Why roof-top solar powers truly do not make good sense.

Davis has actually been actually entailed along with electricity plan advancement as well as the expedition of advancement in electricity usage throughout his job. For much more than twenty years he functioned in the oil & fuel business where.

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In lots of component of the globe there are actually notable economic motivations for property owners to set up roof-top solar powers. This can easily feature financing gives for the tools, tax obligation deductions and/or Feed-In-Tariffs that promise that energy made due to the photovoltaic panel is going to be actually bought due to the neighborhood energy at above-market rates. In Hawaii the yearly price of these motivations goes to minimum $200 thousand. In Germany it is actually right now in the $billions.

As I revealed in an earlier article there is actually intrinsic bias in these aids which are actually merely accessible to fairly well-off single-family resident. Folks staying in multi-family residences, occupants, as well as those on reduced or even predetermined earnings that cannot afford the capital costs of the installation cannot share in these programs. They can easily, however, contribute through taxes and electricity bill payments to the cost of the subsidies. They can also disproportionately help pay for the added complexities of a grid that can incorporate distributed power generation.

The incentive programs in many areas are also vulnerable to abuse. One couple in Ohio have installed over $180,000 worth of solar panels in order to provide year-round heating for their large indoor swimming pool and indoor tennis court. I’m sure they are most grateful to the taxpayers of Ohio and in fact the entire U.S. for the more than $55,000 they will receive in various tax breaks. And by the way, their solar panels do certainly not help anyone become independent of Middle Eastern Oil. Electricity in Ohio is generated primarily by coal-fired plants with a small amount from natural gas-fired and nuclear plants.

Putting aside the fairness issue there is also a very strong argument against residential roof-top solar panels based upon basic economics.

If you live in the suburbs your street probably has dozens of single family homes of different sizes and shapes with various configurations of roofs covered by a variety of materials. Imagine if you will a veritable army of roofers crawling over these houses, attaching frames and mounting solar panels. If you think about that for a moment you will have to come to the conclusion that it is not an overly efficient operation. Lots of up and down ladders time and safety setup time and not so much install solar panel time. Now imagine that same scenario when it is raining or snowing – more than a little scary for everyone involved.

Compare that to utility-scale solar where uniform racks can be laid out and solar panels mounted from the ground in a matter of minutes. The two scenarios are illustrated by the photographs.

Recognizing that the public and electrical utility customers are footing a large part of this installation bill which configuration would seem to provide the best return on investment? It would be hard to argue against the utility-scale solar panels.

What about efficiency in terms of making the best use of the solar resource?

In the case of residential roof-top solar there are likely to be plenty of other buildings, trees, and hills nearby so that the solar panels are often in the shade. Almost all of these solar panels will also be mounted rigidly, most commonly at the angle that is the roof pitch. This will not be the optimal angle for most sites and latitudes.

Utility-scale solar panels can easily be equipped with single or dual-axis tracking which very significantly increases the power generated under all circumstances. They will also be located in large open areas where they will be in direct sunlight for most of the day.

Having small, deep-cycle batteries as backup for the solar panels might be an expensive necessity at Possum Lodge but in suburban North America that type of installation doesn’t make a lot of sense – which is probably why almost nobody does it. Instead, through the magic of net metering, the surplus solar at mid-day is pushed out onto the grid whether it is needed or not. The home-owner effectively gets to use this mid-day electricity as a credit against the much more expensive evening and night electricity that would otherwise have to be purchased from the local utility at peak demand prices.

For the local utility the end result is a significant reduction in revenues from the owners of the roof-top solar panels even though they are making the grid more expensive to build and maintain. Who picks up the slack? Everyone that does not have roof-top solar panels.

The home owner that installs the roof-top solar panels will probably be pretty excited about them and will maintain them to some degree. But as houses change hands that commitment could fade; as leaves, moss, and dirt accumulate through the years who is going up on the roof-top to polish up those solar panels. Nobody is my guess. So the overall efficiency of the panels is bound to decline over time. The same with local battery storage if it has been installed.

Finally, the presence of roof-top solar panels has been identified as a significant danger to fire fighters.

All in all, looking at roof-top solar panels perfectly objectively they just don’t make sense. There are better ways to spend those dollars as we transition away from a hydro-carbon economy. Some other ideas are described in my Sustainable Energy Manifesto.

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Now for the question of the year: at the present time does it make sense to replace coal by utility scale solar in the great state of Ohio, or for that matter in Germany?

By the way, this is an important article.

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Fred, Nope. Makes virtually no economic sense. Ditto from the environmental "save-the-planet" standpoint. Just another exercise in driving the middle class into poverty with stunningly stupid wastes of money promulgated by the government and left-wing elitist.

The article is spot-on. Well done Davis!

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Wait a minute now Michael, wait a minute. As I understand the position of Davis Swan, he Thinks that rooftoop installations are nutty, but not necessarily utility scale installations. Say in Yankee Stadium.

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As far as utility scale applications, rather doubt they make much economic sense. However, if the solar cells ever reach a few cents per Kw, might work. Vaguely recall semi-conductors/transistors were pretty expensive at first. Not any more.

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With currently available technology roof top solar electricity generation is an entirely foolish idea from apublic policy standpoint.

1. It does not get anyone off oil, or coal or gas. Some studies say that it actually increases the burning of these fuels because generators must be on spinning reserve to take up the slack when the sun does not cooperate. Generally spinning reserve – that is the generator is fired up and synchronized to the grid – takes about 2% of output so for a 1000 MW coal plant you are using 2% x 1000 = 20 MW just to keep the machine running when it would otherwise not be. That basically wipes out all your solar output. 2. It increases the amount of CO2 because the panels are almost all made in China whose primary energy source is coal and making these panels is VERY energy intensive. 3. It snows in Ohio (solar panels covered in snow produce nothing) 4. It is dark at night (solar panels produce nothing when it is dark). 5. Only a few people have access to it (those with roof tops) – apartment or multi-unit residential buildings generally occupied by the less well off members of our society do not. 6. Massive power swings occur when clouds roll over and intercept the light.

I could make a much longer list but all we are doing by subsidising these things is make the installers wealthy and the manufacturers (mainly Chinese companies).

So a bit stupid if you ask me.

Utility installed systems are even worse. They occupy vast areas of land that could be put to productive use. A common target for installation is those who have land – farmers. So we use the sunlight to make electricity instead of grow stuff for a hungry world to eat. That is a really far sighted idea.

Now I did say with current technology. New developments based on graphene could make solar electricity generation 10 to 100 times more efficient per unit area. Secondly graphene based super capacitors may allow the storage of large amounts of electricity in a small space. But with what we have now – it is not economically viable or viable from an energy standpoint.

But that is what you get by elelcting people with degrees in law and economics instead of folks that understand why.

A sad world we live in.

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First comment, long time reader. Many of your viewpoints in the above article are not valid and below I will go into depth on why:

1. With new financing mechanisms that pay the up-front costs of solar installations, such as those offered by Sungevity and Solar City, low income homeowners can install solar on their rooftop for no up front fee and reap the benefits of cheaper electricity. These offerings are expanding to many states as we speak.

2. The solar modules installed to heat the indoor swimming pool and tennis court actually do decrease our consumption of fossil fuels with the assumption that the family would be heating their pool and tennis court to the same temperatures without solar. Whether it is ethical is another story. Personally, I would focus more on whether the significant tax loopholes for the 1% and large corporations are ethical rather than the few homeowners that ‘take advantage’ of solar incentives to heat their pools and tennis courts.

3. There are many rooftop installations that are the size of small scale utility installations, totaling 200 kW to 1 MW or more of solar on one roof. These installations can be installed with a ballasted racking system that decreases installation time significantly and minimizes transmission losses. These installations can also be installed on a major power consuming entity (e.g., a factory) thereby saving costs for the business directly.

4. Electricity in the middle of the day is typically much more expensive than electricity in the evening. That is because there is more demand in the middle of the day when offices and factories are operating. Therefore, theoretically, it is beneficial for the grid to have additional power generated from solar during peak, day time hours because it supplements the traditional fossil fuel based generators. Practically though, there is currently too little solar in most US grids for it to matter. All that said, there is no real time demand-based pricing for solar energy that I know of in the US, which means that your argument about daytime output being used to subsidize evening consumption is not valid.

5. Maintenance of small solar installations is extremely minimal and in most areas, the dirt will wash off by rain. In utility installations, you have to worry more about maintenance.

6. Most municipalities have fire codes to guide the installation of solar modules on a roof that create safe working conditions for firefighters so that they can easily move around or under solar modules. Therefore, solar modules are similar to other HVAC equipment and plumbing vent lines on a roof that firefighters have to dodge.

In summary, distributed generation is going to happen and rather than avoiding it and pointing towards insignificant hurdles that we can overcome, the U.S. should adopt it by creating a competitive market for the manufacturing and consumption of clean, distributed energy.

A more proper criticism of the United States solar energy incentive policy would be its link to the tax system. This enables large banks such as JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs to profit at IRRs of up to 15% just from investing in the tax equity of utility scale and small scale solar energy systems. If we decouple the tax system from solar energy incentives, prices will drop significantly.

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To cut to the basics, roof-top solar cells are a pain-in-the-butt to deal with while being extremely expensive and impractical for large swaths of the country. Far easier and cheaper to rely on power from the grid.

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@Daniel – I appreciate all the points you make – they provide a different perspective which helps readers evaluate the many aspects of a complex issue. I will provide a bit of the rationale behind my arguments as you have addressed them.

1. Inability of low income residents to install solar panels – I would refer you to the recently published Hawaii Electric Company Integrated Resource Plan (and bearing in mind that Hawaii is ahead of most parts of the world in solar adoption)

"As the amount of installed rooftop PV grows within Hawaii, it is creating significant economic cost transfers between groups of Hawaii’s citizens. These include the fact that Hawaii taxpayers are providing tax credit subsidies for new PV that do not accrue to non-PV owners; the feeder upgrade and operational requirements that increasing levels of PV impose upon utility customers; and as more PV owners (often more affluent citizens) generate their own energy, they leave fewer customers remaining on the utility system to pay for the fixed financing and operational non-energy prices of system operations."

It is only common sense that renters and seniors are not going to be able to take advantage of roof-top solar panels. I applaud the existence of low interest loans to help people reduce energy usage. But I don’t think the fact that some people take advantage of those programs negates my comment.

2. I found it annoying that the couple tried to tie their installment of solar panels to a political "hot button" issue – import of Middle East oil. No amount of solar panels, particularly in Ohio, will reduce the import of oil.

3. Large scale solar panel installations on commercial/industrial rooftops or parking lot canopies make sense as far as I am concerned so I agree with you at least at latitudes less than about 30-35 degrees. North of that the difference between summer and winter generation is quite extreme (3-5 times more in summer than winter). If we want to actually replace thermal generation assets with solar this is really problematic because we would have to overbuild the solar to supply enough in the winter and then have a huge surplus in the summer. So I am not convinced that is the best investment option at higher latitudes.

4. Electricity Time-Of-Use pricing is very inconsistent but does not match solar power production in any meaningful way.

I would refer you to Ontario where peak pricing in summer is from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm but in winter is 7:00 am-11:00 am and 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm (http://www.hydroone.com/TOU/Pages/Default.aspx). In Oklahoma peak prices run from 2:00 pm to 7:00 pm in the summer (http://www.oge.com/residential-customers/products-and-services/Pages/Sma. ). No TOU scheme I have seen matches peak solar production which reliably occurs between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm local time. So on this point we disagree. Feed-in-tariffs typically are equal to or higher than peak retail rates – therefore there is some subsidization of solar power going on in jurisdictions with TOU pricing. I believe we are headed for an Availability-Of-Supply pricing structure at some point in the future when mid-day solar power will be worth very little because there will be too much of it. Germany is already exporting large amounts of electricity at low prices mid-day in the spring.

5. Maintenance of solar panels. The panels degrade by about 1% per year and as new technologies develop they could be replaced by more efficient panels. But I won’t quibble about that. Maintenance is probably not a big issue (but expensive if necessary).

6. Danger to firefighters: There is a difference between rooftop appliances which can easily have the power cut off as well as solar panels which cannot be prevented from producing energy. The article I reference describes a situation where the building was allowed to burn to the ground because of the perceived danger. So I can easily’t agree on that point either.

The idea that distributed generation is inevitable is highly suspect in my opinion. Every jurisdiction where solar (the only viable distributed generation) has started to become significant is having real problems. These problems will translate ultimately into monthly access charges and/or reduced/eliminated feed-in-tariffs which will make installation of solar panels uneconomic. If homeowners can easily’t save money by installing solar panels they won’t. And that is what I see as a more likely outcome. Installations in Hawaii and Germany are actually actually decelerating.