Because fossil fuel lobbyists and the “solar isn’t good enough” crowd.
“The sun can give you cancer. Do you really want cancer energy in your home? No! Checkmate!”
At this point, I’m pro-extinction.
You first
Alternative idea:
We start with the billionaires and reconvene afterward to see where we’re at.
If you somehow fix it, I might reconsider blowing my head off.
It will take all of us.
Also, consider having the compassion to not create a mess for the cleanup crew.
Sensible conclusion
Maybe the cancer vaccine once invented should be inherently barred from anyone who voted for Trump more than zero times. Hit em back with cancer
I recently had solar installed and it’s been great.
https://lemmy.world/post/32326227
With the 30% federal tax credit, it’s pretty neutral financially. It’s a nice hedge in many, many ways, and it’s a huge step towards independence.
With solar and an EV, it doesn’t matter what happens to electric prices. It doesn’t matter what happens to gasoline. You need food and water to survive comfortably. They haven’t managed to screw up water too much yet, and if there’s one thing the US is good at, it’s farming.
No regrets.
Which “solar isn’t good enough” crowd are you talking about? I have never heard of anyone saying that we should build less solar capacity just because a 100% solar powered grid may not work best in all areas. Rooftop solar especially is a non-issue for anyone who wants to move off fossil fuels.
The only time I’ve seen people arguing against solar is in locations where winter drops the solar energy production for half the year. Even then, people are talking about grid scale installs and alternatives, not rooftop.
I have witnessed this, unfortunately, right in my family. It’s a thing.
Same. It doesn’t fix all problems on earth and next to it, therefore it’s non viable.
People that point out the real estate problem and also dodgy installations causing roof leaks.
“We” are not killing it with red tape. The oligarchs are killing it with red tape because they’ve successfully executed full regulatory capture of essentially the entire US government.
Its mostly red tape at the municipal level; construction permits and such. That’s something that you and a group of friends can reasonably expect to address
That’s a fair point - local/regional building codes definitely need to be pushed in the right direction in a lot of places.
FWIW, I’m in the process of starting a grid-tied solar installation. Total cost, without batteries, will be about $70,000. That’s a 17kW system, that should produce an average of 30kWh/day in the winter.
If I had been doing this last year, it would have been sharply less; tariffs and the drive to kill solar has driven costs up, and the end of the solar tax credit on 31 December means that everyone that wants to do it is trying to do it now, which drives up labor costs.
DIY install would cut the cost dramatically, the markup on labor was already fucking insane. You can get a roofer to do the install for the brackets and an electrician to certify the cabling for fraction of what solar installers want to do it.
Plus the equipment is dramatically cheaper doing it that way too. Go checkout https://signaturesolar.com/ and see how insanely larger your system could be for 70k lol.
Just as a quick example you can build a cart that is
27kW of solar input
24kW of inverter output
55kWh of storage
For about 30k then add 5k for cabling, lugs, fuses and breakers, and I’m also assuming you’ll need the lug crimpers and other such tools amd 5k for the mounting hardware, unless you happen to be or be friends with a welder then you can find a steel yard and make your own mounting hardware for pretty cheap.
So tldr for 40k you can have a system that wildly outclasses that 70k one from an installer. It’s not particularly difficult work to do there are a million extremely great tutorials available out there both in text and video form solar is mostly DC so it’s just positive to positive negative to negative. You can always have an electrician handle the final connection to the actual breaker box of the house and it will still be dramatically cheaper than having solar installers do the whole thing
Reference links for that price
2x Solar pallet
Late reply here.
When I was spec’ing a system for a DIY build, I was at about $60k for a 20kw system, with a 50kWh battery array, not including the actual copper wire to connect to the panel. But the problem you run into there is the bit about burning your house down, or electrocuting yourself, because the voltage gets very high, very fast. Wiring an outlet in your home is pretty simple, running new circuits from a breaker a little harder but still definitely within what a homeowner can reasonably do. But I was looking at things like pouring concrete for piers for a ground mount rack (my roof isn’t adequate, and is partially shaded), trenching to get to the house, using microinverters so that it could be expanded easily, etc., AND trying to be done by 31 Dec. so that I still squeak under the federal tax credit requirements.
And it’s not nearly as easy as you make it seem. Take panels; they’re all going to have slightly different sizes, voltage output, etc., and you need to understand that voltage output when you’re wiring them together. Some of the larger commercial panels (>650W or so) aren’t going to work with microinverters at all. Then you need to consider how many panels you’re going to be wiring in each string, and how you tie those strings together. Running everything in series runs the amperage up sharply, and running everything in parallel runs the voltage up. To make it even better, panel output increases in cold weather, so building a system with inverters and wiring that’s close to the load limit at 50F can easily end up exceeding the load limit if the temperatures drop to -20F. (And goddamn, copper cables for >200A service can get expensive.) Wiring? Well, hopefully your system is actually all solid copper wiring, and not copper-clad aluminum, because at the load limits for copper-clad aluminum it gets a lot hotter than solid copper; too much aluminum wiring in too close proximity can melt the insulation off in a hurry.
And, again, i can not overstate just how easy it is to kill yourself wiring this shit, because the voltages and amperages get REALLY high, really fast. 20kW is an enormous amount of power.
Just a quick correction it’s series that raises voltage, parallel raises amperage. It’s not that difficult to do this safely solar equipment is all made with safety in mind. For example it’s pretty rare that you should be working with raw wire especially any that is any type of live. The only time you will potentially be exposed to Raw wire is when you’re initially making mc4 connectors but they should not be plugged into anything while you’re doing that the panels will already come with their own mc4 connectors obviously you should fully make both ends of the cable before plugging them into anything.
Copper versus clad aluminum should not matter as long as you are using the correct size wire for the amount of amperage you expect to see, that’s the same issue you could run into with house wiring so it’s really no different than that the AWG sizes are standard and all come with load ratings. Regardless of the type of material it’s made of if your wire is getting any type of hot it’s a sign that you need a lower gauge wire it shouldn’t be getting notably warm under load much less hot
There is indeed some math to be done to make sure that whatever type of inverter you use will work with the solar panels and arrangements you plan on using. It’s some pretty basic math not particularly difficult, i do expect anyone doing DIY to do the bare minimum of reading the instructions. Don’t get me wrong there are some stupid people out there, like the people that leave one star comments on an Amazon product saying that the bottle is smaller than they thought even though the listing says the size of the bottle in the title and the description. However I am not going to base my general recommendations on that level of intelligence.
If you do some very basic reading, look over the description of the products which will also tell you what type of voltage they can take how many amps and usually any other considerations it’s pretty easy to put these things together correctly. And it’s fairly easy to put them together without ever actually having to interact with live voltage other than the final connection which if you really wanted to be ultra safe about you could simply do at night when there wouldn’t be any :) there’s countless information available that you can research beforehand if you’re ever nervous. Tons of great videos out there tons of great content on stuff like solarDIY forums etc
Only if you’re in a place that lets you do it DIY. My county does not allow me to do any solar on my own, whether it’s tied to the grid or not. If I could do what you’re suggesting and hire a roofer to install the brackets, then install the panels myself and just hire an electrician to finish tying the wiring into my panel, I would do that in a heartbeat.
You’re absolutely correct in saying people can save a ton of money with DIY, but people also need to check their local laws and make sure they’re able to do that.
Grid tie i fully understand being regulated heavily but man i wish i could punch and then bury alive any officials that regulated offgrid self consumption. Like fuck off its basically just a larger version of those computer battery backups you can get at bestbuy lol. Or better it’s just a larger jackery battery and solar, they gonna fucking regulate those too? We can’t have people being self sufficient that would be just awful
Or better it’s just a larger jackery battery and solar, they gonna fucking regulate those too?
If they catch you using it to be self-sufficient instead of paying the electrical company? You bet your ass they will
There’s two issues at play that aren’t related, and neither is the existence of “red tape”, also known as “any degree of regulation”.
One is that they’re pulling money away from solar, and trying to kill it. That’s shit, and they shouldn’t. End of issue.
The other is that everyone seems to wince at the notion of actually investing in civic services, and then gets confused about why they take a long time to do stuff and make mistakes. Those other countries where it’s easier just spent the money on the government that makes it nice.
Refusing to fund the government because it doesn’t work well, then removing regulations because the government is slow to enforce them is a cyclic libertarian and Republican trope.Amazing how OP went to the trouble to include the Motherjones byline, and all these commenters treat it like lies and misguided opinion, meanwhile Democrat Governor Gavin Newsome is literally fighting rootop solar in the largest blue state.
Because Trump, and his Big Atrocious Bill
I’m not sure that red tape is what killed it for me, to be honest.
Up until about 5 years ago, there were state and federal programs (IIRC mostly in the form of tax rebates) where I live such that panels and installation were essentially 50% off. In addition, the power company paid 1-to-1 for the excess energy. The folks who were lucky enough to be able to buy solar in those days were breaking even in the 5 to 7 year range and they get grandfathered in to the power company’s 1-to-1 buy back basically forever from what I understand.
Now, there’s only the federal incentives, the power company buyback is some ridiculously low amount that it makes you wonder why they bother at all, state incentives are gone, and the cost of panels + installation has sky rocketed. We looked into it several years ago, and with all the recent changes, it was going to take 15+ years for us to break even under fairly optimal conditions. A lot can happen in 15 years and we just weren’t comfortable enough financially for it to make sense.
Yup, this was it for my wife and me too. We don’t use enough to make it worthwhile and I held out for next generation tech.
Well, with the tax rebates expiring, we’re getting them installed by end of year. It should take 9 years to break even, so not awful, and really it’s always sat just about there with our usage. But it’s insane that we aren’t funding this or chasing it harder. Having that much decentralized capacity, while surely difficult to plan for, adds priceless resilience.
Edited to add: added bonus, we’ll be less stingy with the AC in the summer! Only 108 today… this is fine.
