Installing Rooftop Solar Can Be a Breeze. Just Look at Australia. - Slashdot
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Installing Rooftop Solar Can Be a Breeze. Just Look at Australia.
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Australia pays its solar installers salaries comparable to those in the United States, and it buys most of its solar modules from China at 25 cents per watt, just a little less than what American buyers pay. Our houses are mostly detached single-family, like America, too. But unlike in the United States, it's easy to get permits and install rooftop solar in Australia. Australia's rooftop solar success is a function partly of luck, partly of design. In the early 1990s, regulators considered rooftop solar a hobby, and no one stood in the way of efforts to make the rules favorable to small-scale solar. Looking for a good headline to varnish over Australia's refusal to agree to the same greenhouse emissions reductions as the rest of the world in the 1997 Kyoto climate agreement, the federal government embraced renewable energy policies that set the stage for rooftop solar. Households were given rebates for the upfront costs, and were paid to send excess electricity back to the grid. In 2007, Prime Minister John Howard doubled the rebate, a move that is credited with kick-starting a solar installation boom.
Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution to high energy costs? The failures are mostly regulatory: local building codes and zoning laws, state rules that govern the grid connection and liability issues. Permitting can take as little as a day in Australia and is done over the web; in the United States permitting and connecting to the grid can take as long as six months. Many customers just give up. America also generally requires a metal conduit around the wiring; in Australia, the connections can be less expensive soft cables, similar to extension cords. The cost of rooftop solar in the United States depends on many things, including the latitude, tree cover and federal and state incentives. Installation costs can also vary quite a bit, depending on what laborers charge and the local permitting and inspection policies. My friend Andrew Birch, co-founder of the solar and solar software companies OpenSolar in Sydney and Sungevity in the United States, wrote an excellent critique of American rooftop solar and its high price in 2018.
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America should never learn from successes outside them. Definitely not solar. Definitely not gun regulations.
America: "We've tried doing nothing, and we're all out of ideas!"-
Let me tell you why America is completely unique in the world, and then list a dozen reasons it couldn't possibly work:
* Population density
* Diversity
* 2nd amendment
* Latitude
* Electoral collage
* Gangs
* 1st amendment
* Federalism
* Supreme court
* Immigrants
* Republicans
* Healthcare-
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Well played!
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That seems to be at the core of the problem.
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Maybe 3 of those are unique to America and some of them are actually just the fault of the others.
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Isn't it strange how the Republicans, the party of free markets and self made men, tries to stop people making their own electricity so that big energy suppliers can make more profit?
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Its the same problem in telecom. This isnt about deliberate corruption, its about complete incompetence. Out election system is nothing but a popularity contest and nothing more. Would you pick your brain surgeon because he/she was voted Prom King/Queen in highschool? Or picked most popular in your yearbook? We do it every fucking day with politicians. So they passed a bill telling telecom yo do something about spoofed robocalls. But these idiots are not networking engineers, so they turn to the bug players
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While the democrats demonize clean nuclear energy.
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Biden launches $6B effort to save distressed nuclear plants [nbcnews.com]
I can agree that this is not enough by any measure but it's not like we have seen the either party move the needle much with nuclear energy in the past 30 years. Trump did start a couple measures and Biden is continuing them but the unfortunate reality is that nuclear is a bit of a hot potato in the US, in my opinion it's because neither party wants to face the reality that it is only viable if done via nationalization, it's not a free market solvab
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Nuclear simply isn't worth the cost. Just unit #2 at Watts Bar is over $6 Billion now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Winners plan, losers find excuses. Put a panel on your rooftop, how hard can it be.
But yes... Belgium here, we have lot of solar power. Lot of installations go offline at noon due to too much line voltage. Big investments are needed in the grid. Looks like electric car future is starting to move things.-
Different climates yield different roof shapes and pitches. 1 level homes in hotter regions tend to be flatter and much more easy for do-it-yourself. In northern cold regions here, we find very steep roofs which are much more dangerous to climb by comparison. We also parse out land into smaller lots, which creates a tin of 2 level and 3 level homes. This too increases the risk factors compared to lower flatter rooftops. Taking the DIY factor out drastically increases the costs. Nobody in my area, due to ver
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You forgot "9/11" and "Benghazi".
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Maybe 9/11. The latter was just one of those radical anniversary date things. 9/11 gave us the unpatriot act.
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Oh, good one. I was struggling by the end, but "9/11" changed everything!
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Let me tell you why America is completely unique in the world
Nationalism and national exceptionalism are common to many countries, they are not unique to America.
You then go on to make a list which is at least half pure bullshit.
I hope you were trying to write satire. If so, you failed, because it is indistinguishable from actual comments written by actual idiots. But if you were not, you failed even harder.
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Yes of course it was a joke, jesus christ:)
I wanted to make fun of the fact that people will gladly pull out random nonsense reasons to justify why something (that they don't really want) is impossible. Of course it's not unique to America, though it's definitely stronger there, but that's what were are talking about.
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That is pretty accurate. Well, the US has been left beghind in many things already. A few more and things will not look good.
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And other complete bollocks about Australia.
The crime rate did go down after 1997... It's just that gun nuts like to cut it off at 1997 because they don't like what happened.
Shootings themselves are rare in Australia, shootings involving more than 1 person are even rarer.
I will admit I'd never heard that myth about Australia changing the number of victims required for a mass shooting... But it's bollocks. A multiple homicide (regardless of method) is still any number larger than 1. Australia is pr-
But mass shooting here isnt 3 ore more dead. Its 3 or more shot. If it requred 3 or more dead you wouldnt be feed the same BS. Comparing two completely different definitions does not make it even close for comparison. A school shooting here, based on reported incidents, include suicides, in a car, in the parking lot, of a former school boarded up. Sometimes they count a school shooting when a cop, across the street, discharges his weapon, and the bullet strikes the school building. Its a cop. But it sure h
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These are just some BS reporting in 2018:
April 12: Raytown, Missouri
A man was shot in the stomach in the parking lot of Raytown South Middle School during a track meet. 5:30pm. School was not open. Grown man. Was gang driveby shooting.
April 9: Gloversville, New York
A student shot another student with a BB gun in Gloversville Middle School.
March 13: Seaside, California
A teacher accidentally discharged a gun during a public safety class at Seaside High School, injuring a student. Teacher was res
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But we're not talking about ALL crime. We're talking about gun crime. Especially gun crime involving multiple people.
Stop with the strawmen.-
Why do you only fucking give a shit about gun crime dumbass. How about I beat the shit out of you with a baseball bat for what will feel like hours? does that sound better? Maybe I sodomize you with a lead pipe? Iâ(TM)m sure thatâ(TM)s so much better. Stop being an idiot. We arent even in the top 10 countries for violent crime or homicide. Maybe you should move to Jamaica. Very low gun crime. 1000x more likely you will be murdered. Do us all a favor
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You have some strange fantasies.
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lol, its a valid point. Violent crime is the real issue. Whining like a bitch about the method you are violated is like demanding you are eaten by a bull shark not a north-atlantic white tip.
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I have a solar setup on my roof in New England, it powers my house year round very effectively and it cost about 20K to install before tax incentives. Factoring those in my 12 year loan monthly cost was just about equal to my non summer, non AC running electric bill. We get a ton of snow, we get way less sun in the winter and yet it still works out nicely.
Solar is viable in these areas despite folks like you continually taking about how its impossible.
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You know I am not even crazy about gun control but it's the refusal by certain sects of the populace and government to do absolutely anything else around the issue that makes me puzzled and feel like they are all a bunch of dishonest crooks.
Want to keep gun laws as loose as possible? fine;
Can we have an improved healthcare system like every other developed nation with robust mental health options? NO!
Can we have a more dedicated social safety net to help protect vulnerable populations? NO!
Can we have better
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Solar panels are useless when the net cannot handle the power.
Here (Netherlands) the switching gear that passes the power onto the net turns off when the net power becomes to die,
which happens regularly on sunny days.
In vast parts of the country it is no longer allowed to set up large solar plants (larger than a single house's roof full) because the net cannot handle it.
However, our government was stupid enough to privatize the electricity network, so it is not going to be improved anytime soon.-
You can get inverters that allow powering your home from solar or a battery when the grid is down. The cheap ones don't, it's a feature you have to pay extra for. Most of Europe has very stable electricity supply, so it's not worth it. I can't remember the last time we had a black-out, more than a decade ago certainly.
If you are suffering from the grid going down then it might be worth paying a bit extra for a suitable inverter and battery. Whole house UPS. As an alternative to a battery, you could buy an electric car that supports vehicle to gird (it doesn't have to go to the grid with the right inverter).
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You technically can, but at least in the Netherlands that is illegal. The fire brigade wants all power in a building to be off if the grid is off or disconnected.
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Huh, that's interesting. I can understand why they want it, but it seems like a bad solution. If it's a house without solar or battery and they want to be sure the power is off then they will have to go to the consumer unit. Sometimes that is located on the outside of the house for easy access by emergency services, or at least the main breaker is.
Unless they plan on turning off the electricity for a whole block of houses at the substation...
Seems like just mandating an external off switch/main breaker woul
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That's what we do here Automatic transfer switches - here's an example. https://www.lowes.com/pd/Gener... [lowes.com]
To install solar, but not be allowed to use it sounds like a huge payment was made to the lawmakers that made the law.
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Congratulations, you have even worse protectionist laws around power generation than they have in Texas.
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That's really odd. I'm reading this as backup power in the Netherlands is illegal? Here, we have automatic cutout systems that when the grid is down, it disconnects the lines coming into the house.
What does the Netherlands to for life critical things like their verisons of the USA 911 tower system?
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As a Dutchman with solar I can confirm the opposition to batteries.
Recently I asked to have my electric car battery connected via a smart switch to power the house at night but it is a no-go.
In Denmark it seems to be the other way around, they typically want you to install so-called hybrid solar panels, meaning they come with a battery to smooth out the sunny hours vs. the dark hours. -
So exactly as the summary says, the problem is with regulation and permitting, not technology, not whether. Permitting.
My system here was a pain to get connected because the local power company dragged their feet for 2 months because they are allowed and they don't want the competition, but its on now and worth every penny.
Mine also switches off when the power is out, but where I live the grid isn't so bad as to cut out constantly so a battery back up was not a priority for me.
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But TFA is talking about single-house rooftop solar with enough storage to never need to import from the grid... Which makes your comment irrelevant.
Actually the issue is that Australia happens to have fantastic solar resource and a demand profile that almost exactly matches solar output profile - big peaks during long, sunny summer days due to high air conditioning load. This doesn't work at higher latitudes because the solar output peak remains the same while the demand peak is on cold, short, winter da
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This doesn't work at higher latitudes because the solar output peak remains the same while the demand peak is on cold, short, winter days due to high heating load.
It depends a bit on your definition of "doesn't work". Residential rooftop solar may not be able to supply 100% of electric demand during winter months in the northern United States (especially with heat pumps). But if it were only, say, 50%, that would still be worth pursuing, no? As an incremental step, I'd be satisfied with running fossil
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We're at 52 degrees, roughly (Bristol). We don't have air conditioning at all. We have heating throughout the house. That's pretty typical for the whole country.
Yes, offsetting some of your usage is worth doing. But the UK is already at the point where solar output is destabilising the market because at the solar peak, solar output is about 50% of consumption (in summer) but the peak demand doesn't correspond to the solar peak; the peak demand happens in the morning and evening. So you've got a lot of
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You don't necessarily need fat interconnects for the grid when you move power generation closer to where it is consumed.
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Amazing that solar panels work so well that they are useless.
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by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @06:38AM (#62620558)
They don't mention anything about the system cost and ROI time. An 11kW system with 16kWh battery is around $75000 in the US. So, if you are talking about a 10 year ROI, then your electricity bills need to be over $600 a month for this to make sense. I'm guessing this simple math has more to do with the uptake than any other factor. No utility is actually going to give you money for excess production (they may give you a credit for it), since solar ultimately costs them money. The feds and states seem to be over the idea of rebates, since it doesn't funnel more bribes into their pockets like dependence on coal and gas does.
Welcome to America-
That can't be right. That's 3-4x component cost?
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>That can't be right. That's 3-4x component cost?
Oh it can be. "Solutions" cost a lot more than components. Design, ordering, licensing, shipping, installation, testing, inspections, permits, support, etc. I priced a much smaller system and it was something like $35K, the ROI here would have been 20+years, with lots of optimistic assumptions.
And in the USA, sun angle, prevalence, etc varies WILDLY.
A natural gas generator with transfer- the "installed" cost was 3.5 times the wholesale price of the equi
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Sounds like someone has deliberately screwed up the regulations to protect their profits.
Such a system in the UK would be around $25k tops, installed.
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Sources for your figures?
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You can always pay a lot more for the same stuff...
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Seriously? are prices really that insanely high in the US?
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Sure you pay a lot for permits and bureaucracy and red tape in the US, but that's the price for Freedom(TM). Duh.
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I put in a 14kw system 2 years ago in Australia for from memory about 16k (AUD) so roughly 12k USD, without the battery though, so add another 10k or so for battery. The OP's system would be roughly 15-20k USD here depending on brand.
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That seems to be the normal price pretty much anywhere outside of the US.
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In Australia that system would be about 20k Australian dollarydoos, so about 15k US dollars. Installed. Why are US prices over 5 times higher?
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In most places, utilities don't work like that. Most deregulated utility markets work by having separate producers and retailers. The producers feed into the grid, the retailers buy power from them and sell it on to consumers. In this model, it absolutely makes sense for retailers to pay you for rooftop solar output, at something approaching the wholesale cost of electricity.
One of the issues of the solar market is that governments have typically subsidised rooftop solar to a massive extent. At one poin
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You fucking what? That is less than $20k installed in Australia, and that's Australian dollars so closer to $14k USD. ROI for my dad's solar installation was less than 2 years, though electricity in Australia costs significantly more than most US states.
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You must have a bloody huge roof!
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I live in an expensive state in the US (Massachusetts) and the typical cost of a 12 kW system is ~$30k. I have done extensive research on this as I'm about to get such a system installed. A neighbor of mine with a 10 kW system achieved ROI in https://homeguide.com/costs/so...
I can't speak to the cost of battery storage systems.
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They don't mention anything about the system cost and ROI time.
That's because that stuff costs more in Australia, which has stricter import regulations than we do, and yet Solar is still more successful there, proving that these considerations are not what are holding back solar installations. QED, you are flapping your mouth and wasting time in a way that does the energy companies' work for them.
They use to profit from everything, but when it was discovered that they were taking massive advantage of their customers laws were put in place to really make only building new generation capacity profitable. This makes rooftop solar a threat to shareholder profits, and since shareholders of utilities are amoral or immoral they are happy for the power companies to lobby to protect their profits.
A fair market would decouple the transmission infrastructure costs from the generation costs, and never let the same company own both transmission and generation. In fact the transmission should be handled by actually public utilities, like the bulk of roads. Generation can be a mix of public and private sources.
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https://www.thisoldhouse.com/s... [thisoldhouse.com]
Let's say $15k for a 6kw system.
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An 11kW system with 16kWh battery is around $75000 in the US.
I call bullshit on your numbers, unless you can provide some references for that pulled-from-your-ass estimate.
Here is one reference [energysage.com], and here's another [marketwatch.com], that indicate solar installation costs at under $3/W. The larger the system, the lower the per-watt cost. That's not just for the panels - that's total system cost. The point of the opinion piece is that, were regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles reduced, the cost could be even lower (so -
$75,000?
How did you manage that? Also you only really need around 4KW to power a house.
In the UK, a 4KW solar system is about £6,000 installed. That's probably $7,500.
Australia is not really a good example to follow because the situation changed. Up until quite recently the government were giving rebates for every solar system installed and there were quite generous feed-in tariffs. This lead to people getting the systems on finance based on a non-guaranteed future income that has disappeared -
That pricing is simply wrong. I'm getting an 8kw system with a 13.5kw hour system installed $32k BEFORE the tax credit (less than $25k after).
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That's what they'll do. They're doing it now by constraining oil and gas exploration. They'll make utility rates skyrocket forcing consumers to switch to more expensive technology just so the numbers make sense. It's called boiling the frog slowly.
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house we recently bought provides a hint: It came with two rooftop solar systems. Well, that's nice. He didn't have to install a solar system himself, so didn't have to deal with costs and labor doing it. I know America is behind, but bad mouthing us cause we have different regulations / costs. I agree new houses should start being built with solar installed. Retro costs run from $40-70k which a lot of people can't afford.
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40-70k is insane. This is the effect of having to pay the wages of the few people who still want to work after the pandemic and each solar company has a parasitic owner who is sunning himself in Barbados most of the year not doing any work.
I am putting in another 2.2kW of solar myself and the total cost shouldn't exceed 1800 euros for me. But I am not paying some company to do it for me so I'm not being fleeced. 450W panels are costing me €210 each and ABB inverter from ebay cost €420, other th -
That retrofit system of 11kW panels and 16kWh battery would cost $US15k in Australia. Not 40-70k. Why so expensive?
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That can't be right on those costs. Australia pays hideous costs to transport anything here as we don't make any of the panels or inverters. Yet we could easily get that system installed here for around $20k USD and our labour costs here are bloody high and every system gets inspected post install and must be installed by a licensed installer so we have more than our share of red tape. I have a 7.4kw system installed with 5kw invertor installed last year for a total cost of $6500 AUD (about $4500 USD), yes that includes some gov subsidies so you could add another $1000USD to the price. Still I find it hard to believe the US has $20k-50k of red tape costs on top of a system install.
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Those costs aren't right in my experience. Generally 10 kW systems (no battery backup) are $30k here. That assuming you get typical solar installations, not something like solar city roof panels, which are quite expensive. And assuming you don't need roof reinforcement, which is sometimes necessary.
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well that still sounds incredibly expensive, 10kw solar here without battery you are looking at under $10k USD, I guess there must be some politics and big business at play to prevent or minimise solar installs over there as the components certainly don't cost anywhere near that for even the very top end brands?
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https://homeguide.com/costs/so... [homeguide.com]
^Reasonably accurate costing of systems in the US. I can't speak to Australia but a lot of that US price is rather expensive labor.
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Australian labour costs are higher than US costs
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That's only because you're not familiar with the US, where it costs more in permits and mandatory connection fees to build a single bedroom home than it does to buy the materials.
In the USA, corporate investment in political races is considered protected speech, since Citizens United [wikipedia.org]. Things were bad before, but they're worse now.
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There is now so much solar in Australia that in some places the max grid voltage is often exceeded and inverters cut out. I suppose they need to find a good way to store/use the excess generation
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In Australia the payback period for batteries (late 2021) was roughly the warranty period of the battery (5 to 7 years). Therefore a break even proposition. The historical advice was install more solar panels rather than invest in batteries even though the power exported to the grid was a fraction of the power import price.
With increased power prices power storage batteries are potentially a net benefit however previous energy crisis have only lasted 2-3 years as opposed to the current payback periods of po
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The inverters don't cut out, they just keep humming along at voltage because unlike a non-inverter generator, they are voltage-controlled devices. Solar power systems don't have any trouble with overproduction, it's the legacy equipment that does. The speed of the generators is controlled by load. Take load off the network and they overspeed. But that's only because they are so primitive, and frankly, the lack of more speed control on those systems is responsible for many of the failings of the entrenched g
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That tends to make solar a bit more effective than many parts of the more northern US.
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I've been going around Tampa and Orlando recently where every house runs AC because it's so hot and where there is abundant reliable sunshine. How many solar systems have I seen? Zero. To me it seems a no brainer - install solar, power your entire house, car & grid. On top of that there are vast parking lots where trucks of arrays could be placed on the edge or mounted above spots to provide shade and also generate power for the business. Why isn't that happening? There is something seriously fucked up
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FWIW, we took the grandkids to Legoland Florida a couple months back (between Orlando & Tampa), and the on-site hotel had shaded parking areas covered with solar panels. Someone apparently has a clue. https://www.tampaelectric.com/... [tampaelectric.com]
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In my central Florida area I have actually seen a number of houses get solar installed, not a majority by any stretch but a decent amount.
It does not help that Florida is also rife with solar scam companies [google.com] now that try and sell overpriced systems with sometimes shoddy workmanship and awful contract terms. [youtube.com] I have been solicitied at my home at least a dozen times now and all them have a fairy tell to sell and it makes people leery of the legit companies and the concept in general. Scamming is an American t
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What do you expect from Florida? The state that bans subjects that aren't even taught in schools and created a law just for looking at little girls genitals.
https://lawandcrime.com/high-p... [lawandcrime.com]
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Florida is messed up in all kinds of ways but this just seems like a no-brainer for everyone regardless of politics - free energy, 1000s of jobs, investment, energy independence etc. The power companies might have to realign but I don't necessarily see it being bad for them either since they're still the infrastructure and profit from selling energy somebody else put into their grid.
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That's the smuggest statement I've heard so far this year. He moved his home between two nations for that? His rant is on-line anyway - doesn't Australia have the internet?
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Yeah, his smugness can go get fucked. Australia ranks amongst the worst in the world in emissions per capita for many of the same reasons the USA does too. Abundance of coal, fetish for huge gas guzzlers, governments that didn't give a shit year on year (which is why both major parties got annihilated in the past election and why for the first time ever the greens have more than 1 seat in the house).
I only recently saw an article which compared Australian houses based on Europe's energy star ratings. Nearly the entire country would range as E or F and building codes are about 20 years behind countries which actually do have green energy policies in place.
Your solar panel is worthless when all they do is blast your leaky uninsulated house with the AC turned up to 11. Yeah good that it's solar power, but Australia is massively wasteful when it comes to energy consumption.
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This was probably a tongue-n-cheek comment, but no, we have the "national broadband network" and it's a fucking joke. It was supposed to be a nationwide fibre-to-the-premises fibre rollout, but halfway through this rollout, the government changed and the new guys completely gutted the original plan, and paid Telstra billions of taxpayers' dollars to rehash their woeful copper network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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"Why has America been significantly slower to adopt this solution ?"
Probably because Australia is an arid, dry place 15-30 degrees of the equator.
The U.S. is mostly a temperate forest/grassland, 30-45 degrees off the equator with substantially more rain and clouds, meaning the marginal return is far less.But why apply logic, when anecdotes and smarmy virtue signaling is so much more fulfilling?
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Probably because Australia is an arid, dry place 15-30 degrees of the equator. The U.S. is mostly a temperate forest/grassland, 30-45 degrees off the equator with substantially more rain and clouds, meaning the marginal return is far less
The author's point wasn't "Why can't the US be as geographically blessed as Australia?" That'd be stupid - the US can't control its geography. Rather, the author was urging the US to tackle the bureaucratic hurdles and "soft costs" in the US - permitting, system design,
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by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @08:04AM (#62620752)
Australia could learn something from the rest of the world when it comes to saving money: insulate your frigging house. All the solar in the world doesn't do squat if you waste it all on running the AC full blast into your leaky living room.
Australia lags behind much of the world when it comes to green credentials. Building codes many years behind other western nations, wasteful energy practices such as a preference for huge cars, lack of decent public transport in many major cities, coal coal and more coal providing baseload, all combined make Australia among the highest per capita emitters in the world along with the USA, Canada, and oil rich nations in the middle east.
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" How is it that Australia, a country that historically has been a coal-burning climate pariah, is leading the world on solar? "
They finally ditched their 'big banana' PM.
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Wherever there is a lot of sun, like the California desert and insanely high energy prices at 25c/kWh, like the California desert and insanely high state and federal kickbacks, like the California desert then we definitely see solar rooftops just like the Australian desert. At least people can and are leaving the California desert.
Iâ(TM)m looking for solar options, once it starts competing with my 4c/kWh pro-nuclear and pro-hydro coop Iâ(TM)ll start installing.
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I'll let others argue points about Australia versus US. Nation versus nation pissing contests online just leave both parties, as well as the surrounding area, smelling really funky.
Biden has at least authorized, via the Defense Production Act, for solar panels to not be tariffed. This is a start. Yes, a lot of the panels may be from China, but energy is money, and solar panels are a critical part of a decentralized grid.
Solar panels do work. I have a few colleagues who have spent the cash to put panels
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I looked into rooftop solar when I lived in Texas. The economics just don't quite work, even with the huge tax credit (30%!). To a certain extent, it should be obvious that installing solar panels on my roof doesn't make as much sense as installing them at utility scale outside of town. There are three big problems with solar roof for homeowners:
1.) Rate of return - It wasn't the case then (and probably isn't now) that the money you spend upfront is appropriately paid back. If you spend $20,000 to insta
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europe is actually in better state than most australia
Wind production is very high in many countries and solar is increasing fast, with countries like Germany and Spain have huge amount of solar power
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We have real winters, they mostly don't.
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I have a solar setup on my roof in New England, it powers my house year round very effectively and it cost about 20K to install before tax incentives. Factoring those in my 12 year loan monthly cost was just about equal to my non summer, non AC running electric bill. We get a ton of snow, we get way less sun in the winter and yet it still works out nicely.
Solar is viable in these areas despite folks like you continually taking about how its impossible.
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Gee, I wonder how they've beaten rainy Europe on that...
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Dunno about the rest of Europe, but in the UK the 'feed in tariff' (the rate you get paid for returning energy to the grid) used to be quite good - so good that companies sprang up putting solar panels on your house (for "free") so they could get paid the tariff and then pass a bit of it onto you. Then the government reduced it, so now you pretty much just get paid the wholesale rate - which is a lot less than the retail rate you actually have to pay the electric company. Now getting solar is down to just y
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When I visited in November one year on the USS Abraham Lincoln, I noticed most of their houses were basic 1 level with a simplified low pitch roof. That makes DIY a piece of cake too. Im lucky that my house faces SSW, but 2 stories, a complex roof and higher pitch rules out any DIY. 3 different pitches to the roof.
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Probably the same way that Fox News had an energy expert on who claimed that Germany received more insolation than the US. Turns out only a few places in Alaska receive the same insolation as Germany.
Here in rainy Pennsylvania, we successfully deploy solar installations, and they work year round. Is Australia "better" for solar?
Kinda. But all that "better" means is you don't need quite so many panels.
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Yeah time to get our shit together and join the rest of the developed world. Nobody else has a score of people dying in single shooting event every other week. It's so bad that toddlers are shooting someone an average of every two weeks. https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31... [npr.org]
It's a mental health problem!
Great, guess who voted against expanding healthcare coverage for people...
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