Just saw this at American Thinker:
It is an article of faith in the media that California has a “housing crisis” owing to the very high cost of homes, especially in the coastal urban areas, where most of California’s residents live. Yet the state is now adding an estimated $25,000 to $30,000 to the cost of constructing a new house in order to gratify the virtue-signaling impulses of green extremists.
Jon Fingas of Engadget (via Yahoo Finance) explains:
Link to article:
Good article. In the article it says that the new regulations will add an estimated $25,000 to $30,000 to the cost of constructing a new house but that after 25 years it will “save the owners” $50,000 to $60,000. The author points out that this is a horrible return on the “investment”.
But it is much worse than that. With any type of “Green” product the projected “savings” are ALWAYS several times what the actual “savings” will be. First the expected lifetime of the product is greatly exaggerated. How many CFL light bulbs have we been coerced into buying by government regulation claiming that they would save several times what they cost during their ten year expected lifetime only to have them fail within a few months. I have a pile of them because you can't just throw them in the trash.
Second, the projected cost of energy in the future is typically expected in the projections to increase exponentially. This may or may not be accurate. It is hard to know when the next “fracking” type innovation will hit the electrical energy market. But it is likely that new electrical energy generation technologies will begin to pan out in the not so distant future.
Third, the rated output of solar panels are typically several times greater than the actual output. One would think that this would be factored in to the regulators calculations, but when it comes to solar power they most likely are not. Many if not most solar energy projects produce typically 30% of what the projections predicted.
I know several people who live “off the grid” and the solar cell component of their systems have all vastly underperformed what my friends initially calculated that they were going to get based on rated capacities. And these are people who mostly had engineering backgrounds.
We live in an outlying area where the power goes out several times a year typically for a day or two but sometimes a week or more. But we are very fortunate that we have natural gas piped to our home. So we have a generator that I converted to natural gas using a flange with a venturi that I designed and printed on our 3D Printer. I keep very precise records using a couple very precise watt meters and the gas meter to measure our consumption of natural gas vs our production of electricity.
This data has allowed me to calculate what the realistic costs of producing our own electricity and compare this to what it would cost for other power generation options such as solar. In our location solar and wind are just laughable compared to just having the generator to natural gas. We would have to cover half an acre with solar cells and maintain a bank of expensive storage batteries to match the generator's output. And even then as my friends who live “off the grid” have discovered you still need a backup generator to keep your batteries charged depending on conditions.