Natural sunlight on Earth is finicky. They're not talking about the sun itself. They're just using "the sun" as a shorthand for the weather, the rotation of Earth and so on. Humans sometimes do that.

syn·ec·do·che səˈnekdəkē/ (noun)

a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).

Simile; a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid (e.g. as brave as a lion ).

Curiously, that's the line that caught my attention too. Because, solar is so popular but the sun is so 'unreliable' - another case where popular enthusiasm contradicts simple engineering. The sun is a terrible power source, simply because it fails at least half the time everywhere.

For experimentation purposes, the sun is terrible. It doesn't have a fixed, standard output that allows reproducible measurements, you can't dim it to measure effectiveness at various radiation levels etc.

As a power source, it's not that bad: It does need storage and the output level fluctuates, but almost all other power sources need storage as well (fossil fuels before conversion to electricity, which makes things easier, but still) and it does need management. It's certainly harder to handle than other sources, but that's exactly what's being explored right now, even with that setup. Solar power does come with a few upsides as well though: Installations are comparatively easily transportable and independent, don't require grid connection and once in place require steady supplies and doesn't produce and waste .

Solar construction is dominated by energy and finance companies, with large projects in places that don't have subsidies. Popular enthusiasm is barely relevant.

Hm - what's the impact of roof solar in California? My brother's electric rates went from $0.24 per kwh to $0.46 and we suspect its because the power company is recouping its losses from buying all that off-peak rooftop generation at retail rates. So he's installing rooftop solar too, just so he's on the other side of that equation.

relevance: its popular enthusiasm that got the buyback rate set at retail instead of wholesale. Thus fueling a statewide boom in pointless rooftop solar.

Doesn't make sense to me. For the costs to be that significant, net metered kilowatt hours would have to be a huge chunk of their generation, and rooftop solar is smaller than utility solar, which is maybe ~10% of the market, and rooftop doesn't net meter most generation, it consumes it off the grid.

It could well be the case that solar is changing the cost mix and driving up prices, but I doubt net metering is driving that.

But they're related in a strange way: they raise the rates a penny, they have to pay a penny more back to solar at 'retail rates'. So its a funny feedback loop.

The numbers just don't work. California power consumption is something like 40 gigawatts, net metering is a fraction of 4 gigawatts.

So even if the net metering is somehow 100% cost (it isn't, they sell the power), it still wouldn't do anything like double rates.