The idea that solar is guaranteed to be an environmental or economic net-negative in the northern US is misinformed at best, propaganda at worst.

Just as a single data point, my parents, who live in rural upstate NY, installed solar panels on a portion of their (connected-to-the-house) barn's roof a few years ago. Aside from times when they're literally covered in snow (which is rare, due to their temperature), they're producing power, and even in the depths of winter they produce plenty enough to offset a huge chunk of their electric bill (and in the summer, there are days and weeks at a time where they're producing more than they need).

I can't speak for the specifics of environmental impact, because I don't know the details for their panels, nor how one calculates such uneven things (how do you subtract electricity generated from the various kinds of environmental damage done to mine and refine the various rare minerals in solar panels...?), but at least economically, they're a huge win.

Every energy solution in existence. Whether nuclear, steam, hydroelectric, solar or coal. Was manufactured from raw materials that were mined and refined. It makes no sense for you to single out solar as if it exclusively were the only energy source this precedent relates to.

A barn might have a lot more surface area compared to a typical home...

The area covered by the solar panels is roughly comparable to the size of one side of a typical roof in their area—and the area is mainly middle- to lower-class.

Counterpoint: there is a lot of PV in the pale green of Germany and south England. It works well in a lot more places than most people realise.

Germany doesn’t have a housing crisis. The context of the mandate is that USA lacks about fifteen million houses that it desperately needs. Solar power adds tens of thousands to the already-bloated cost of construction.

I calculated how much it would cost for me to DIY av solar setup, and it was <$10k to completely offset my electrical bill. To get a solar installer to do it, however, was ~2x the cost (best offer from multiple installers). If you're building a new house, it's going to be fairly inexpensive to install solar during the process since you can just include the permits and whatnot in the initial construction.

That being said, I'm against a mandate. Solar panels look ugly, so sometimes it's preferable to have the energy company take care of it. It also requires a decent amount of additional equipment, which means certain types of additional risk.

Instead of this type of legislation, at should just tax carbon and let individuals optimize. If fossil fuels become ~2x more expensive overnight, you can bet we'll transition to green energy much more quickly, but it doesn't push a specific solution. Maybe roof mount solar isn't the best option but some other centralised energy solution is (e.g. nuclear or wind).

First question: How much of the cost of a house is the cost of the land, and how much is the cost of the construction?

Second question: if the PV is part of the construction, and not bolted on afterwards, what can you save?

Third question: given that these save money and are a net economic win after a decade even when they are bolted on as an afterthought, even if the answer to #2 is “none” and even if the answer to #1 is that purchase prices go up rather than land owners can’t sell for as much, surely it’s still a win?

Don't build a house if you can't pay for the energy it's going to consume. You still come out ahead (versus utility power alone) if forced to pay for solar on the roof, and finance the system cost as part of your mortgage.

Americans aren't entitled to the cheapest new construction housing possible while foisting the consequences of that on the rest of us. No different than cars being more expensive to meet higher CAFE mileage standards. Not living in a polluted hellscape costs money, who would've thought.

Meta: Where did this entitlement complex come from that someone's pocketbook is more important than the air we breath?

I don’t know why you’re accusing me of having an entitled attitude. I worked to develop two of the largest solar power stations in California. And I happen to know that utility-scale solar makes a hell of a lot more sense that rooftop.

If you’re worried about pollution tax the emissions, like any civilized country would. Mandating rooftop solar is way too indirect and exposes the public to corruption of the construction trades. Of course, that’s why the parties that stand to benefit from the corruption are going around the country pushing these laws.

I'm not accusing you directly (that would be rude), but the idea in general when someone says "this makes housing more expensive!". It doesn't make the total cost of ownership more expensive, but it does front load some of the energy costs while still being cheaper in the long run for the homeowner. In some jurisdictions (California, the sixth largest world economy), it's been deemed a reasonable policy strategy.

Utility scale makes sense, but so does rooftop solar at scale (if you can streamline soft costs; permitting is unnecessarily expensive AF in the US versus someplace like Australia). A pollution tax will take time to implement, if at all tenable in American politics. Unfortunately, indirect methods are needed at times due to the political landscape. I will take a decent solution today over the perfect solution when it's too late.

California’s mandate has already been postponed over the objections of several municipal utility districts and probably will never take force in the way people who drafted it expected.

I really think mandates like this are totally wrong approach. Consider that in virtually every jurisdiction in California a new home requires both solar power and a 2-car garage. If that isn’t perverse I don’t know what would be.

Unlike you I consider a carbon tax almost trivially easy to implement. Way easier and more effective than construction mandates.

Agree to disagree. If a carbon tax was trivial to implement, why is it not implemented yet? If not now, when will it be?

Utilities can kick and scream (and attempt to subvert the mandate to maintain their relevance), but the mandate will go into force.

> Commission officials acknowledged homeowners will see smaller bill savings under SMUD’s Neighborhood SolarShares program than they would with solar panels on their roofs.

> The average single-family home in the utility’s service territory, which covers most of Sacramento County and parts of Placer and Yolo counties, can currently save around $75 a year with rooftop solar, the Energy Commission estimated. Under SMUD’s program, the average single-family home will be guaranteed electricity bill reductions of just $28 a year.

> The changes from SMUD’s initial proposal didn’t convince critics from several prominent environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity. They argued the solar projects SMUD plans to use for its program are too large and generally too far from residential neighborhoods to be considered true “community” solar facilities.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2020-02-20/califor...

“ California Energy Commissioners gave the Sacramento Municipal Utility District unanimous clearance to offer builders the option of buying solar energy from SMUD, via local solar farms SMUD would build, rather than install solar panels on new-home roofs.”

I think we're destined to remain on different sides of the argument. I'm confident rooftop solar still wins; utilities aren't known for not raising rates, and the political winds shift. It might take longer, but rooftop solar keeps getting cheaper every year. SMUD provided power from natural gas [1] doesn't, regardless of how much local utility solar they build. They even call their natural gas a renewable resource!

[1] https://www.smud.org/en/Corporate/Environmental-Leadership/P...

We need both. Utility scale solar has it's own set of problems related to land use. There is nothing about rooftop solar that makes it make less sense than utility scale if it's done well. There is a promising future ahead of us where building regulations will take into account cosine losses and start mandating equatorial facing rooftops, solar trackers, etc. It just seems weird now because we haven't seen it done yet with any kind of aesthetic vigor.

By the way, it's not commonly acknowledged but in my experience solar panels are very underrated as effective insulators, reducing A/C costs.

Well, if you look from the outside, the USA seems to have a huge problem with the construction of houses in general.

Start building houses out of bricks and mortar. They will last for a century, provide shelter to your children and grandchildren and in that case, 10k for a solar system do not really make much over the time.

Indeed, almost the whole of the USA housing stock is disposable hovels. The real problem is we don't replace them, we instead give them historic protections!

> Solar is very geographical

No, it's not. As already pointed out, Germany is full of PV, even very large systems.

Deploying solar systems everywhere is very important to decentralize energy creation (and in the future: energy storage). The future of our electrical systems lies in decentralized systems, to minimize the need for huge infrastructure to get power from A to B and also to "harden" the grids against failures.

So, it's a good idea to have solar on every house. And if it only takes care that your fridge is running on "your own" energy from the PV system that's a good start as well.