In the belly of the whale, part 2

In part 1, I summarized all the reasons why our current trajectory is going to fail miserably at combating climate change, and how nobody is going to do anything about it.

In part 2, advice for what to do about it.

Nobody knows anything: so teach them

Do you know what the photoelectric effect is? How about a solar micro-inverter? Even if you’re well-educated, you won’t know what the renewable energy policy of Bangladesh is.

While you might be able to learn everything you need to know for a solar installation at your own residence in an hour or two, to have an educated opinion on broader solutions it might take the equivalent of a semester-long university course.

“Solving climate change” isn’t as hard as people imagine, but even still the simple solutions are less well-known than people imagine.

Wikipedia doesn’t know either: so fix it

In the year 2022, when you don’t know something, you ask Google. And Google returns a Wikipedia page. And the Wikipedia pages are lacking.

It gets worse when you enter into the known morass of “corporate entity” articles. Is OneRoof a notable company? How about Grape Solar? Or StraightUp Solar? Or tenKsolar? Or Palmetto? There is neither rhyme nor reason to be found here, merely the stochastic noise of a dozen years of random behavior.

I can’t fix any of this myself, and I can’t pay someone else to fix it either. The only approach is finding someone else to do it.

Solar panels: let’s make more

It seems that every solar energy plan in America ultimately boils down to a plan of “first, buy solar panels from China”.

There is an entire essay to be written about “why can’t we make anything in America anymore”. Fortunately, in this case, that debate isn’t necessary. The Chinese need America to stop burning fossil fuels just as much as the Americans. It is unlikely that a trade war, COVID lockdowns, or Ragnar Danneskjold’s piracy will stop the flow of solar panels.

Solar installs: price it by the watt

It is perhaps unsurprising that solar installation companies are extremely hesitant to give out price quotes. I have given up on sales pitches before they even get to the price.

On the other hand, the companies make more profit from over-charging one customer than giving a competitive price to ten. So it is unremarkable that the most profitable (and, thus, the fastest-growing and most-advertised) companies do this.

As a person looking to purchase solar, you should demand at least a “rough” price estimate in dollars-per-watt before a salesman comes to your front door.

With inflation as it is, I don’t want to commit too firmly to a price range, but in most of the US, it should cost between $2.5 and $3 per Watt, fully installed (but without any battery system).

Net metering: a necessary evil

One of the limitations of residential solar is “net metering”. Roughly, you cannot produce more electricity than you consume. This leads to every “solar sales” conversation taking a dysfunctional tone. Rather than focusing on income, the conversation focuses on how much you can save.

There is a practical reason for this: solar power generation is spiky. There is no generation at night, and even during the day, it is spiky. If you have too much solar and not enough storage, the electrical grid will simply fail.

Also, in some areas the (residential) price of electricity varies by time of day; in other areas it does not. Net-metering is a flexible enough crutch to work with both systems.

The utilities should allow people with sufficient on-site battery storage to go beyond net-metering. But that is both complicated and regulated, so it hasn’t happened.

Batteries: still too expensive

The rough price of a battery-system is $1/W-h. To be fully independent from the grid, you would need roughly 6 hours worth of storage.

That increases the price from $3/W to $9/W. If you estimate that each Watt of production generates $0.25 worth of electricity each year, that changes the payback period from 12 years to 36 years.

What’s worse is that, unlike solar panels, today’s batteries are extremely unlikely to last for 75 years.

The economics of batteries are extremely unfriendly, but there may be little choice.

Surplus electricity: too hard to use

There are quite a lot of things that could be done with only surplus electricity. For exampe, one could synthesize ammonia. People say “it’s not economical to only run the factories during the daytime”, but those people are wrong.

Unfortunately, the most popular way to use surplus electricity today is mining Bitcoin. Which, at a global scale, is a complete waste of electricity.

Interconnection: where friction is revealed

As I have alluded, there are a lot of requirements to keep the electrical grid running. When an installation is a rounding error in total production, most of the time there is no substantial cost.

But sometimes there is a cost. Many times, it is a “fuck you” price, where it would obviously kill the entire project. Whether or not that price is due to legitimate expenses or pure animus … depends on the technical details.

Of course, if you don’t understand the technical details, you are likely to come up with a plan that is in fact completely infeasible.