I have the curse of having an mom who was a smart CPA.

All this stuff root top solar, plug in solar costs at least twice what utility solar. And only makes sense when you have messed up rate setting schemes that enable arbitrage.

But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.

Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar. You could get twice as much if you just invested the money in a conventional solar farm.

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leoedin 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> But it's not what you want if you want to get the most GW connected as fast as possible.

I agree with rooftop residential solar. The cost per kW is high, each site is fiddly and requires far more labour and paperwork than the extra cost of adding 4kW of solar panels to a large grid scale one.

But plug-in solar bypasses most of that. The cost to the government to allow someone to buy and install a panel on their balcony is effectively nothing. A single 800W panel is not interesting, but the aggregate effect of 10% of households buying an 800W panel at the local shop is an extra 12% of installed solar capacity.

Admittedly that's less than the annual growth rate right now. But it's also almost free.

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ZeroGravitas 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

US costs for rooftop solar (at build time or retrofit) are misleadingly high.

In the EU build time solar roofs overlaps with utility costs but up to 1.5x , and retrofit is say 2x.

To give context. In the EU adding solar to new homes is cost competitive with running existing(!) nuclear plants. In the US only utility scale is competitive with that.

Retrofit rooftop solar is about the same as new nuclear in the US, retrofit is 25% cheaper than new nuclear in the EU.

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pjc50 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Like the requirements that new houses have roof top solar.

As a CPA child, you should understand that the same money is very different when it comes out of a different account.

(everyone watches two critical numbers, income tax and government deficit, so the #1 priority is to hide capital spending somewhere else, in this case by moving it to buyers of new homes)

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ben_w 11 hours ago | parent [-]

While true in general, I suspect that this won't change house prices as (I think) those are more driven by supply-demand imbalances rather than the actual costs, and that the increase in costs will go into someone else's profit margin, which may be some mix of the builders (although they're famously opaque from all the sub-contracting) and the land owners.

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Ray20 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Regulations like these make the entire renewable energy sector seem like a crazy scam and greenwashing.

They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.

	▲	ben_w 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On the one hand, it's been obviously economically a good idea to require this for about a decade, both because PV is cheap and would pay for itself even at full price and also because doing it construction time is cheaper than doing it later. Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards. On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.