Posted on 07/03/2016 2:45:08 AM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
Hillary Clinton, courting young voters and the broader Democratic base, has promised to one-up President Obama on climate change, vowing to produce a third of the nation's electricity from renewable sources by 2027, three years faster than Mr. Obama, while spending billions of dollars to transform the energy economy.
A half-billion solar panels will be installed by 2020, she has promised, seven times the number today, and $60 billion will go to states and cities to develop more climate-friendly infrastructure, such as public transportation and energy-efficient buildings. She would put the United States on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent from 2005 levels by 2050. And, she says, she could achieve all that without new legislation from Congress.
But Mrs. Clinton has avoided mention of the one policy that economists widely see as the most effective way to tackle climate change — and one that would need Congress's assent: putting a price or tax on carbon dioxide emissions.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
$150 billion spent on solar and wind. It accounts for 3% of our energy.
Yet we ignore our enormous reserves of natural gas and oil that would make us energy independent and jump start our economy.
Investigate the Green movement. RICO!
son in law will be financing with goldman sachs money and PROFITS GOING TO CLINTONS....
bobblheads are incapable of logical thought..... pathetic
Hillary be like: “Legacy? I’ll show you a legacy!”
==>Does anyone know how far along the theoretical performance curve solar panels are?<==
I had some professional estimates for complete whole-house systems done back when there were rebates on solar systems.
Most projected about a 20 year useful life but after some independent research I concluded that was optimistic and only part of the story.
The effectiveness of panels declines year by year so even if they don’t have a total failure their output diminishes.
Comparing the cost of the system against the projected cost of the commercial power it would replace showed that the solar system was much more costly.
The system would have to function flawlessly for 20 years to even come close to a financial break even point and that doesn’t take into account the failure and replacement of controllers and other system components.
I decided that the high cost of the whole-house installation wasn’t cost effective because of the projected effective life of the panels and likely failure of other components.
Of course, the one advantage of solar is the ability to generate power when/if commercial power is lost.
Advanced batteries are necessary for mobile users of electricity (cars), but PV vehicles are nothing but a novelty. For most PV installations, if one is on the grid it is much cheaper and easier to just push power back into the grid. No battery necessary. Off-grid applications need energy storage, usually batteries, but these are a very small fraction of total PV installations. All of the people I know who have off-grid PV installations have some battery storage, and a fossil fuel generator to provide backup when it is most needed.
There is nothing inherently wrong with PV, but it is not cost-effective on an individual basis unless heavily subsidized by the government. Any real economist will tell you that this results in the taxpayer subsidizing the wealthy, but we all know that already.
Solar panels are also dangerous in a house fire. They emit all kinds of toxic fumes and chemicals that firefighters have to combat.
Do they add a big hit on your home insurance rates?
Wonder if that is figured in on the economics.....
In other news, Hillary Clinton, courting young voters and the broader Democratic base, has promised a new shuttle service between the Earth and the Moon to harvest money from the money-tree plantations that grow wild on the green cheese fields of the lunar surface.
Her new shuttle service will be in operation three years ahead of the current Obama administration plans for this lunar money-harvesting operation. Hillary says she could achieve all that without new legislation from Congress.
Hillary says this new service will cure “climate change”, make volcanoes and earthquakes more manageable, cause deserts to blossom forth with milk and honey, make stone soup more hearty, create new jobs, revitalize the crumbling infrastructure of the U.S., calk cracks in houses for free, improve midnight basketball by starting it an hour earlier at 11:00 PM instead of midnight, and cure both alopecia and halitosis.
Democrats, the media, and other Hillary supporters everywhere wildly cheered her vision of the future and have no doubts that she will fulfill all of these election promises on schedule and within budget within months of her first administration as President.
Good tip.
Thanks.
Bloomberg tends to be more conservative on their projections than other sources. There are other credible sources out there who say this is going to roll out faster than what Bloomberg says.
Good question. Perhaps there haven’t been enough instances where the solar panels figured into the cost of a claim for insurers to sit up and take notice.
I have heard of it. If the power grid is available, it is always less expensive to hook up to the grid. Even with the Tesla battery.
If you are going to live off-grid the Tesla battery may be an appealing storage solution, but you will still need a back up generator. The problem is that in most places, electricity demand is highest in winter, when there is the least sunlight. And, winter is when most places have more cloud cover than in summer. There is just no way around this issue.
Even in most of the southern US, this is true, although air conditioning demand in summer may shift peak demand to summer, the ratio of demand to available sunlight is still highest in winter.
A good marketing guy may get a lot of people agreeing that the Tesla battery is a good solution, but guys who really live off-grid will have a generator in addition. If you are on the grid, you do not need any battery at all.
Your statement: "If the power grid is available, it is always less expensive to hook up to the grid."
That is not an accurate statement. It depends on the tariff.
The govt regulators can set a high feed in tariff(premium tariff) as a way to encourage homeowners to install roof top solar but that works only when there are few with solar. As more and more install solar it creates severe problems for the power company and you can end up with the same problems that arose in in Spain and Germany.
Ultimately it ends up with the homeowner being paid far less for the power he is generating and exporting to the grid during the day and paying far more for the power he has to buy after the sun goes down.
Under this scenario the homeowner is generating more power than he uses but he still has a sizable power bill. He wants the battery so that he can store the electricity he is generating rather than selling it at the cheap price.
Another scenario is where the homeowner is trying to avoid a time of day tariff. He will install less capacity both in solar panels and battery storage because he is only trying to avoid buying power during the peak power pricing period.
Then there is the multi family nor multi user application that might be an apartment house, an entire sub-division, or highrise building. The developers want these batteries because it lowers their connection to the grid costs and enables them to be the electricity provider which give them another revenue stream. These you could classify as a microgrid.
Eventually, as rooftop solar becomes extensive and battery storage becomes extensive, the combined storage capacity of all the home batteries and microgrid batteries becomes the largest single source of power on the grid. This eliminates the problem in California, Texas, and other places such as in Australia and Europe where at certain times they have excess renewable power that they have to export. It is illegal to export power from the Texas grid so there the price of wind generated electricity is sometimes negatively priced.
As more and more participate, the economics of scale kick in and this applies to the panels, batteries, inverters, smart meters, software/controllers. The economics of scale don't apply to installation labor.
But if you want to, you can argue with Bloomberg, Citi Group, Morgan Stanley and the other forecasters.
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