Posted on 05/09/2007 1:01:06 PM PDT by amchugh
SACRAMENTO — California homeowners are rejecting new rebates for solar power equipment, saying the state has made installing the rooftop panels far more costly than expected.
As a result, Public Utilities Commission reports show a decline of 78% in rebate requests in the first three months of this year, compared with last year, and the solar installation industry says it is threatened with collapse across much of California.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
You mean the ultralibs in California who push a lot of the environmental nonsense aren’t willing to “do whats right” unless they are paid to do so? Imagine that!
This simply can’t be. EVERYONE wants solar power and its cheaper too, the gubmint told me so.
Never mind that fact that acres and acres of solar panels are a real, down to earth eye sore with very little output compared to its cost.
I think it’s more of a case that they were happy with the rebates but about had a heart attack when they found out how the power company was going to charge them more for the electricity they did use.
I think the power company had a lot more to do with killing the project than the local papers want to know about.
If you don't build any power plants, then all day, every day is "peak demand".
You can cover your entire property with solar cells, and you are not going to get enough energy to run that air conditioner when the temperature gets above 90 degrees F.
When feel-goodism runs up against physical reality, something’s gotta give.
I would say that it sounds like their leaders passed a bunch of laws that sound good without doing much research into their practicality...but we all know that politicians never do that sort of thing.
Don't get me started on the power companies though. A lot of people seem to make the mistake of thinking that a privatized regional monopoly is going to be more efficient than municipal services. While it is true that they may have better economies of scale when it comes to administration, they have no competition to drive down prices or encourage efficiency. Private does not equal free market. Also, you have less accountability to voters/consumers.
Storage batteries are about the worst thing you can do in a solar installation unless you are completely off-grid, but you probably already know that.
They do a program here that does something like what California must have been trying to do...although it is hard to be sure of just what they thought they would accomplish. The idea here is not to get 100% of your home’s power needs from solar but to provide a bit of a boost during the time the grid could use it most...when the sun is shining directly on your home. If you evaluate the project based on the benefit to the home owner and the benefit to the power companies/grid, it is a good deal.
Did away with that noisey, ugly, motor breaking, leaf catching, frosting over in the wintertime energy using box outside the window did you?
I’ve got regular Heat Pumps but if I had a few extra bucks I’d dig up the back yard and switch to in ground.
Their modus in recent years is typical California, which is, loosely, 1: Spend several months and millions of dollars "scoping" the project and creating diversity programs so that not ALL the staplers on their desks are the same color. 2: Find some environmental reporting companies run by UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz graduates who can be counted on to execute, write up, and provide costly reports supporting the conclusions those graduates and the board members already have decided upon going into the investigation phase. 3: Order further voluminous reports by paid shills to study the obvious. 4: hold lengthy hearings and spend millions of dollars in order justify their existence reconciling the differences between the two (or more) sets of reports. 5: hold public hearings at great expense to get public comments to mollify the public in meaningless meetings which are certain to have no effect whatsoever on the conclusions that were pre-established before ANY reports were ordered or written. 6: Spend even more money on hot-tub, wine, and cheese retreats holding more meetings where the pre-arranged conclusions can be discussed even further and several other consultants, friends of the board members, can be hired and given exhorbitant consulting fees, 7: Publish, at further expense, detailed reports and position papers laying out the pre-arranged conclusions agreed to at the very inception of these boards so that everyone can become aware of the conclusions of the boards and so their recommendations will be so very inclusive. 8: Find willing members of the state legislature who haven't the foggiest idea of how to appear productive, who will lend the weight of their chairs (and ASSES) to the movement to enact the regs, conduct more hearings, publish more papers, hire more consultants, vote themselves pay raises, hold more diversity sessions, create more manuals for governing internal conduct and consider special gender-neutral training programs to allow inclusion of multiple nationalities, personalities, preferences, and racial groups to participate equally in the study of the elements, hold more hearings, publish more recommendations, hire more consultants, and finally, 3-5 years after the inception of the study, arrive at the most boneheaded, harebrained conclusions that they think they think they can get away with. Of course, a whole new raft of politicos will have to be co-opted by then since it will be a new election cycle. Then, 3-4 years after that, when the results of their so-called efforts come to light as setting new standards for total idiocy, they will reconvene, begin hiring consultants to write position papers denying they ever came to such destructive and idiotic conclusions, start the buildup of the next round of UC Berkeley graduate-dominated boutique eco-companies, and begin anew the process somewhere near the beginning of the whole cycle. It is a thing of beauty. They manage to demonstrate the need for themselves by proving how utterly useless they are, at which point the solution is inevitably to reconvene the board, vote themselves new terms, and start the entire cycle again.
They did it with electical deregulation, costing the state many tens of billions of dollars and rolling brownouts circa 1995-2000. They did it with MTBE, the fuel additive that caused massive groundwater pollution when it leaked so aggressively from aging underground fuel tanks. Last I heard, this was a $30 billion repair job....so far. They are well along in the process of doing it again with coal-burning power plants to be built in Wyoming so they do not soil California air. Every time, the pattern is exactly, precisely the same. Take 3 years and as much money as you can possibly spend to figure out the stupidest thing possible, make the obvious problem seem hundreds of times more complex than it is. Ignore any and all experts who have worked in the industy under consideration for decades, call in unqualified shills and self-proclaimed self-aggrandizers, and develop the most boneheaded non-solution possible. It's no surprise that they done it again with these solar regulations. It must be tremedously disappointing to them that they have not mandated the use several proprietary rare-earth and titanium-encrusted brackets manufactured by companies owned and operated by a subset of board members; and mounting systems that have to be code conforming so that they can rewrite building codes, undergoing years and years of testing at Underwriters' Labs, etc; etc; etc; They can change this just by changing a rate table. But of course, that's your 100% guarantee that that simple method of addressing and fixing the problem is the absolute last thing in the known universe that would ever, ever happen.
They keep running aheead of the technology. I doubt that is much ahead of where they were in 1984.
“Edison charges summer time-of-use rates that range from 29.7 to 35.9 cents per kilowatt-hour between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on weekdays. It drops to a range of 16.3 to 18.6 cents per kilowatt-hour from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. weekdays and all weekend days and holidays, according to documents filed with the PUC.”
Yes, you read that right. I pay a minimum of 16 cents per kwh and during the heat of the day I get to pay 36 cents per kwh. With generating costs under 5 cents, somebody along the way is making a fortune. My electric bill goes from $90/mo Nov-Apr to $300/mo May-Oct. For a 2BR condo.
We’re designing our new house.
Solar was a bust, even if we did get adequate sunlight in the winter...and we don’t.
Plenty of wind, but getting a system that would be durable & effective production wise, was way too expensive when installation & other “extras were added in.
Best choice, just as you, is a ground source heat pump; and we can get a separately metered ‘heat rate’ electric system, which gives us a $.03/KWH rate on the dedicated heating circuits from the end of October to the end of March.
With our forest, we have all the wood we’ll ever need, so for backup or reserve capacity we'll keep our catalytic wood stove. That thing burns 12-16 hours without reloading.
The rest will be extra insulation, window placement, and landscaping choices; and, maybe, a passive solar atrium.
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