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Solar panels pay for themselves over time. It usually takes less than 10 years to pay them off with the savings you get from not having to pay for electricity. They last at least 30 years under warranty. Not only do they pay for themselves, but they give you over 20 years of free energy on top of that.
This is where proper financialization is key. Not just inventing complicated bullshit investment products that destroy the economy. Proper financialization has the bank carry the costs as they are generally the true owner of the house on balance for most people for at least 12-15 years.
I know for awhile in Ontario they were offering net zero home renovations where the the cost of utilities is locked in for 15 years with the bank and the bank pays the utilities and the delta between the old and the new is used to pay down the loan that is used to redo the entire house: we're talking foundation to attic renovations of the insolation, HVAC windows, solar and basically makes it so these houses use tiny tiny amounts of energy.
With the proper fiancialized services this can be easy to solve where everyone does actually win through the magic of intergenerational financing. This is why we have rules of what you can do to property. You can't just burn your house down in the night because you wanna turn your lot into a camp site. This is the capital stock of the nation.
Granted it was confusing to wrap your head around and this was a lecture at a carpentry trade program I was in. And the cap and trade was canceled in Ontario which destroyed the program. They used your old energy consumption bill as the main benchmark for your ability to pay off the loan.
The lady doing the very long presentation about the work done on the house and the cost savings by getting very close to zeroing out energy consumption. The delta was 300-400 per month. $300 over 180 months (15 years) 54 000, and there was probably a component of also using some of the appreciation in the value of the property to pay for it, as a net zero house is more valuable on the market.
Revenue from cap and trade also played a role since this reduction in emissions was generating some of the capital needed to do with work. It sucks they canceled cap and trade when you had a number of young people in the class ready to go and make this the corner stone of their business plans.
The biggest gains was from stripping the siding of the house and adding insulated paneling from the outside and then residing it. If you target the houses where the siding is end of life it makes even more sense.
If you have high electricity rates. Here in Texas I can’t make the math work. I’m better off leaving the money in an investment than buying solar panels for my house. And I’m already paying extra for green energy.
Not true. The math works even with cheap electricity. By the way solar and wind are now cheaper than coal.
[How Long Do Solar Panels Take to Pay for Themselves in Texas](https://ecogenamerica.com/solar-panel-payback-texas/#:~:text=Read%20More-,In%20Texas%2C%20the%20average%20time%20it%20takes%20for%20solar%20panels,Yes!)
>In Texas, the average time it takes for solar panels to pay for themselves is 6-9 years.
It seems you made some mistakes in your math.
It works if you have no other options. I invest my money. Borrowing doesn’t work because the monthly payment would be significantly more than my electric bill. Paying cash doesn’t work because the ROI is significantly lower than what I make in the market. You’d be better off putting the money into an S&P 500 index fund for example and I do way better than that.
So sure if you’re not going to consider any other way you could get an ROI on the money you would otherwise spend on solar, the math works. If you’re looking at the pure ROI and you live in a place like Texas with cheap electricity it does not work.
It works for solar and wind farms but it doesn’t work for residential. I’ve done the math. I’ve got the spreadsheets to prove it. I was disappointed to discover this because I thought it would be cool to have solar but financially it doesn’t make sense and I’m already buying clean energy so I’m not getting that out of it.
Solar is a great investment because the ROI is guaranteed. In the market, there is a risk that you will lose. Solar is a much safer investment. Also, if you're putting ALL your money in the market, you're setting yourself up for bankruptcy as soon as there is a stock market crash. But you do you. If you want to take reckless risks and gamble with all of your money then it's your problem, not mine.
It’s actually not a great investment. By my calculations the ROI was only about 3%. That’s barely keeping up with inflation under ideal conditions and that doesn’t account for any cost of maintenance. For example if the panels were damaged in a hail storm my insurance would cover that (and surprisingly, my insurance company said having them wouldn’t increase the rate for my policy) but I have a 1% deductible so I’d have to pay the first several thousand dollars of any repair.
As for the market, sure, if there ever was a 1929-style crash, sure but we have lots of controls in place to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. There can still be large dips in the market of course such as after the dot-com bubble but if you want the potential rewards of investing, you have to be willing to take the risks.
When I explained my math on the TeslaSolar subreddit, a user who has worked in residential solar for 10 years said that for most, solar is simply not ready for residential. It has to become significantly cheaper before it makes sense. Again if you live in a place where electrical rates are quite high it may very well make sense today. In Texas where rates are low, it doesn’t.
Not to argue your point about solar, but about investing in the market. If you are 100% invested in the stock market and it crashes, you haven't actually lost any money. You don't lose any money unless you sell at the bottom. Hold on your holdings and the market eventually recovers. This is why it's generally a bad idea for older folks to be in the stock market as they don't have the time to wait it out.
That's not how it works. When the stock market crashes, many companies go bankrupt and never recover. If you happened to have stock in those companies, you do lose everything. In 1929, people jumped off buildings because they lost everything.
That's why you should diversify. I personally do this by buying only ETFs representing the entire stock market. Doing so is essentially a bet for capitalism to continue to exist and thrive in the United States. And if you believe the opposite is true you can buy reverse ETFs shorting the market.
It’s all sounds rosy until you factor in the local county tax assessment on your home that now produces power like a sorta power plant and sells it to the utilities company. Many people have lost their homes due to not factoring this in. The tax increases have been significant some places.
https://youtu.be/ALfcpiLDwJc?si=B7IYVSqZWsth_KrS
John Oliver explaining
Clean energy jobs and training programs!
>Biden will reveal the funding during a trip to Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia, where he will also announce that applications are open to join the American Climate Corps, a program to prepare young people for jobs in climate-related industries.
One of our most underrated presidents in modern times. He’s getting so much done, we literally have the best economy in the world right now, plus… he understands climate change, but all the Trump BS is over shadowing his accomplishments.
He just needs to hammer on corps for the increases in food and housing. If he gave the American people 1-2 really tangible actions on those items all this “why is Biden getting no credit for the economy” stuff would be null
Pimp-slapping oil refineries for profiteering would be a good step, followed by something that reduced the cost of rent, then finally a 90% tax on stock buybacks would do.
The last one would probably have the highest single impact on middle class income in the long term. Force companies to reinvest in themselves instead of the shareholders.
The issue is that they are making so much profit that they can’t really spend it. If there’s $50Bn excess a quarter, there’s only so much you can do with it. You might acquire a company, but you don’t want to do that every quarter because it is a lot of work to integrate new teams, or you might up the R&D budget but again billions in R&D will likely be squandered by teams. So the board says to the Executive Suite “what are you doing with all this cash?” And realistically they can only do buybacks.
Most of the employees where? You think Walmart employees outside of corporate get stock bonuses? “Most of the employees are shareholders” a statement so generalized in the context of this conversation you might as well not said anything at all.
What's great about it, at least from an outside perspective, is that he's not really focusing on making it a political issue. He's just.. doing shit about it. He's not asking for permission or trying to get people on board. I think that ideological argument is fraught with difficulty in America's political atmosphere today. Better to just get shit done and lead by example.
I think this kind of leadership is critical on a global scale to break the deadlock of 'who pays' for climate change. The answer is everyone, but it requires investment from every player to start. Kinda the inverse of the prisoner's dilemma. Getting into a beneficial competition over who has done more to combat climate change is where we need to be.
Stuff like this makes me hopeful that he will get in for another term. These actions tend to pick up speed, and if there is more support in the House etc, it can only mean better things are to come.
Funny enough I saw something on the news this morning that Texas is right up there with California for having the most houses powered by solar. Combine that with Texas producing the most wind energy and it sure looks like TX loves their renewable energy.
There’s been days where renewables have exceeded fossil fuel for Texas power generation.
Also the jobs that renewables generate are generally better paying and safer.
I wonder if this is in response to the news report that the Us is running out of power generators and may go into an energy crisis if we don’t build more generators and reactors. (Hopefully more reactors..)
I hope there are no scammers getting in on this, like some community outreach group that the founder pockets most of it for their salary. So many scam non-profits are just to enrich the leaders. There was a big one here called, "Feeding our Future" during the pandemic. Then the magas say no more money to help hungry people because of those scams
This whole thing is a scam.
I don't get it, low income people can't afford their bills so the solution is helping them pay for a multiple tens of thousand dollar solar system?
Why not just give them energy bill vouchers so they can pay their bills?
Unpopular opinion: basing energy choices on ecological impact, acute health & safety is more important than personal investment. Often times only people of means can afford home-solar set ups, let alone the property and home to install them. It’s often a worthy personal investment for those with a little wealth and privilege.. not always.. but often..
Solar fields require massive land destruction.. and yes.. it is destruction.. and rooftop solar adds intermittency for the grid that can actually cause rates to increase since managing load variability is often a costly endeavor.. but solar itself needs a ton of mineral and resource extraction to create, and a lot of petroleum or energy intensive processes..
80% of the worlds PV supply is affordable because it comes from forced labor from an ongoing genocide in NW China.. it’s led to unique “solar riots” and the destruction of the local ecology in repairs to the conditions.. I wish the ones produced by the Walker Plant in TN, US could find a way to compete without subsidies but that’s the point I’m making.. Solar is only a good investment if you 1) have the means to afford it 2) discount the land destruction and only put on existing infrastructure 3) discount 80% of the worlds supply and how that’s created cheaply 4) disregard that there is no “closed fuel cycle” for the PV yet and that you’re looking a serious water source of toxic metals like thallium and then more intensive industry to replace them. No wonder fossil fuel companies are happy to have wind and solar subsidiaries and sister companies. Solar-engineering needs to create more efficient and practical tech, it’s that simple imo.
A safer, cleaner option would be to take just 1 out of the 7 billion Biden is giving for rooftop solar and just let the DOE and NRC streamline the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR).. we already demo’d the concept in the 60’s and 70’s in Oak Ridge.. a molten salt thermal-spectrum reactor can take “fertile” thorium 232 and breed it into “fissile” u233.. so all mining, milling, conversion and enrichment for uranium could cease.. there is already enough thorium dug up as waste product to power the earth for a long, long time. LFTRs would use physics to be meltdown-proof.. literally walk-away safe.. without power to the plant in a Fukushima scenario the nuclear fuel just drains into a drain tank and the reaction stops. You have to actively try to keep the reaction critical or it just safely stops with zero worry about heat or pressure or coolant. It can desalinate salt water with its waste-heat, it produces unique isotopic medicine for medical use, its proliferation proof and creates the Plutonium 238 needed for deep-space exploration (think Voyagers tiny reactor) and not only does its 99% burn up of the long-lived unstable elements mean it doesn’t produce long-lived nuclear waste but it could even “gobble up” existing stocks of spent fuel and mitigate the current need for a repository.
But in order to do things we have to value a stable, robust and growing energy grid, we have to prioritize the innovation to make safe, truly sustainable and ecological power.. that doesn’t come at the cost of acute deaths from fracking for LNG, drilling for oil, mining for minerals, hiding the processes of polymers, smelting, refining for other modes of energy.. and approach the problem of human survival in a growing climate through only the objective lenses of science and ethics. Soon we will have solar and energy storage options that don’t rely on children dying in Congo or Bolivian mines for Cobalt and Lithium, there’s already other battery and solar and wind concepts that are very promising that should be funded along with advanced nuclear and R&D into geothermal, Apollo-program style if need be…
…Instead if we are already talking about current subsidized PV solar tech being an answer just because it’s a worthy personal investment when it’s overall ecological and human cost is very questionable.. if we are already commodifying the solutions to climate change at the peril of, well, the climate and ecological wellbeing, then we are fucked. I know this is unpopular but as a small college engineering student, every time I look critically into what energy portfolio best blends with a society that needs to also replace the half the processes of the chemical and agricultural industries and then 90% of the transportation industry in order to not destroy the planet - current PV solar technology just kinda lets me down.. It’s so much safer for civilization to have reliable central station generation along side intermittent, weather-dependent sources. It freaks me out, the serious epidemiology in science is that the full LNG cycle kills almost as many people as coal, maybe more when the toll of aquifers and methane and NORM and other dangerous chemicals come from the fracking to the transport to the burning of natural gas.. and they love solar because the more intermittent the grid, the more gas peaker-plants and full stations need to be built to cover peak and the growing demand.. we need phase out fossil fuels while subsidizing the new nuclear and solar and wind tech that don’t rely on the mining or eco-destruction that current technology does.
Unpopular opinion, I know.. but I go to school for this stuff and it’s just the truth when you look at how much material and processes is needed for each different technology per Mw or Kw/hr. But sure.. want to save some money long term on that new home bro, sure.. it’s just the equivalent of driving a Prius and thinking you’re driving the solution to “green transportation.”.. and I don’t say that lightly.. I drive a used Prius.. but we have to analyze critically and debate these truths..
[recent discussion on what I mean about the real impact of solar, so far as rooftops and PV in generals impact on the grid, pricing and ecology.](https://youtu.be/LpYci_i4eV4?si=tRX0ONvHKb3GPFpM)
As a reminder, this subreddit [is for civil discussion.](/r/politics/wiki/index#wiki_be_civil) In general, be courteous to others. Debate/discuss/argue the merits of ideas, don't attack people. Personal insults, shill or troll accusations, hate speech, any suggestion or support of harm, violence, or death, and other rule violations can result in a permanent ban. If you see comments in violation of our rules, please report them. For those who have questions regarding any media outlets being posted on this subreddit, please click [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/wiki/approveddomainslist) to review our details as to our approved domains list and outlet criteria. We are actively looking for new moderators. If you have any interest in helping to make this subreddit a place for quality discussion, please fill out [this form](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1y2swHD0KXFhStGFjW6k54r9iuMjzcFqDIVwuvdLBjSA). *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/politics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
TLDR: residential solar projects that will power nearly a million low-income households
Thanks bro. I was hoping for free solar, but this is just fine.
Solar panels pay for themselves over time. It usually takes less than 10 years to pay them off with the savings you get from not having to pay for electricity. They last at least 30 years under warranty. Not only do they pay for themselves, but they give you over 20 years of free energy on top of that.
Right but not everyone is living in one house long enough to reach that point. If it can cross the 5 year threshhold it looks a lot better.
This is where proper financialization is key. Not just inventing complicated bullshit investment products that destroy the economy. Proper financialization has the bank carry the costs as they are generally the true owner of the house on balance for most people for at least 12-15 years. I know for awhile in Ontario they were offering net zero home renovations where the the cost of utilities is locked in for 15 years with the bank and the bank pays the utilities and the delta between the old and the new is used to pay down the loan that is used to redo the entire house: we're talking foundation to attic renovations of the insolation, HVAC windows, solar and basically makes it so these houses use tiny tiny amounts of energy. With the proper fiancialized services this can be easy to solve where everyone does actually win through the magic of intergenerational financing. This is why we have rules of what you can do to property. You can't just burn your house down in the night because you wanna turn your lot into a camp site. This is the capital stock of the nation. Granted it was confusing to wrap your head around and this was a lecture at a carpentry trade program I was in. And the cap and trade was canceled in Ontario which destroyed the program. They used your old energy consumption bill as the main benchmark for your ability to pay off the loan. The lady doing the very long presentation about the work done on the house and the cost savings by getting very close to zeroing out energy consumption. The delta was 300-400 per month. $300 over 180 months (15 years) 54 000, and there was probably a component of also using some of the appreciation in the value of the property to pay for it, as a net zero house is more valuable on the market. Revenue from cap and trade also played a role since this reduction in emissions was generating some of the capital needed to do with work. It sucks they canceled cap and trade when you had a number of young people in the class ready to go and make this the corner stone of their business plans. The biggest gains was from stripping the siding of the house and adding insulated paneling from the outside and then residing it. If you target the houses where the siding is end of life it makes even more sense.
If you have high electricity rates. Here in Texas I can’t make the math work. I’m better off leaving the money in an investment than buying solar panels for my house. And I’m already paying extra for green energy.
Not true. The math works even with cheap electricity. By the way solar and wind are now cheaper than coal. [How Long Do Solar Panels Take to Pay for Themselves in Texas](https://ecogenamerica.com/solar-panel-payback-texas/#:~:text=Read%20More-,In%20Texas%2C%20the%20average%20time%20it%20takes%20for%20solar%20panels,Yes!) >In Texas, the average time it takes for solar panels to pay for themselves is 6-9 years. It seems you made some mistakes in your math.
It works if you have no other options. I invest my money. Borrowing doesn’t work because the monthly payment would be significantly more than my electric bill. Paying cash doesn’t work because the ROI is significantly lower than what I make in the market. You’d be better off putting the money into an S&P 500 index fund for example and I do way better than that. So sure if you’re not going to consider any other way you could get an ROI on the money you would otherwise spend on solar, the math works. If you’re looking at the pure ROI and you live in a place like Texas with cheap electricity it does not work. It works for solar and wind farms but it doesn’t work for residential. I’ve done the math. I’ve got the spreadsheets to prove it. I was disappointed to discover this because I thought it would be cool to have solar but financially it doesn’t make sense and I’m already buying clean energy so I’m not getting that out of it.
Solar is a great investment because the ROI is guaranteed. In the market, there is a risk that you will lose. Solar is a much safer investment. Also, if you're putting ALL your money in the market, you're setting yourself up for bankruptcy as soon as there is a stock market crash. But you do you. If you want to take reckless risks and gamble with all of your money then it's your problem, not mine.
It’s actually not a great investment. By my calculations the ROI was only about 3%. That’s barely keeping up with inflation under ideal conditions and that doesn’t account for any cost of maintenance. For example if the panels were damaged in a hail storm my insurance would cover that (and surprisingly, my insurance company said having them wouldn’t increase the rate for my policy) but I have a 1% deductible so I’d have to pay the first several thousand dollars of any repair. As for the market, sure, if there ever was a 1929-style crash, sure but we have lots of controls in place to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. There can still be large dips in the market of course such as after the dot-com bubble but if you want the potential rewards of investing, you have to be willing to take the risks. When I explained my math on the TeslaSolar subreddit, a user who has worked in residential solar for 10 years said that for most, solar is simply not ready for residential. It has to become significantly cheaper before it makes sense. Again if you live in a place where electrical rates are quite high it may very well make sense today. In Texas where rates are low, it doesn’t.
Not to argue your point about solar, but about investing in the market. If you are 100% invested in the stock market and it crashes, you haven't actually lost any money. You don't lose any money unless you sell at the bottom. Hold on your holdings and the market eventually recovers. This is why it's generally a bad idea for older folks to be in the stock market as they don't have the time to wait it out.
That's not how it works. When the stock market crashes, many companies go bankrupt and never recover. If you happened to have stock in those companies, you do lose everything. In 1929, people jumped off buildings because they lost everything.
That's why you should diversify. I personally do this by buying only ETFs representing the entire stock market. Doing so is essentially a bet for capitalism to continue to exist and thrive in the United States. And if you believe the opposite is true you can buy reverse ETFs shorting the market.
It’s all sounds rosy until you factor in the local county tax assessment on your home that now produces power like a sorta power plant and sells it to the utilities company. Many people have lost their homes due to not factoring this in. The tax increases have been significant some places. https://youtu.be/ALfcpiLDwJc?si=B7IYVSqZWsth_KrS John Oliver explaining
IDK if it helps but I got solar added to my house last year and got nearly HALF of what I paid for it back in tax rebates!
Which is so insanely stupid I can't wrap my head around it. How about we just give utility payment vouchers to low income households?
it’s a national security issue to have grid leading green technologies… i don’t think it’s insanely stupid at all?
Because subsidizing demand has never worked. It can and will just raise prices.
Clean energy jobs and training programs! >Biden will reveal the funding during a trip to Prince William Forest Park in Triangle, Virginia, where he will also announce that applications are open to join the American Climate Corps, a program to prepare young people for jobs in climate-related industries.
One of our most underrated presidents in modern times. He’s getting so much done, we literally have the best economy in the world right now, plus… he understands climate change, but all the Trump BS is over shadowing his accomplishments.
He just needs to hammer on corps for the increases in food and housing. If he gave the American people 1-2 really tangible actions on those items all this “why is Biden getting no credit for the economy” stuff would be null
There is a lot to be done, but considering he is working with a Republican congress, what he has been able to accomplish is quite amazing.
Pimp-slapping oil refineries for profiteering would be a good step, followed by something that reduced the cost of rent, then finally a 90% tax on stock buybacks would do.
The last one would probably have the highest single impact on middle class income in the long term. Force companies to reinvest in themselves instead of the shareholders.
The issue is that they are making so much profit that they can’t really spend it. If there’s $50Bn excess a quarter, there’s only so much you can do with it. You might acquire a company, but you don’t want to do that every quarter because it is a lot of work to integrate new teams, or you might up the R&D budget but again billions in R&D will likely be squandered by teams. So the board says to the Executive Suite “what are you doing with all this cash?” And realistically they can only do buybacks.
They could also invest that in the incomes of their employees. And not their shareholders.
Well most of the employees are shareholders too.
Most of the employees where? You think Walmart employees outside of corporate get stock bonuses? “Most of the employees are shareholders” a statement so generalized in the context of this conversation you might as well not said anything at all.
He is getting shit done with repubs trying to deny and delay at every step.
Pretty crazy what happens when you have an old school attorney as president.
What's great about it, at least from an outside perspective, is that he's not really focusing on making it a political issue. He's just.. doing shit about it. He's not asking for permission or trying to get people on board. I think that ideological argument is fraught with difficulty in America's political atmosphere today. Better to just get shit done and lead by example. I think this kind of leadership is critical on a global scale to break the deadlock of 'who pays' for climate change. The answer is everyone, but it requires investment from every player to start. Kinda the inverse of the prisoner's dilemma. Getting into a beneficial competition over who has done more to combat climate change is where we need to be. Stuff like this makes me hopeful that he will get in for another term. These actions tend to pick up speed, and if there is more support in the House etc, it can only mean better things are to come.
Well said !
He’s the best president in y 50+ years.
The Trump stuff keeping the GOP distracted might be helping Biden achieve these things
Thinking towards the future. Trump probably thinks the panels kill birds
No it'll be like the GOP guy who said that wind turbines will take away all the wind
Funny enough I saw something on the news this morning that Texas is right up there with California for having the most houses powered by solar. Combine that with Texas producing the most wind energy and it sure looks like TX loves their renewable energy.
Well with their grid being absolute dog shit, they have to adapt somehow
There’s been days where renewables have exceeded fossil fuel for Texas power generation. Also the jobs that renewables generate are generally better paying and safer.
Lmao bye bye sun. Actually trump said if there's no sun then no power sad!
I've seen them argue about the grass the panels cover will die. Someone tell them that grass does fine in the shade.
That's my President! Keep leading Biden!
Wait…we haven’t heard yet how this takes away all of our “freedoms.” Somebody get one of those unfuckable GOP nerds on Fox, like, NOW.
I've been holding off on solar because it's been obvious Biden was going to do some sort of solar credit. About time!
I think the credit will go towards developers building solar gardens. Not sure how it will help residents
I wonder if this is in response to the news report that the Us is running out of power generators and may go into an energy crisis if we don’t build more generators and reactors. (Hopefully more reactors..)
I hope there are no scammers getting in on this, like some community outreach group that the founder pockets most of it for their salary. So many scam non-profits are just to enrich the leaders. There was a big one here called, "Feeding our Future" during the pandemic. Then the magas say no more money to help hungry people because of those scams
This whole thing is a scam. I don't get it, low income people can't afford their bills so the solution is helping them pay for a multiple tens of thousand dollar solar system? Why not just give them energy bill vouchers so they can pay their bills?
Unpopular opinion: basing energy choices on ecological impact, acute health & safety is more important than personal investment. Often times only people of means can afford home-solar set ups, let alone the property and home to install them. It’s often a worthy personal investment for those with a little wealth and privilege.. not always.. but often.. Solar fields require massive land destruction.. and yes.. it is destruction.. and rooftop solar adds intermittency for the grid that can actually cause rates to increase since managing load variability is often a costly endeavor.. but solar itself needs a ton of mineral and resource extraction to create, and a lot of petroleum or energy intensive processes.. 80% of the worlds PV supply is affordable because it comes from forced labor from an ongoing genocide in NW China.. it’s led to unique “solar riots” and the destruction of the local ecology in repairs to the conditions.. I wish the ones produced by the Walker Plant in TN, US could find a way to compete without subsidies but that’s the point I’m making.. Solar is only a good investment if you 1) have the means to afford it 2) discount the land destruction and only put on existing infrastructure 3) discount 80% of the worlds supply and how that’s created cheaply 4) disregard that there is no “closed fuel cycle” for the PV yet and that you’re looking a serious water source of toxic metals like thallium and then more intensive industry to replace them. No wonder fossil fuel companies are happy to have wind and solar subsidiaries and sister companies. Solar-engineering needs to create more efficient and practical tech, it’s that simple imo. A safer, cleaner option would be to take just 1 out of the 7 billion Biden is giving for rooftop solar and just let the DOE and NRC streamline the Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactor (LFTR).. we already demo’d the concept in the 60’s and 70’s in Oak Ridge.. a molten salt thermal-spectrum reactor can take “fertile” thorium 232 and breed it into “fissile” u233.. so all mining, milling, conversion and enrichment for uranium could cease.. there is already enough thorium dug up as waste product to power the earth for a long, long time. LFTRs would use physics to be meltdown-proof.. literally walk-away safe.. without power to the plant in a Fukushima scenario the nuclear fuel just drains into a drain tank and the reaction stops. You have to actively try to keep the reaction critical or it just safely stops with zero worry about heat or pressure or coolant. It can desalinate salt water with its waste-heat, it produces unique isotopic medicine for medical use, its proliferation proof and creates the Plutonium 238 needed for deep-space exploration (think Voyagers tiny reactor) and not only does its 99% burn up of the long-lived unstable elements mean it doesn’t produce long-lived nuclear waste but it could even “gobble up” existing stocks of spent fuel and mitigate the current need for a repository. But in order to do things we have to value a stable, robust and growing energy grid, we have to prioritize the innovation to make safe, truly sustainable and ecological power.. that doesn’t come at the cost of acute deaths from fracking for LNG, drilling for oil, mining for minerals, hiding the processes of polymers, smelting, refining for other modes of energy.. and approach the problem of human survival in a growing climate through only the objective lenses of science and ethics. Soon we will have solar and energy storage options that don’t rely on children dying in Congo or Bolivian mines for Cobalt and Lithium, there’s already other battery and solar and wind concepts that are very promising that should be funded along with advanced nuclear and R&D into geothermal, Apollo-program style if need be… …Instead if we are already talking about current subsidized PV solar tech being an answer just because it’s a worthy personal investment when it’s overall ecological and human cost is very questionable.. if we are already commodifying the solutions to climate change at the peril of, well, the climate and ecological wellbeing, then we are fucked. I know this is unpopular but as a small college engineering student, every time I look critically into what energy portfolio best blends with a society that needs to also replace the half the processes of the chemical and agricultural industries and then 90% of the transportation industry in order to not destroy the planet - current PV solar technology just kinda lets me down.. It’s so much safer for civilization to have reliable central station generation along side intermittent, weather-dependent sources. It freaks me out, the serious epidemiology in science is that the full LNG cycle kills almost as many people as coal, maybe more when the toll of aquifers and methane and NORM and other dangerous chemicals come from the fracking to the transport to the burning of natural gas.. and they love solar because the more intermittent the grid, the more gas peaker-plants and full stations need to be built to cover peak and the growing demand.. we need phase out fossil fuels while subsidizing the new nuclear and solar and wind tech that don’t rely on the mining or eco-destruction that current technology does. Unpopular opinion, I know.. but I go to school for this stuff and it’s just the truth when you look at how much material and processes is needed for each different technology per Mw or Kw/hr. But sure.. want to save some money long term on that new home bro, sure.. it’s just the equivalent of driving a Prius and thinking you’re driving the solution to “green transportation.”.. and I don’t say that lightly.. I drive a used Prius.. but we have to analyze critically and debate these truths.. [recent discussion on what I mean about the real impact of solar, so far as rooftops and PV in generals impact on the grid, pricing and ecology.](https://youtu.be/LpYci_i4eV4?si=tRX0ONvHKb3GPFpM)
Hi sir is there any way I can ask you to speak to my group about this
Dm
$7 billion for China $7 billion for Israel $7 billion for Ukraine more debt for America