Solar Energy Is the Fastest Growing Industry In the US 410
Hugh Pickens writes "According to Rhone Resch, the last three years have seen the U.S. solar industry go from a start-up to a major industry that is creating well-paying jobs and growing the economy in all 50 states, employing 93,000 Americans in 2010, a number that is expected to grow between 25,000 to 50,000 this year (PDF). In the first quarter of 2011, the solar industry installed 252 megawatts of new solar electric capacity, a 66 percent growth from the same time frame in 2010. Solar energy is creating more jobs per megawatt than any other energy source (PDF) with the capability, according to one study, of generating over 4 million jobs by 2030 with aggressive energy efficiency measures. There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes. In the manufacturing sector, solar panel production jumped 31 percent. 'The U.S. market is expected to more than double yet again in 2011, installing enough solar for more than 400,000 homes,' writes Resch. 'Last year, the industry set the ambitious yet achievable goal of installing 10 gigawatts annually by 2015 (PDF) – enough to power 2 million more homes each and every year.'"
J/MW? (Score:3, Insightful)
Jobs per megawatt? What the hell kind of measure of efficiency is that?!
Re:J/MW? (Score:5, Funny)
Jobs per megawatt? What the hell kind of measure of efficiency is that?!
Jobs = work/week
Watt = work/second
Jobs/MegaWatt = 0.144 E-12
You haven't Play Alpha Centauri have you? (Score:2)
Re:J/MW? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.
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Exactly, it's the kind of political measure that politicians love to cite when they pump government money into pipe-dream bullshit like solar. It's the same bullshit you used to hear when they were approving big subsidies for duds like hydrogen fuel and ethanol.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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People do not consider solar correctly.
I'm making the investment into solar without government subsidies because it makes sense.
My current electric bill is $900 a year (apparently low by many standards but I have studly insulation.)
My goal is to reduce that by $500 per year at current prices.
Two key things.
My effective tax bracket is 50%.
So every dollar saved is worth two dollars earned. If I can save $500, I would have to earn $1000 to have that after tax spending cash.
Secondly- historical pricing inflati
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Yeah, really. Once the subsidies get killed off like they did in the late 1970's, solar will once again be put back on the shelf and all those workers will be out of a job. Until the cost per watt is less than that of coal or natural gas (not including regulatory-based cost increases) solar will never be able to compete in the marketplace.
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generating over 4 million jobs by 2030 with aggressive energy efficiency measures
This quote is from the description of the article. Yes, how many jobs do the energy efficient measures cost? Im all for solar power since its almost free after it pays for itself, but these measures will undoubtedly cost some jobs.
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I hate the whole "this will create jobs" attitude. The more productive something is, the fewer jobs it creates. I mean, honestly, rather than having four million people schlep to and from work to keep the lights on, it would be better to have some magical, maintenance-free "free energy" machine that would do it without anyone having to lift a finger. Society as a whole would be much richer.
But there's the contradiction: we'd be richer, but unemployment would go up, so some of us would be more miserable.
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Jobs per megawatt? What the hell kind of measure of efficiency is that?!
One that will ultimately bring back the treadmill.
Re:J/MW? (Score:5, Insightful)
$ per Megawatt hour is the measure of efficiency. Ideally you would want a world where you had unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is a measure of inefficiency and it shows that Solar is the worst.
Anyone that claims a project is great because it creates jobs is an idiot. The goal is to have stuff not jobs.
Batist wrote that all people act as a both a producer and a consumer. In their job they are a producer and in the rest of their life they are a consumer.What do they as a producer want? They want the good or service they producer to be scarce and expensive. What do they as a consumer want? They want the good or service they buy to be abundant and cheap.
What type of society do you want to live in, one where things are cheap and abundant or scarce and expensive? Any law that favors producers does so by making goods scarce and expensive. Unfortunately like the people that wrote this article it is easy to show how a certain law that favors a producer helps those people. It takes a bit more thinking to explain that the only way to help that producer is by hurting all consumers.
Re:J/MW? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Read up on the basic economic principle of comparative advantage [wikipedia.org] and then write us a 500 word essay on how economics are not a zero-sum game.
Re:J/MW? (Score:4, Interesting)
I know all about comparative advantage. When a country can produce more and better sugar because they have the right climate it makes sense to import it to the degree it is cost effective to do so. But if you pass a law restricting import or putting a tariff on it you do so specifically to benefit the domestic sugar producers at the expense of all sugar consumers.
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That is why I wrote to the degree it is cost effective to do so.
Your original point was economics isn't a zero sum game. That is not accurate in all cases. In a free market it isn't a zero sum game. In a Centrally Planned one it is you can only give to one party what you take from another. It is only during a voluntary trade that wealth is gained by both sides.
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If and when trade is mutually beneficial, then it does not follow that helping the producer (through legislation) is necessarily harmful to the consumer.
In fact by generating more trade, more income, and more tax revenue, the subsidy might very well pay for itself. And before anyone accuses me of socialism, this is essentially the supply-side argument the U.S. Republican Party has been advocating for th
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And this is why the Republican Party is just as bad for the economy as the Democrats.
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I certainly agree with you there. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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When you go to the store to buy something who gains and who loses? Do you gain because you get a product you want or does the store gain because they get the money they want? The answer is both parties in a voluntary trade win and both are wealthier because of the trade otherwise they would not make the trade. This is how trading creates wealth because both parties value what they are trading for more than what they are trading with.
The stock market as it currently works is scam because of the monetary sys
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I mean, if jobs/MW is good for the economy, why not just hook up a bunch of treadmills to generators, chain them together electrically, and let people generate their 300W or whatever that a human is capable of outputting. Boom, massive jobs/MW.
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I've always wondered if the cost/benefit ration was good enough to do this for places like health clubs. Hook up some generators to the treadmills and/or weight machines and let the participants generate electricity while trimming down.
Re:J/MW? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't have money, it scarcely matters what the price of goods is. You are still fucked. For virtually everybody this impecunious, having money = having a job, not selling some bonds or re-allocating your portfolio in the direction of a higher-dividend asset assortment. Given the er... not exactly small... number of people who have fallen off this particular bus(with the additional fun that periods of joblessness do wonders for one's future prospects of being re-hired...) "jobs" as something close to an end in itself does represent a net gain for a substantial number of people.
Secondly, you say that "Ideally you would want a world where you have unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is true If and Only If the gains from increased efficiency are allocated in a manner that gives you a slice of the expanding pie. If, however, the pie is expanding; but your share of it is shrinking even faster(because whatever you do is an "inefficiency", you are quickly sliding toward point #1.
Empirically, a great many people have reason to be concerned, and to have no particular room to hope that even steady encheapening of goods will allow them to do better than tread water, since labor is definitely one of the goods being encheapened. As this [investorvillage.com] cheery little J.P. Morgan report notes, in a discussion of the improvement of corporate margins: "There are a lot of moving parts in the margin equation, but as shown in the second chart, reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. This trend has continued; as we have shown several times over the last two years, US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP (see EoTM April 26, 2011)."
Improvements in efficiency do you absolutely no good if somebody with more market power than you have is capturing them. This would appear to be the case. Under such conditions, the people with less market power(ie. about the bottom 95%) don't have a rational interest in efficiency; because they won't capture the gains from it. While(from the perspective of people's actual state of knowledge) the fascination with "jobs" might be largely sentimental populism, it is arguably not economically irrational. If essentially all gains from efficiency(which includes reduction in human resources costs) are being captured by people who aren't you, it is very much in your interest to demand greater inefficiency and attempt to roll back the reduction in demand for you.
Only in a society where everybody has a boat is the fact that the 'rising tide lifts all boats' a comforting one. If a substantial portion of the population is stuck in the mud, the rising tide is not a welcome development...
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Not really. That was pretty non specific.
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You really don't understand what he's talking about do you?
In economics, the only reason a rational participant in a market place cares about efficiency is because it lowers costs. If, as the other poster said, it doesn't lower costs (instead it becomes surplus profit due to, let's say, monopolistic control) then a rational participant has no interest in efficiency at all because they gain no benefit from it.
If efficiency doesn't affect either supply or demand, then why does the market care?
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be careful when you write "$ per Megawatt" that can be taken two ways.. "cost per Megawatt" which is what you meant and is efficiency related to consumer and "profit per Megawatt" which is not what you meant and rather is efficiency related to cartels.
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It's early days for solar really, given time it will easily out-perform all other sources for low initial cost and low maintenance. In fact solar thermal collectors are almost there already because the higher costs associated with building new(ish) technology on a large scale are more than offset by zero fuel and very low maintenance costs.
PV will probably get there too one day, when we figure out how to grow panels cheaply and cleanly using bacteria.
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Depends in what world you live. If you live in Utopia, you are right. As you get everything for free and don't need to work. ;D Such a job increase in your country wont last for ever ... in 30 years there will only people be needed for
In the real world jobs are created by technology shifts. So the more jobs get created by installing more solar power the better it is. But it is like with programmers
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Monopoly only exists because of laws allowing it. Long term monopolies don' exist naturally.
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Right! That's why the term "Natural Monopoly" [wikipedia.org] doesn't exist.
Wait...
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Yes, and besides the cost/upkeep of transmission lines, anyone can theoretically generate power and feed those lines. I would personally have no problem treating power lines, and fiber like we do with roads.
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Millions of cyclists pedaling away.. Now THERE's jobs per megawatt for you!
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Re:Propped Up Industry (Score:4, Informative)
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Here is a write-up on Boulder. [solarpowerrocks.com] Note that roughly 2/3 of the installed costs is done in rebates. Then the electric company has to buy any excess energy from you. It is at a
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to be fair .. building a rail system for all of Britain is equivalent to building it for a 1-2 states here in the US..
you have a small area with high population density
we have a large area with low population density
the money is where the people are - if left up to private companies they would only ever build a rail where there was a concentration of people and not bother making long haul runs as they aren't short term profitable - and if they are profitable they are not as profitable as other short runs.
th
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The amount of railroads around the nation was a spit in the bucket, compared to other nations. Then we VERY heavily subsidized them to get them off the ground. The feds and states gave all sorts of lands and even money to them to build on. We are not talking just ROW. They GAVE large lands to them. Many of the ranches here in the west were originally railroad owned. They then sold those to get funding for building out more of their railroads.
In fact, the US and state govs have done that with the va
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There is absolutely nothing wrong with subsidizing solar energy companies. There are incentives there, and I'm not even going to waste my time listing them - as you seem to know so much about the topic, you should know this yourself. As for U.S., the entire country is subsidized. I am talking about the national debt.
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Re:Propped Up Industry (Score:5, Informative)
Solar is propped up far less than the dirty fossil fuel industry. Oil and Natural Gas alone are set to reap more than $1.25 Billion from Texas alone this year in subsides and tax breaks. [abovetopsecret.com] At the Federal level, they've reaped more than $50 Billion [huffingtonpost.com]since 2002. In order to level the proverbial playing field, the subsidies to Solar and other alternative energy forms are necessary. But the Oil and Gas companies are reaping billions of dollars in profits and paying less tax than the average wage earner in terms of a percentage of income.
Without subsides, our $4 gallon gas would be more like what they pay in Europe--nearly double that and would cripple or kill the auto industry. Of course it may well spur development of better and more efficient (and more profitable) forms of Public Transportation, but most of that would take a decade or more to put in place. This, too, would kill our fragile economy. Had this all been done during the Clinton Administration, when we were seeing 5% Annual Growth, then removing the subsidies for Oil and Gas would
New favorite unit of measurement (Score:3)
Jobs per megawatt
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Bah... the amount of jobs per megawatt will drop for solar as factories get bigger and more efficient.
Still, it shows that solar has moved from an interesting research topic to a real (profitable) industry.
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a real (profitable) industry
The only reason it's profitable is because the government is artificially inflating it with shitloads of subsidies. If it were TRULY profitable, it would have been developed without those subsidies long ago.
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They did the same thing with oil. Look it up. Government fostering new technology is NOT a bad thing.
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They do the same thing [cleantechnica.com] with oil. Look it up.
FTFY
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Government has been trying to foster the development of PV solar for 40 years. At what point do we decide to cut the cord and turn it loose?
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When you discover an infinite supply of coal.
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You really think the people that have their hands deep in oil extraction would just stand aside and look at how the solar guys develop their thing? I don't think subsidies have much to do with it, my friend.
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The evil oil and coal companies don't have to resort to underhanded tactics to fight solar. Their ability to say "We can deliver more power for much cheaper" is enough for them to compete with any solar startup.
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and a DIY install on the electricity side can end (Score:2)
and a DIY install on the electricity side can end up very badly with out the right hook ups and the last thing you need is when the power is out is for the panels to back feed to the grid and kill a lineman.
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This is a risk you run even with people who don't know what they're doing connecting a generator during a power failure. Hopefully anyone playing with an alternative energy source in their own home (solar/wind, or generator) will do a some of their homework and avoid this. In the case of grid tied solar, pretty much all domestically available grid-tied inverters have very rigorous protection to avoid an islanding situation. Even if they're not installed exactly up to code they should be able to detect th
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As long as complete kits are supplied with socket connections, "solar panel, battery, rectifier and switch board connection", there shouldn't be too much of a problem. Even better if a set of standards governing default connection standards for a home solar power kit, would allow people to mix and match as long as the equipment adhered to the standards and they used default electrical connections. Excluding off course the wiring the switchboard socket which should require a licensed electrician, beyond tha
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I thought it was standard practice to pull fuses [apogee.net] on either side of your work area... if not, why? It's a quick task to pop one of them out of their clamps with those long fiberglass fuse pullers [electricia...online.com].
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according to the International Energy Outlook [eia.gov] the world energy consumption in 2007 was 495 quadrillion British thermal units. If I calculated correctly one year of [Steve] Jobs is worth 16.56 trillion Watt years.
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More importantly, is going from 93k to 50k a growth ? It seems like a recess to me, or a typo ;-)
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People who cite "jobs/production unit" as a relevant metric don't understand the primary purpose of industry.
Hint: it isn't job creation.
From a low base (Score:3)
...no doubt.
How much (Score:5, Insightful)
How much of this industry growth is fueled by government subsidies?
Re:How much (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a possibility but not a necessity. You seem to have forgotten that the difference between oil, gas and coal energy generation and wind, solar, geothermal and hydro electric is that you have to pay for inputs to oil, gas and coal. If the plant costs are comparable, then the difference in jobs/MW only needs to be less than what the plant would spend on fossil fuels (and eventually carbon taxes).
What I think it means is instead of buying tonnes of coal to burn, solar plants pay people to inspect, clean and repair the solar panels.
As for government subsidies, as I understand there are far more subsidies for coal, gas and oil than there are for solar. I've read the difference is about 10 to 1 each. So for every $1 in government subsidies for solar, coal gets $10, and natural gas gets $10 and oil gets $10.
Re:How much (Score:4, Interesting)
There's also the minor question of "are we paying for the right thing?" Subsidies/grants/investments for research into renewables is one thing--they have the potential to produce improvements in the efficiency and cost of such systems. But subsidies for production and installation of renewables (as the US gov't currently does) is absolute futility--by doing so, the government is distorting the value of those products, actually providing a disincentive for producers to make those systems more economical on their own.
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I'm not sure I follow the logic that it is a disincentive for producers to make those systems more economical. Given that these subsidies are temporary and not permanent and controversial among the heavily indebted to oil and gas Republicans, it seems like it gives them a very big incentive to become more economical. The subsidies are likely to be taken away as soon as the Republicans can muster enough votes to quash them again. That means, if history is any indicator, soon enough they will be in open co
Re:you need to look at subsidies per megawatt (Score:5, Insightful)
Without the federal subsidies AND the special liability protection offered to Coal, oil and gas they would fail.
If you wiped out all subsidies, Coal, Oil and Gas WOULD be cheaper slightly. Afterall, they have 125 years of infrastructure built.
People said the same thing about thoes fancy horseless carriages and the new fangled steam-ships.
Subsidies are important to give new and promising technology an opportunity in the market. Solar is still a baby. We are every year finding new and dramatic ways to improve solar. It will probably be a baby for another 20 years. Coal, Oil and gas haven't been babes for 50+ years. We have seen a small improvement in efficiency but thats it.
Once a technology is no longer in development it should be stripped of subsidies and protections and allowed to stand on its own. Coal, Oil and gas never have done this.
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I was thinking along the same lines. Seems 93,000 employees for 600,000 houses powered isn't that great of a ration. That's 1 person for 6 houses powered. With the cost of capital equipment and the ongoing maintenance of said equipment, the cost of solar power must be magnitudes higher than fossil fuels.
Re:How much (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comparison is meaningless. You should be comparing the 93000 employees with the growth rate of solar energy installations, not currently installed effect. 3000 MW already installed require very little maintainance, but new installations require a lot of work per MW. Research, production and installation. A lot of people are employed in the heavily subsidised coal industry as well, but mostly in maintainance and coal production. Not as much in building new power plants.
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Except with every other power system you have fuel costs as well.
So it takes (making up numbers) 10 people per megawatt to install a coal plant and 15 people per megawatt to install a solar plant. Every year the coal plant spends a few million in fuel and maintenance. Solar has maintenance only and if you are a grid tied system, not much maintenance at all.
Solar needs to drop about 50% from current prices to be directly competetive with the current subsidized price of coal power. If we dropped the subsid
Based on USD Market Cap... (Score:2)
Tax dollars (Score:3)
How much government money has been spent creating these jobs? And what is the percentage of salary for solar workers compared to this government money?
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Whats wrong with government spending money to create jobs? More appropriate calculation is:
economical efficiency = (Ns + Us) / Ss.
where:
Ns is government spending on Nuclear, oil and coal - env. impact on harvesting fuel and operating, health issues (coal), permanent storage (nuclear),
Us is government spending on people (currently employed in solar business) if they were unemployed or in jail. Not all 4 million people eventually employed in solar would be otherwise unemployed
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I think it's important to ask ourselves how much of the money is actually getting to the workers. And how much the owners of these companies are taking from the pot for themselves. There is also the question of where this money would have ended up if the government hadn't decided to spend it. Perhaps there are other more efficient areas that it could have gone to, which would have helped more people.
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There is also the question of where this money would have ended up if the government hadn't decided to spend it.
Probably most of it would have been invested in millions of square yards of ugly stucco siding on mcmansions.
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it makes perfect sense that the government should intercede to stimulate job growth
Not if those jobs won't last. The trick is to stimulate in areas that will eventually be able to sustain those jobs WITHOUT government help. Solar is not one of those areas.
I've got good news and bad news and more bad news. (Score:5, Insightful)
The good news: Solar energy is the fastest growing industry in the US.
The bad news for solar energy: Solar energy is the fastest growing industry in the US.
The bad news for the US: Solar energy is the fastest growing industry in the US.
J/MW not that odd (Score:2, Interesting)
Contrary to the above posts Jobs/MW isn't all that odd a metric, particularly if you actually read the article and not the headline.
One of the claims regarding clean/alternative energy is that, among other things, it will create jobs since the entire industry barely exists compared to where it would eventually need to be scale wise. The paper basically says, ok let's see if that's the case and count number of jobs created. Since the product of an energy plant should be MW not white papers, glossy brochure
Not just electricity for solar (Score:2)
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Not sure if you have a typo or if you are trolling or what... but 60F is only slightly above the temperature of most groundwater. 60C, aka ~140F is a bit more like it, but that seems a bit on the hot side for most hot water.
Rats flock to government subsidies (Score:5, Insightful)
Any industry heavy with government subsidies - defense, social welfare, medicine, and now 'renewables' - attracts opportunists of both the legitimate and illegitimate sort.
Legitimate businesses are interested because they know that having a politically-attractive industry can make a lot of low-/no-interest money available as well as making the government paperwork (permits, etc.) all move much quicker than usual. Finally, it's a truism that once established government programs almost never die (for God's sake, the TVA's REA is still alive and flourishing - conveniently renamed to the RUS "Rural Utilities Service" - to legitimize its ever-spreading 'responsibilities' hahaha).
Illegitimate business (con men, criminals, etc.) are attracted because government investment typically now means at least dollars in the 10^6 range, that until they reach 10^9 these numbers are considered 'trivial' and barely worth notice/mention by Federal agencies (how many pallets of $$billions have been untraceably 'lost' in Iraq/Afghanistan?) - a perfect environment for fraud.
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I totally agree, but at least with solar we are going into debt for seemingly much better reasons:
1) building infrastructure in our own country
2) not funding another war or the military
3) replacing non renewable energy sources
4) distributing the energy grid
Our money is and can be spent on much worse things.
The race is rigged (Score:2)
You can't even get a permit let a lone build a nuclear or coal power plant because of EPA regulations and red tape.
It's like watching a race between two people running and one person get's hit by a car every third step they take and acting surprised the other runner is doing so well. It's a rigged race and the desired outcome sh
From Another Point of View (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't even get a permit let a lone build a nuclear or coal power plant because of EPA regulations and red tape.
You're not going to hear much sympathy from me. I've been to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, I've seen what natural water should look like. By my own first hand account, there is none of that on the East Coast.
So let's see here, after some shallow checking on Google News we have: Frack water to be dumped in Niagara Falls [niagarafallsreporter.com], the EPA has been completely ignoring Anacostia River pollution [courthousenews.com] and the dead zone in the Chesapeake is growing [washingtonpost.com]. And that's just news from the last couple of days. How can I be upset that the EPA wants to tie up companies in "red tape" when this is happening in our country? Why don't the solar companies get the same red tape? Oh, right, they don't produce a byproduct that is often dumped in nearby water [lhup.edu]. I'm sure the site of solar panel farms suffers the same environmental scrutiny that your poor "hobbled" coal and nuclear power facilities face. It's just that the byproducts and environmental effects appear to be okay for local residents.
It's like watching a race between two people running and one person get's hit by a car every third step they take and acting surprised the other runner is doing so well. It's a rigged race and the desired outcome shouldn't be a huge surprise.
The way I see it, is it's more like two people racing and one person pouring crude oil along the entire race path and then sliding on it with a sled and beating the person that's trying to run through it. Meanwhile the people who live near the race track are drinking shit in their water. Think I'm making that up? Go ask the residents of West Virginia who get to watch their entire state terraformed into slag [youtube.com]. PA's natural gas boon could result in the same thing if we don't have that evil evil evil "red tape."
Re:The race is rigged (Score:4, Interesting)
Too bad solar manufacturing is heavily subsidized by the US government
Or is it? [cleantechnica.com]
"Just give them spoons" (Score:2)
As related by Mark Calabria of CATO:
Tipping point (Score:2)
It used to be that solar panels were by far the most expensive part of an installation. At the moment, for an installation that can supply 1350 kWh/year, the panels cost E4500, the inverter is E1200, labor is in the region of E1000 as well I suspect. So the panels are still 66% of the total cost. Two years ago, the panels would have cost E8500, or more than 80% of the total cost. When the cost per Watt reaches E1, the panels will be 50% of the installation cost.
At that point savings in the cost of inverters
Solar to Hydrocarbons (Score:2)
about time (Score:2)
great to hear that this so underused industry is now coming out of the dark ages, and trying to catch up with the 21st century. Seriously though....its great that we are now moving (although at a snails pace) towards other fuel sources for our country.....screw those shieks and their oil....hopefully we will have a fully self sustaining operation within the next 10 years and kiss oil goodbye forever!
Business potential in going green (Score:3)
For years governments (at least in Australia) have been saying that going green will be bad for jobs and economy, while some of us have been saying there is enormous business potential in green tech, if given the right guidance. (Although in my opinion, the best guidance is probably not subsidies.)
I reckon that the easiest way to go green is by taking advantage of capitalism, but for some reason the Liberals (blue) just don't seem to see it. It seems they're only on board now that they realise that they're losing votes because of their stance. In Australia I wish there was a cyan party (blue-green) rather than the Greens (which is really red-green).
Is it just in Australia that it's like this? How about the US and Europe? Can other governments see the business potential in "green technology" other than China?
Would it be booming without the subsidies? (Score:2)
We went completely solar in 1981... (Score:3)
When we built our 32-foot sailboat and embarked upon a 5-year cruise of the eastern North Pacific (read: Washington, Oregon, California, Baja and the Sea of Cortez) we bought two 33-watt solar panels in Oakland, CA and used them throughout the cruise. They worked amazingly well but we did spend a bit of time making sure they were oriented properly. We later augmented them with a wind generator (hand-carved propellor and a 35vdc motor hung in the rigging) which helped the refrigeration system make enough ice per day for two drinks each at sundown instead of just one.
We were a novelty then...
Now we're solar in our little 21-foot camp trailer and, guess what..... we're *still* a novelty. Two 40-watt panels (about half the size physically as those we bought in 1981 but roughly the same price in 2010 dollars) still give us all the power we need but we're typically the only solar-powered RV in the campground. And other campers continually ask us if they actually work.
I'm convinced that distributed solar power is the best answer to the energy problems facing the USA but I've been skeptical that we're educated enough as a culture to get there. Nice to see this piece.
It's also nice to have been a pioneer.
PR math is wrong! (Score:2)
There are now almost 3,000 megawatts of solar electric energy installed in the U.S., enough to power 600,000 homes.
This would mean that each home consumes 5 kW. That's really low. Most small houses have a 100 A panel if their stove is electric. 200 A panels are pretty common. The reality is closer to 10 kW.
For comparison, 3 GW is either three large gas or coal thermal plants, or 1.5 nuclear reactors.
Remember, on top of that, that you cannot store electricity unless your production is near a hydro da
So where is the real Value Add then? (Score:2)
The equivalent measure in banking... (Score:2)
... would be jobs/megabuck moved. To maximize that measure, we should replace all thoss ATMs with human tellers [marketwatch.com].
Right?
Human Batteries! (Score:3)
Don't we want less jobs per energy?
I can beat Solar easily, and solve both the energy crisis as well as the US unemployment problem.
Step 1: Figure out how many unemployed people there are in the US!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_unemployment_rate [wikipedia.org]
9.2 Hooray!
Step 2: Figure out how many Americans there are!
Google!
307 Million
Step 3: Do some complicated math!
1st assume a population of 300 and an unemployment rate of 10%!
30 Million people!
Step 4: Buy 30 Million exercise bikes and hook them up with dynamos and connect them to the grid!
You might possibly need an inverter or something fancy.
Step 5: Hire 10 Million people at minimum wage for each of 3 shifts.
Step 6: PROFIT!!! :)
Now you have all the power you need, no unemployment, and as a bonus I solved all your obesity problems you have in the US as well!
I'll take my Nobel peace prize!
You're on your own with that whole debt thing though, I'm not touching that one!
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There are so many jobs tied up with the Shuttle, we have to keep it in service - no matter how little they actually do for society or how much it costs.
So, I guess what we need is a solar-powered shuttle.
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I just hope the North Koreans don't develop a glowing dog of their own.