Not really. It's not like we have a trillion solar panels near the surface that we simply have to dig up. Coal is only alive, because the infrastructure is all there, and it's profitable. The mines are there, the electric plants are there, they are connected to the grid, etc.

Solar panels and batteries are not there, they need to be manufactured, transported from China, land needs to be bought, then they have to be installed. New fabs need to be built to match the increasing demand.

All of the above is true. But coal is also alive because of the way the EPA was politically forced into classifying coal ash as solid waste as opposed to toxic. This has amplified the negative affects of coal residuals a hundred fold. It has also made it increasingly difficult to regulate as well as made it easier for state and local politicians to defend. This started decades ago

The epa provides guidelines on coal ash storage but does not have the power to enforce them. This power falls to the local level and is expected to be enforced via citizen lawsuits. Some state politicians are working hard to prevent even this.

http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/politics-co...

This is directly a result of lobbyists and campaign contributions.

While favorably classifying waste certainly helps the coal industry I'm not getting on the "more federal power will solve this" bandwagon.

We'd also have a lot more wind farms if it weren't for environmental regulations. A group of people with money can stall a project by taking them to court over environmental impact and compliance with regulation.

What justification is there to simply sidestep certain classes of solution that have worked just fine in the past? Federal environmental regulation worked pretty to curtail many wide-scale human pollution problems - acid rain, water pollution, and ozone depleting chemicals, just to name a few. The only real reason to not solve it federally is political capture by entrenched capital.

I don't understand, you seem to be drawing a false equivalence between any sorts of government action.

Claim: "Campaign lobbyists are giving coal an extra advantage by helping coal dodge regulations." Your response: "We would have more wind farms if it weren't for bad regulations."

These two claims seem like two ships passing in the night. I agree with both of them.

So are you saying that the conservatives have it all wrong when they say that coal in the US would be healthy if if it were not for the actions of the federal government?

Solar has a barely positive EROI. When all costs are considered it typically uses more energy than it produces. This has been studied extensively in multiple European countries.

http://energyskeptic.com/2018/solar-pv-has-a-net-energy-loss...

These articles making claims to the contrary basically don't make any sense. If solar panels and wind farms resulted in large amounts of cheap energy they would be going up at a massive rate. We have a relatively free economy. Utilities and entrepreneurs would be going nuts building the things. Instead they only exist as tax scams anywhere in the industrialized world. Use your head, people.

That article you link to is based on the Ferroni and Hopkirk 2016 paper, but that has been discredited somewhat, I believe.

The paper below revised the EROI figure from 0.8 to around 8.0.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...

"Looking at the bulk of the research, it’s more likely that solar panels, over their lifetime, generate 10-15 times as much energy as it takes to produce them and their associated hardware. That number may be as high as 25. And it’s rising over time." http://rameznaam.com/2015/06/04/whats-the-eroi-of-solar/

There's also the fundamental mistake that not all energy is equal.

Energy in the form of electricity is far more useful than energy in other forms as it can be used directly. With other forms it will generally need to be converted first, with massive efficiency losses which are ignored by EROEI proponents.

So for example while oil might be said to have an EROEI of 14.5, it loses 80% of that when used for the common purpose of turning a cars wheels, giving only a 2.9. generally those who quote EROEI numbers would claim this makes industrial society a literal impossibility.

All analysis I've seen indicates pretty much the opposite. Electricity is way less useful than diesel fuel. Our civilization critically runs on diesel and no one has figured out an even theoretically viable way to substitute in batteries where diesel is used in logistics, resource extraction, and pumping.

These claims are based on simplistic spread sheet models. We have REAL WORLD DATA. The real world experience throughout europe and the USA shows net losses. I repeat: if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies. Do you dispute this? Does the legal environment somehow prevent entrepreneurs throughout the western world from selling solar power into the grid?

If you think tax subsidies have anything to do with EROI (i.e. EROEI) you are very confused. This is calculated on the basis of Wh/Wh. Simple dimensional analysis shows that $ doesn't show up at all in the calculation.

Of course tax subsidies are useful to bootstrap on a $ cost basis, but with current costs and rate of falling costs even that will soon become unnecessary (let's get rid of fossil fuel subsidies to make this "real world data" comparison fair though).

Cash flows are in fact a reasonable proxy for energy in many cases. Manually tallying up the uses of energy and materials is a handwaving exercise at best, but net losses of cash in the energy industry indicate with certainty that you not yielding net energy to society as an enterprise.

Can you review this [1] and ELI5 why solar seems to work in China, but the Sun doesn't shine enough to make the economics work in the west according to your research?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_China

> if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies.

No, it's the other way around: fossil fuels are subsidized by governments to the tune of $4.8 trillion a year, so solar needs to be subsidized as well to be able to compete.

http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=42940.0

> they would be going up without tax subsidies.

They don't even build Walmarts without tax subsidies these days.

Can you link real world data?

Are externalities (CO2 output) taken into considerations in your unsourced REAL WORLD DATA!!~!

> I repeat: if it worked the plants would be profitable and they would be going up without tax subsidies

Right, so on that basis these bids below the grid rate indicate that they now work?

Bids are speculations.

Bidders are very frequently unable to actually deliver. See pretty much any highway project ever.

Agreed on that.

Nothing prevents anybody from selling solar power. Lots of solar farms are live and many more are being built.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_photovoltaic_power_sta...

(note how the biggest ones are all new)

I would have bought a house without a tax subsidy.

But there is one, so I'm sure as hell taking it.

It used to be that solar panels never paid for themselves, then it was 20 years to break even. Now, I think, we're down to 5 years.

Solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper, and they definitely have a positive ROI now. And there are huge solar farms being built all over the world. I'm pretty sure they did the math before investing millions of dollars.

If you can highlight a plant that is not a "tax farm" I would be interested to read about it.

"we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit." --Warren Buffet

This illustrates the reality of every "renewable" facility I've heard of to date. If the business case has changed just now, that's great and I look forward to the future. But most of what I've seen has been very silly industry propaganda.

Some areas have produced cheaper energy without subsidies as far as 2014. See pages 2-4. It's way better now, since the solar prices went down so much.

https://www.deutschebank.nl/nl/docs/Solar_-_2014_Outlook_Let...

And to answer your question about non-tax-farm, I don't know. If the government gives a subsidy, why wouldn't you take it even if you're profitable without it?

Subsidies alone don't prove that the solar farms are not profitable.

Is the 40GW of production in China a "tax farm"? Your argument that "solar is a gimmick because tax subsidies" seems flawed when international counterexamples are considered.

> Is the 40GW of production in China a "tax farm"?

According to everything I can find online the answer is a clear Yes?

What you call a "tax farm" is traditionally called industrial policy, and it has an exceptionally good track record.

It's almost as if initial government investment has allowed the technology to advance to the point that it no longer requires subsidy to be cost effective. Kind of like every other major industrial and technological breakthrough over the last 100 years.

What kind of economics would allow a solar panel manufacturer to spend $301 worth of energy to produce a panel which sells for $300?

The simplest response to this is: they are going up at a massive rate.

To be fair, this is only just happening on a pure cost basis, if this is true it will be new for this year, previously it has only been in countries with high retail rates and high solar output (Italy, Australia, Hawaii etc) where solar plus battery was on the verge of competitive, and even then more on a somewhat hypothetical basis assuming friendly planning laws, access to equipment like a Powerwall which may actually be difficult to get hold of straight away, efficient installation ecosystem, and so on.

The things that we should be criticizing are more about:

i) Failing to acknowledge the transition had to be done regardless of whether it was more expensive, because the result of climate change would be worse

ii) Failing to accept that the cost of these technologies (electric batteries, electric cars plus charging infrastructure, solar, wind) was consistently falling in a way which implied they would become cheaper than current technologies over a period of decades.

iii) Supporting new technologies over the existing technologies, and to what degree to push them over a tipping point quickly. Subsidies and mandates have been completely instrumental to getting to these point, there's no way solar in particular would have scaled up without them. If we are already at or around a tipping point, maybe we will be able to reduce them quickly rather than slowly, but I still think they will be important over the next 5-10 years for making this happen by 2040 rather than 2060.

How does politics prevent electricity companies from building solar plants.

While I agree politics could help enable it more through subsidies. However we are capitalisticish where utilities won't build a coal plant if solar is truly significantly cheaper.

How about by trying to make it illegal for state utilities to sell power generated by alternative energy?

https://www.popsci.com/wyoming-is-basically-trying-to-outlaw...

Many politicians place a very high value on the opinions of their major campaign contributors. Many of those contributions come from established coal based power companies.

In America a lot is being done to actively discourage anything but CNG and coal. Montana is literally crippling their economic growth to keep coal and CNG producers and burners happy and the US is raising tarrifs on solar panels and components to further damage a market that has already been under constant, pointless regulatory assault.

Strangely enough, installation in the US is a lot more expensive than it is in Germany and most other countries with a significant installed base of solar, even once you ignore subsidies. And according to something I read from the US Dept of Energy, one of the big reasons for that is reckoned to be over-regulation. That's because each US state has complicated, separate laws for permitting, attachment to the grid, and so on, whereas Germany has a unified regulatory system which allows installers to get decent economies of scale.

The US has all sorts of odd subsidies and issues of regulatory capture like this, I'm thinking also the corn subsidies, and the block on buying cars direct from retailers. It's ironic that all of that happens despite all of the vastly stronger rhetoric about cutting regulations. In my opinion it's another indication that a 'starve the beast' approach to government is not effective even on its own terms. To actually get rid of specific bad policy you have to campaign against those measures specifically, and have people in government who are acting in your interests, you can't just rely on a general anti-government government.

Good point about regulation. I am from Norway but have lived in the US. My impression is that regulation and bureachracy tends to be overly complicated in the US, while usually much simpler in Norway.

This happens despite Norwegians generally being positive to government and regulations while Americans seem knee-jerk anti anything government.

To get simple and good regulation I think you need an effective government and a belief in government. In Norway you can enact large and broad reforms and regulations, while in the US everything seems peacemeal.

Take welfare or healthcare. The US has a huge patchwork of small programs and minor regulations. This is due in part because of a reluctance towards broad but simple government programs like single payer.

A government can set standards for data exchange and bills e.g. which is why prescription can be sent from my doctor electronically to all pharmacies in Norway.

To be fair, Norwegians might be more anti anything government if the Norwegian regulatory system was as Byzantine as in the US.

>And according to something I read from the US Dept of Energy, one of the big reasons for that is reckoned to be over-regulation.

Yes. This is non-negligible part of the problem. There's lots of regulation and that plays right into the hand of the incumbents (utility companies) who can use that regulation to make it harder to compete.

And many of these subsidies are actually protective of existing energy industry that wants to enforce connectivity to the grid.

California in particular had a relatively quick plummet in power demand that actually caused older parts of the grid to start breaking. PG&E despite having used negligence to set a bombs with gas line negligence and kill dozens of dogs with electrified ground plates argued they couldn't cut into profitability, and started forcing people to reconnect to the grid even if the customer would exceed the maximum buyback cap PG&E offers (as I understand it, not a homeowner so this specific part is only my reading).

Result is protectionist nonsense that greatly reduces the profit margin of solar for individual installs.

Utilities certainly will build a coal plant when coal subsidies are over 3% of global GDP. That's a huge figure, and hardly capitalist.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X1...

You can see a copy of the report here: https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15105.pdf

It isn't a direct subsidy. They're saying pollution from coal has external costs and there isn't a tax on the coal-burning polluters to pay for this, so in effect coal has a subsidy.

I guess it has a point but I think calling that subsidy is misleading.

Subsidy just implies that someone other than the coal industry is paying for a cost that the industry imposes.

The only time the term subsidy didn't make sense was when we didn't know that these externalities existed. But the moment the costs were clear, not assessing them on the coal industry became a subsidy.

Subsidy suggests someone giving you money, as opposed to not taking your money. These are not the same thing at the margins.

It's a subclass of subsidy known as an "implicit subsidy":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidy#Environmental_external...

There are assumptions in calling that a subsidy, I identified these two that I have issues with:

1) The net externalities are measurably negative

2) The coal producers should be paying them

There are clear and massive positive externalities to fossil fuel, and anyone arguing otherwise needs to take a deep breath. They are the foundation of modern civilisation, and we all get non-economic benefits from the era of unprecedented peace and prosperity that we live in. If we price in all the externalities, fossil fuels probably do deserve a subsidy. The renewables debate is about whether we have an alternative that is better than the historically magical substances we call fossil fuels.

Since it has a higher EROEI than solar, if we are going to start pricing in externalities I would be comfortable arguing fossil fuels deserves a higher subsidy than solar for positive externalities. I don't think that is sensible, but neither do I accept that there is an 'implicit subsidy'.

The 2nd assumption is a political question that afaik has been answered in the negative. It doesn't make sense to claim that they 'have a subsidy' when the system we use to determine if they should be paying for an externality (currently) accepts that they do not have to.

> They are the foundation of modern civilisation

This sounds like sentimentality. We've found better ways that costs less and have fewer externalized costs. Consistent electricity at the point of use is indifferentiable as to its source. It matters little if coal got us to this point if other technologies can provide cheaper energy in less environmentally harmful ways going forward.

> and we all get non-economic benefits from the era of unprecedented peace and prosperity that we live in

Prosperity is not at risk with the implementation of renewables and storage. The removal of the health costs of coal-generated air pollution will increase quality of life.

> unprecedented peace

What exactly does coal uniquely offer in terms of supporting peace vs other sources? Also, you are conflating coal with all other fossil fuels when it suits your argument. They are not all the same. Natural gas will continue to have use as a heating fuel for a long time, but the same can't be said of coal. It doesn't have a significant use today beyond producing electricity.

What is at risk are jobs in the already long-declining coal extraction, transport, and combustion industries, and the people in the regions that are dependent on those industries should be helped transition in the near term.

> There are clear and massive positive externalities to fossil fuel, and anyone arguing otherwise needs to take a deep breath. They are the foundation of modern civilisation, and we all get non-economic benefits from the era of unprecedented peace and prosperity that we live in. If we price in all the externalities, fossil fuels probably do deserve a subsidy. The renewables debate is about whether we have an alternative that is better than the historically magical substances we call fossil fuels.

I think you'd have to be pulling a pretty long bow to argue that fossil fuel extraction and use has no environmental externalities - this paper for example (http://insight.jbs.cam.ac.uk/2015/measuring-fossil-fuel-hidd...) shows that for 2008-2012 "the implicit subsidy exceeded post-tax profits (averaged over five years) at all 20 of the largest oil, gas and coal producing companies studied".

We're already (globally) subsidising the fossil fuel industry, I think it's only fair to ask for some of that money back - it's not like they would 'unpollute' the sky and sea if they could anyway.

While they may be the foundation of the modern era, fossil fuels are also a dirty relic that should be left in the past. Leaving aside the environment impact I don't think I'd have to argue so hard that they have a not-so-great legacy when it comes to huge injections of capital into the middle east and it's concomitant propping up of dictators and despotic dynasties.

The ability to derive useful energy from coal is not an externality, it is priced into the sale and consumption of the good.

Just for your benefit, an externality is a cost or benefit that is incurred by a party not involved in a transaction.

Cheap energy generates positive externalities. Obviously I'm not talking about the buyer and the seller of the that energy, I'm talking about the social polity at large. There are positives to having large cheap energy reserves, and those positives are absolutely not priced in to the energy market.

Cheap energy is an enabler that frees resources up for other tasks. It is not a reasonable position for someone to pretend that coal is 'implicitly subsidied' because they've picked up on one negative externality and decided that it should be priced in; the net picture needs to be considered. If we were going to price in all the externalities of having such a cheap and convenient but dirty fuel it might well get an actual subsidy, but that would be silly in its own right. This is one of the major reasons why the pro-renewables crowd has such difficulty convincing anyone to price in the environmental impacts.

Sure, if the debate is had and we all decide that a specific negative externality is to be priced in then I've got no leg to stand on and I'll sing a different tune. But governments so far have implicitly accepted that that negative externality should not be priced in.

Agreed. Its interesting too the external costs of not using coal. EG shutting down mines causes a lot of economic hardship in some regions of the US. Is that a subsidy for gas/solar/nuclear?

No. You also do not have standing to sue a company for decreasing the resale value of your property by releasing a new model.

There absolutely can be social utility in remedying structural unemployment, but we are not in an economic system where people have a right to wages for work that is not valuable.

It is a subsidy under our legal system if the industry / plant / miner causes a tort and it's not remedied. That's money going out of one persons pockets into another.

Sure, the term might not be the most appropriate one, but if we are talking about choosing the most effective use of capital to create energy, and one method has negative externalities that are shared by the whole world but are not taxed, and one method does not, then it's much harder for solar to be an attractive option. The market is skewed.

With a very broad definition of subsidy. By this definition roads are subsidy for cars (turns out, Greenpeace agrees with this one! https://www.thebalance.com/government-subsidies-definition-f...)

"Undercharging for global warming accounts for 22% of the subsidy in 2013, air pollution 46%, broader vehicle externalities 13%, supply costs 11%, and general consumer taxes 8%."

Call the negative externality costs whatever you like, but the coal industry doesn't pay it, which makes it seem cheap compared to solar. Which is why this article is news.

how can you possibly say roads are not subsidized for cars? if i wanted to build a railway, and the government built the track for me wouldn't that be a subsidy?

just because the government normally pays for it, doesn't make it somehow not a subsidy.

Ha! Can't tell if trolling or what, but if you want a great example from California look at Panoche Valley. It's a barren wasteland with no crops and little grazing, where the Spanish explorers despaired that they'd entered Hell. But as soon as someone wanted to put a solar power station there, chaos broke out. Even the Sierra Club sued to stop the project. Project eventually got downsized from 250MW to 150MW, and construction has only just started, 10 years into the project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panoche_Valley_Solar_Farm

Many states have put up barriers to rooftop solar, at the behest of local utilities. That's the most common and obvious example.

If politics can help it through subsidies, then it can certainly harm it through opposite means (subsidies of competitors, fees, taxes, tariffs, overregulation like zoning rules, extra requirements or legal liability, etc.).

decreasing prices also reduce an investor's return

if prices keep dropping hugely year after year: investors aren't going to be very willing to risk their capital, as tomorrow's prices might not allow them to recoup their investment

(yeah, futures are the answer, but are presumably expensive if you're talking about decades)

Depends on the rate of return and payback.

Panels only last ~20 years so they need to payback ~5% of the investment + interest in the first year. Assuming costs drop less than ~4% waiting is unlikely to be a net benefit. (Basically, trading 1 year now for 1 year 20 years from now is rarely worth it.)

Further, panels are far from the only cost involved so really waiting is generally not worth it. Which you can see because panels are being used as quickly as they can be manufactured.

Is that true that panels only last for about a couple of decades? A quick google suggests that that's just the warranty period and they just lose about 1% efficiency a year.

This stuff depends on the panel. Panels may still function in 40+ years, but the decreasing power output becomes very significant.

I am more saying losing total output in ~30+ years and ~0.5% to ~1% power output until then is about the same as losing 1 year of power output 20 years from now.

>How does politics prevent electricity companies from building solar plants.

By whacking massive tariffs on imported solar panels.

They pretend it's done for the benefit of American solar manufacturers. It's not. It's done for the benefit of coal and gas. If they just wanted to help American solar manufacturers they'd give them subsidies to offset what they (erroneously) considered "unfair" competition from China.

Let's not forget major wind power states literally making it illegal to compete with gas.

A subsidy is a government cost and likely needs more approvals than A tariff which is a source of income for the government. One was accomplished with executive order while the other would likely have to go through congress.

They did it before with solyndra.

That was before solar became an existential threat to coal and gas.

Obama had some fairly close ties with oil/gas despite him trying to tout his green credentials.

Those tariffs are brand new and in the US, but the data in TFA is fro last year in Australia.

A) Solar tariffs were initially brought in under Obama and B) I figured the question was a general one - not specific to Australia.

The reason for the tariffs is definitely related to why the costs are so low.

1) Chinese manufacturers stole American technology and are producing without having paid the R&D.

2) China is heavily subsidizing the industry on many levels all the way down to raw materials. If China were a company in the US we'd be calling them out for violating our monopoly laws, driving everyone else out of business.

I don't support tariffs on anything under any circumstances, but I think it's important not to let the discussion get framed as a simple: Obama/Trump hate solar because donors. There's a bigger geopolitical game being played here.

I skimmed the state department report justifying the tariffs and one of the justifications they gave was "local governments in China promoted local solar companies on their websites. This amounts to free advertising, which is a subsidy".

The phrase "clutching at straws" jumped instantly to mind. I think they weren't expecting anybody except the Chinese to actually read it. There were zero reports in the US media on its contents. They basically just reported that the report existed.

I have seen precisely zero evidence for 1. Frankly, Chinese solar tech beats US tech hands down. The US might be better at making ridiculously expensive panels with 2% extra efficiency to go on satellites but Chinese companies aren't even competing in that market - their tech is centered around making panels that are acceptably efficient with aggressive cost cutting in their manufacturing process. They're hands down the best in the world at that.

China does get an implicit subsidy via the suppressed yuan but that applies equally to all Chinese products, not specifically solar panels, so if you're going to slap 30% tariffs on solar panels why not assembled iphones too?

The geopolitical game being played here involves one of misdirection. If you follow the trail of money it becomes clear what is really going on. The US solar manufacturing industry is small and makes almost no political donations. The US solar installation industry - who lobby against tariffs - is much larger and contributes much more. Both are completely dwarfed by political contributions from coal, oil and gas.

The idea that Obama and Trump (the latter especially not being known as being a friend of clean energy) are simply trying to help a weak and politically irrelevant industry out of their green, green hearts and only coincidentally helping their "real" friends I frankly consider an insult to my intelligence, but hey, people lap this shit up.

Don't they?

In 2009-ish China announced subsidies of basically half the cost of any large scale solar installations. The Chinese government has been giving solar companies below market rate loans. According to Scientific American China chipped in $47 Billion to build its solar industry.

This is, of course, in addition to the standard protectionist industry subsidies like the Joint Venture rules, subsidies on raw materials like steel, or transportation of such goods via rail, etc.

[1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-china-is-domi...

The tariffs under Obama were much more specific as to country of origin, and Chinese manufacturers quickly dodged them by moving. The current tariffs are in essence new in that they apply much more broadly and are not specific to China.

I think perhaps you should have avoided using the phrase "brand new" to refer to tariffs that are not new and have simply been tweaked. Right?

I think it's also cute how you think Trump of all people is so concerned helping out US solar manufacturers given his, y'know, words.