours with no shade at all.

Houses where the roof is completely in the shade from trees? That's not a very common sight.

Missing from your calculus are the healthcare costs of every person in a country breathing in fumes from electricity plants that burn coal and fumes from cars that burn gasoline.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266675922...

(And a gazillion other studies.)

Roof maintenance is a need in Canada regardless of the presence of solar. Solar roofs do demand additional maintenance but the benefits over relying on natural gas for power (which is the alternative in Canada outside ON/QC) is worth it.

I will stand by your statement from the philosophical point of view that nothing in life is free and everything has its trade offs - but this is a pretty clear positive. In addition, Canada has pretty decent workplace safety enforcement for the sort of workers that'd be doing the maintenance - it certainly isn't perfect but it is something that Canadians seem to find important.

Panels have warranties of over twenty years now. They pay for themselves much earlier. You probably have to replace the inverter earlier, but that’s not a huge expense. I don’t know anybody who lives in a place where it rains who cleans the panels on their roof.

I’ve had the system 18 months now. I’ve never once cleared snow or washed them. We get tons of snow.

Zero maintenance.

Solar panels last practically forever. Despite the official lifetimes of 25-30 years, that was a conservative estimate for budgeting purposes, and they're still working after that time, with moderately reduced efficiency (around 70-80%).

I've had my system for 10 years and maintenance has literally been 0. Rain and snow clean the panels. Panels themselves warrantied for 30 years but will likely last longer.

Roof-based panels also take on some roof wear, increasing longevity of roofing as well.

Yeah of course solar is cheap if you get everyone else to pay for it.