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0 pointsZeroGravitas6y ago0 comments

It is a great investment and people are installing crazy amounts of it around the world.

However on an individual scale, market externalities mean that individual choices often lead to inefficient outcomes because the true cost is not borne by the person making the choice.

This is almost certainly the case when you decide that solar doesn't make sense for you economically.

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candiodari6y ago

Meaning half the time taxpayers are paying for the installation and/or maintenance of those solar panels.

Ironically it's now flipping around. Governments have realized that in many locales, from Australia to the Netherlands and Belgium that if richer people were to cut them out by cutting the grid connection they'd be thoroughly screwed, and because the electricity prices that would have to be charged ... mostly to apartment renters in large cities would be a lot more than they pay now (the grid is 50%-80% of electricity cost, so if 20% of people outside of cities disconnect that same cost now has to increase by 25%. If it ever gets to 50% it doubles. Grid costs are mostly paying off the loans used to build the grid so they don't go down much because someone doesn't use some part of it. So that means now governments are running scared and introducing measures to make private solar panels artificially ... expensive. Yes, really.

In .au this has more-or-less changed the calculation to "it's about a neutral investment if you do it, assuming conservative panel lifespan. If you can disconnect from the grid, however ... definitely worth it. In the outback, there's no alternative". Varies by locale, as local councils have a lot of policies that matter too.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/23/australia-aemc-shies-...

Solar might make living in cities quite a bit more expensive, especially in the places were already a lot of poor people live.

ZeroGravitasOP6y ago

That's a real interesting grab bag of reasons you don't like solar.

You want to help the urban poor and stop the rich taking advantage but you don't like government intervention or taxes. Must be tough coming up with solutions that you actually would accept when you place those kind of constraints on yourself.

Me personally, I'd use progressive carbon taxes and mostly let the power of the free market sort it out. But I guess that involves taxpayers paying for it, which I guess is now considered bad somehow? Like the military and police and schools and courts and half of modern civilization and all that terrible stuff that taxpayers pay for.

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