Manhattan Contrarian Ping
And the costs of getting rid of the wind and solar generators, plus the spent batteries, is never included in these comparisons. What do you do with a 90’ blade when it is worn out? What about these thousands of spent blades and solar collectors that are just sitting there, taking up space and looking UGLY? The Government (Meaning us) will have to clean up these messes soon. There is no way solar and wind compete if they don’t have the subsidies.
I’ve discovered a really cheap way:
Just cover the entire planet in shag carpet and we all scrub our feet across it at the same time...................
The cheapest would be any production method that doesn’t involve Democrat graft & corruption.
Um, no.
The ‘iq’ test fails when it poses a rhetorical question.
Thus, this can only be directed at both apologists & believers, neither of which group will accept the premise to violate their ‘religion’.
More evidence of the ‘true pandemic’...
I asked grok this very question the other day. The machine said per kwh it’s Wind turbines. Not nat gas, mini nukes, clean coal or a combo, nope all wind turbines. It’ll be cheaper, grok said so.
When you meet a person who realizes that the entire Democratic agenda, be it “renewable energy”, defund the police, globalism, socialism, the celebration of homosexuality and all its permutations, etc etc is all meant to destroy the American nation, then you have met a person with a high political IQ.
You can’t store sun or wind to use during power spikes. You can stockpile coal.
This one really made me sit up: “LCOE” is the thoroughly fraudulent “levelized cost of electricity” measure that simply excludes all the ancillary costs of running a grid on renewables..."
That's just stupid. I read that and thought "Who would be stupid enough to swallow that as a metric", and then, about a half a second later realized "Oh. Wait. They don't care at all if anyone does or doesn't swallow it."
They are simply throwing the lie out there, knowing full well the metric is fraudulent, and just letting the lie go around and around and around and around the world, over and over again, knowing the truth is never going to get its pants on. This lie will be read by millions of people all over the world, and perhaps 5-10% of them will view that lie of a conclusion critically. And a very, very minute fraction of that 5-10% is going to say anything to anyone. It will be parroted in schools and colleges to minds of mush, it will be used by politicians to create "green" policy.
The example of how the Left works when it want to use lies to achieve its goals is their treatment of Senator Joseph McCarthy in books written since the early Fifties is illustrative. There is very little "original research" in the books about Joseph McCarthy. Almost all the books vilify him, and almost all the books that slander him with lies and deception do so by referencing earlier books that lie about him, and so on. It is a literary form of the Russian Matryoshka dolls that next inside each other. Nobody ever traces the references to references to references to original research. Nobody will ever get sued, sanctioned, or punished in any way for creating and disseminating those lies. So the Lie becomes the Truth.
And so it is with "green energy". This is an outright fallacious representation using deliberately deceptive measures. This type of analysis will end up on documentaries, television panel discussions, high school and college courses on environmentalism, and in Congressional studies.
They have done the calculus, concluded that the small, isolated cries of "Fraud!" will be swept away in the tsunami of information that sweeps across the consciousness of people every day.
And the Left will tell any lie they deem necessary to advance their goals, because they feel with a religious fervor that they are in the right on this, and any means is justified by the ends.
If the article takes twenty paragraphs for an answer, I’m not going to believe it anyway.
I thought it was interesting that Texas and Iowa are maxed out in solar generation.
“Ooh, ooh, ooh! Call on me!”
Lies, lies, and more lies. There is absolutely no contest. Fossil fuels are by far more efficient, more cost effective, less invasive, and more reliable than any other source of energy except maybe hydro. Leftist loonies don’t talk about the pollution from mining materials for solar, the 700 gallons or more of oil necessary to lube wind turbines that has to be changed. Oil leaks? You bet. Blades need to be sprayed with an anti-freeze before a snow or ice storm. Where does the residual go? How many birds including eagles die? What a complete fraud.
I laid $20 to take an online iq t3st once, and a week later i got a r3sponse. I open3d it up and inside was $40 and a sympathy card
And Captain Obvious smiles, as he always does when one analyzes liberal “science”.
Why is Washington state so low? I would have expected it to be higher.
You can get a 710w with peak 850 with bifacial gain for $250 retail today in 2025 money. I can get the same panel for $90 wholesale by the pallet load of them.
These are thin film poly silicon double sided panels.that can be installed vertical, horizontal, at the latitude equivalent pitch angle or on two axis or single axis trackers. A two axis tracker boosts single sided panels by 40% and bifacials 60%
These panels carry a 25 year warranty to 80% original capacity and modern thin film poly silicon double are going to be 40 year panels as the decline curves are showing asymptotic vs linear curves. I have 5 year olds panels that have barely lost 2% and that loss was really all in the first year then it leveled off and has not dropped much as in under half a percent in the last 3 years.
Texas has a PVOUT of 4.6 where I live that means over a 30 year average from 2024-1994 the average yearly solar output of thinfilm solar panels works out to 4.6kWh per kilowatt of installed capacity when you divided the sum of the yearly total by 365. It’s a convenient number to compare location to location for solar site selection the real number is the yearly output over that 30 year climate average.
So a 710w with bifacial gain to 850 is an 850 watt panel if it’s freestanding such as my panels up on poles over part of the property.
At a PVOUT of 4.6 that panel will make 1427 kWh in its first year and now in its 5th year 5 % less so 1355kWh currently dropping 0.05% per year.
Over it’s rated 25 year life which is not to dead it’s what the manufacturer warranties it should still be producing 80% at 25 years old.
Given real world asymptotic decline vs modeled behavior at 25 years those panels will be down to 94% SOH not 80%
So 1341 kWh per year.
Sum it all up. That single panel in 25 years is going to make in sunny Texas 22,897 kWh one panel the size of a sheet of plywood roughly.
Even at full retail cost of $250 per panel is 1.09 cents per kwh in panel costs. At wholesale what someone with a LLC and a TIN number can get them in bulk it’s 0.39 cents per kWh.
$250/22897kWh
$90/22897kwh
Inverters wholesale are 18 cents per watt of capacity in the 5000 to 15000 watt size range. You won’t get inverters of 15kw retail. A typical 4500 sqft home will have 15000 watts worth of panels.
So $2700 for the inverter that drives a 15kw system. You can work out the cost per watt over the 25 years once you know how much kWh your system will make. In this case it’s a 18 panel system for 15300 watts.
18 panels are going to make 22897x18= 412,146 kWh in 25 years in a solar insolation PVOUT of 4.6
$2799/412,146= 0.0065510766
This is 0.655 cents per kWh over that 25 years it’s insignificant once you get to large systems.
Mounting costs....three guys can use no hole mounts to put up 18 panels in an afternoon four to 6 hours is what is booked. $15 hr for two general labor $25hr for the “skilled” team lead. So $330 for labor semi-skilled.
Mounts no hole $9 retail each you need 4 per panel wholesale $2= $648 retail $142 wholesale , wires it’s by the foot 250ft is $149 retail. You need two breakers and a panel tie in.
Legally you need a licenced electrician to do the panel tie and install the breakers or they can sign off on a subs work with post install inspection. Either way $175 for the one hour inspection. Have a electrician on retainer is the name of the code game.
So all in wholesale since if you going to hire subs you should use their LLC to get wholesale prices.
18 panels = $90x18= $1620
Inverter $2700
Labor $330
Mounts $142
Wire $149 @250ft worth
Dual pole 80amp breaker $57
Mandatory electrician inspection $175
Depending on code you may or may not need a sub panel and a grid auto disconnect. We don’t have to have one behind the main 400 amp panel breaker as long as the inverter does grid sense to zero output on loss of grid sync and/or zero net output on command.
$5025 this is what a 15,000 watt system would cost if you didn’t pay some installer a 500% profit margin to do it. Which is why you see dozens of installers coming door to door all the time trying to install systems for home owners it a HUGE money maker.
5,025÷412,146 kWh= $0.0121922814
1.22 cents per kWh LOCE
This is why decentralized solar makes so much sense.
I paid slightly less than these numbers for my last two 15,000 watt systems and will be getting 1.2 cents power for the rest of my life as these panels will last not 25 but 40+ years. In realty I sell excess power at a profit so I am not paying for 1.2 cents power I am turning a monthly profit at this point my systems are paying me.
So get big mad at solar but people who can do math and live in the sun belt are laughing all the way to the banks. I took zero subsidy I make WAY too much per year to qualify for any such things. Oh and these panels were Canadian or Taiwan so allies not commies.
I really don’t get why chest thumpers get all mad at individual solar it’s the only means of independence from the grid and yes the natural gas grid is well a grid. Virtually no one has a functional oil well in their back yard or back 40 and if you did the EPA compliance to burn your own fuel means you have to have H2S strippers, and Lord help you if you have benzene, toluene or zylene even at ppm levels in your gas. Independent people’s should be all over homestead solar that giant fusion reactor in the sky is showering your roofline with energy and you are paying out the nose for some cooperation to string wires to your house and feed you electron that you could harvest from your own roof and land for 1/12 what the corporations want to charge you for.
Ha chest thumps drill baby’s drill for more natural gas so you can make corporate execs rich and their board too. Frankly I would rather take personal responsibility for my energy and let God shine his abundance upon my home and lands.
Here are 40+ year old panels using two generation old tech the new stuff blows this away.
https://x.com/JessePeltan/status/1921463441971155095
Politicians don’t care the taxpayer has lots of money to pay for whatever they want
Have not checked in a while. In the 70’s it took more energy to build a solar cell than it would produce in its lifetime. And they do age. I think they’re good for about 20 years.
Generation from wind and solar is 3 to 4x natural gas, and that isn’t even full lifecycle cost that includes demolition of some very nasty materials. This was stated by California PG&E during their bankruptcy when they were asked to explain why they didn’t maintenance their power lines in fire prone areas.
The state made them install wind and solar and would not let them recoup the cost via billing as that would let people in on the scam. Something had to give and it was the maintenance budget.