Posted on 05/07/2023 6:19:43 AM PDT by CFW
Shortly after President Joe Biden offered tax credits to anyone buying solar panels, a Colorado homeowner named Stacie took out loans to install $30,000 worth of panels on her roof. Nearly six months later, however, those panels sat unused, generating no power.
The problem seemed to have a simple fix: Stacie's energy provider merely needed to hook the panels up to its power grid—but there's no room.
Increased demand driven by Biden's green subsidies, combined with inadequate power grid capacity, has left thousands of green energy projects like Stacie's without power, rendering them useless. "When you put out $30,000, you sign loans, and don't have a working product, it's frustrating," Stacie told a local reporter. "There is no communication."
Stacie's predicament reflects a significant snag in Biden's green energy revolution. While the hundreds of billions of dollars in green energy spending allocated through the Inflation Reduction Act led to a flood of new wind and solar projects, America's antiquated power grid is not ready to accommodate them. Nearly 1,300 gigawatts worth of green energy projects, for example, are waiting to be connected to power, according to a recent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report. The country's entire electric grid has an installed power capacity of just 1,250 gigawatts.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
You don’t buy solar panels to pass on electricity to others.
You buy solar to use the electricity for yourself.
ROTFL! Okay, so the panels are worthless but look at it this way. You are helping the penguins and Cola bears and helping the Swedish Meatball Princess buy a couple more cars. The UN third worlders love you too!
I wonder how much of a kick-back Biden and others are getting for this scam.
This is no different than the college loan program, the savings and loan fiasco, the building of homes in the 9th Ward(N.O.). People get on board and there’s no stopping it. Home owners are guilt tripped into solar just like their kids are guilt tripped over college. Feel good wins over business sense.
Ronald Reagan would end all subsidies. The economy would do better but no one will notice. The environmental hecklers would still be out there.
Big buildings(government/corporate) have big solar panels. Tell me it;’s profitable without subsidies.
This is a great place for this posting I am writing.
Panels capture energy from the sun.
Batteries store the energy for the time when the sun is gone.
EV Cars transport people.
Make the batteries in the cars, directly charge from daytime PV energy.
Make household power from those same EV batteries at night.
As far as I can tell, nobody is doing this right now.
Zactly. If she spent $30,000 and got no batteries and inverter to run her house she got screwed good.
Evidently they talked her into a grid-tied system to mitigate her power bills. Salesman should be shot for not making sure the system could actually be tied to the grid.
So why cant she connect the panels to her own circuit and thereby use less utility wattage? If she did, would she have to reimburse somebody for a subsidy?
>You don’t buy solar panels to pass on electricity to others.
You buy solar to use the electricity for yourself.<
That would require a battery installation. I’m guessing in the $20k range.
It sounds like the lady was expecting to hook to the grid, use solar to power when the sun shines whilst selling the excess to the power company, then using from the grid at nightand and cashing in on a tax credit. It would pay back in the 11-13 year range.
Full off-the-grid solar takes longer to pay off.
As an added non-bonus, the batteries are only warranted for 10 years.
This is all pie in the sky stuff.
EC
Batteries are the tool needed to compensate for the wide fluctuation in solar output. If the house is using 5kw and the solar is at 5 kw output, perfect. But cloud comes over, solar drops to 1kw, house load cannot be turned off that fast.
Then cloud passes and solar jumps to 8kw. House can find or turn on loads fast enough.
It is the hybrid inverter that with the aid of a battery bank that ‘blends’ the variations together. When cloud comes over house takes energy from batteries, and when solar goes higher than house loads, the batteries are instantly sucking in the excess energy. Battery can track the energy variation from solar in realtime, the house loads cannot.
In a grid tie situation the utility does the realtime give and take processes.
“simple fix”
Using solar panels is practical in rural China and Africa.
American homes are larger and generally have not been designed for solar.
The simple fix is duct tape on brain dead Biden’s mouth and around his wrists.
I have the misfortune of looking at solar panels on a neighbor’s roof here in Florida. What an ugly mess.
I haven’t spoken to Johnny yet, but I assume his system does what he would want. He is in the roofing & solar business.
I assume they are grid-connected.
“Minnesota customer...rooftop solar”
Stupid people with big money are all too common.
“I have the misfortune of looking at solar panels on a neighbor’s roof here in Florida.”
Thanks — you could tell this to my face — whatta neighbor !!
“Using solar panels is practical in rural China and Africa.”
Also solar in Puerto Rico makes sense with the unreliability of that island’s power grid.
I once asked a city councilman who was all in on trying to put panels on city hall, Why doesn’t the nearby Wal-Mart have panels all over it? The Target? And on down the line for large numbers of large nearby commercial buildings?
He had no answer. Of course the answer is that there is no economic reason to do it, other then marketing/virtue signaling.
Ultimately the council voted no, thankfully. I think he did, too. Or it may have not even gotten to a vote, just dropped. Good outcome in any case.
Solar panels should be used in China to replace coal power and not in the USA (or Northern Europe) to replace far cleaner natural gas power.
Solar panels should never be imported from a coal-burning country into a natural gas-burning country.
THINK of the polar bears.
As well they should not. Powering your home from EV batts means you have no power in the morning to drive to work.
This is all half-arsced bad tech. Battery tech is about 3 decades from being usable. And, anything labelled “sustainable” (e.g., solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc) is nothing but headline grabbing virtue signaling. All it accomplishes is money laundering.
The US power grid is not antiquated. It is like your blood vessels in your own body. It has grown. Tinkering with it while you are walking about? Dumb and fatal.
I spoke to a neighbor who got solar panels on his roof. He was all excited about the tax credit, interest free loan and helping the environment (cough).
I did the math and even with zero percent interest, he was paying almost double for the solar panels than he was paying for his electric bill. He said that they would only last the ten years that his loan was for and then would have to pay it all over again to replace them.
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