FTA
""The residential solar market enjoyed double digit growth for the past decade with what they thought was a bright future.""
""The market, in real time, is 80% below where it was last summer""
""Many of the state’s 1,100 installers and developers could be forced to reconsider their business model.""
There is no 'market' when subsidies are eliminated. Kalifornia passed laws that make residential solar power MANDATORY on all new construction, and still the solar 'market' implodes without government (taxpayer) dollars.
This last quote from the article is the ultimate:
""Every opportunity we have, regulators need to make it easy to put solar on, not more difficult.""
The utter idiocy of asking democrats and government to make anything easier speaks to the insanity of trusting government at all.
You know a product sucks when they have to send out conga-lines of door bangers to peddle this stuff.
Most wildly over pay for their solar systems, Solar works great for stand alone systems like my well or a small cabin with limited electricity use, but a whole house operation is a different ball game altogether.
In the famous words of William F. Buckley, “when you subsidize something you get more of it like illegitimacy and cheese.”
Okay, what is the net result, are home owners being paid the same price the utility is paying other solar power sources or paying the going rate? Maybe before they were paying inflated price? The article doesn’t say. Seems like on the surface they should buy/sell electricity from homeowners at the same rate. But maybe that is too simple?
Basically the state is FLOODED with electricity during sunny days, due to all of the solar panels - so even more rooftop production is simply not needed.
What is needed (by the Leftists there) are ‘clean’ systems that can produce power when it’s not sunny and there’s no wind. Hydro can do that, but they’re too busy tearing down dams to know that, so can nuclear (LOL). Batteries too, but they’re expensive and still have to buy the power to charge them.
So the state is saying to the solar owners, we’re not going to pay you much money for something we don’t even need.
Sounds right to me...
You can play the stupid games of robbing Peter to pay Paul when there are many Peters and few Paul’s.
But what happens when the number of Peters gets less and the number of Paul’s increases?
Margaret Thatcher: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.”
That is the problem with most of this solar and wind power, EV’s, and many of these other so called green, regenerative, sustainable, carbon neutral, zero emission, baloney.
Almost all of these require a form of subsidy in order to work. Left on their own (without special tax breaks at purchase, free electricity for the car, subsidies for charging stations, subsidies for the manufacturers, example Tesla had over $5 billion in tax dollars as of 8 years ago) all of these great ideas would have a minuscule market share as they are only economically viable in a few niche areas.
It makes perfect sense to maybe put up some wind turbines and solar panels for a cabin that is 25 miles from the nearest power line and in the middle of a forest or mountainous area. But when you skew the market as government has with a plethora of programs which infuse money to ultimately create an artificial market, you get to where we are at today. It’s not unlike public transit, another wet dream by the left. Name me one public transit system in the entire country which is in the black? There isn’t one. They are all running at a loss, getting city, state, federal money pumped into them to stay alive. Here in DFW the Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) gets 2% in the form of a sales tax in the entire Metroplex on top of what they charge for tickets. It does not matter if you dine out, buy clothes or watch a movie, DART gets 2% from everyone even though only a small minority uses this junk.
The more dead weight government creates, the more wealth they destroy. So called “Green jobs” is government creating market inefficiencies at the EXPENSE to productive and the actual true demand driven private sector which is producing wealth.
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Reminds me of decades ago when the territories were being devised and
made available (to be invested in) of the then newly forming cable tv industry.
My dad invested pretty heavily (for him at that time) in it.
And of course I don't even need to tell you the rest of the story.
The IRS 'changed the rules' - so what would have been a profitable
investment, was magically turned into a loss for my dad.
Also reminds me of when Amtrak was formed and Pennsylvania railroad bonds
became mostly worthless (in 1970) - and I heard my grandfather
(who owned a good number of said bonds) use profanity EVER.
“So much of this story demonstrates the utter folly of business getting in bed with government. Anything the government provides can be eliminated at their whim.”
Dear Miss Welfare Mom:
We just imported millions of new Democrats and no longer need to fund you to get your vote.
Team Donkey
We have seen this in ethanol and coal bed methane in the energy industry. I was sent on a mission to find 1 TCF of coal bed methane and to make a recommendation about getting into that business. I recommended against it. We didn't and I believe time proved me right.
I believe ethanol has died twice and been resurrected by gooberment mandate or manipulation. It simply can't stand alone.
If gooberment has to incentivize something or mandate it to make it viable it isn't. If it can't stand alone it is not competitive, practical or essential. It will not work. There is no such thing as a temporary incentive.
Usually these fluster clucks get started by a lobbyist who stands to make a fortune or some wack job environmental promoter or some feral agency trying to justify their existence with some hair brained idea to save the world.
They will pull the same with EVs.
It’s all about them being in control.