Reading your comment and then rereading mine, I think I’ve been doing a terrible job explaining myself. I am not generally in favor of central planning, and am generally in favor of permitting reform, more utility scale solar, fewer subsidies, removal of net metering, and introduction of real time electricity pricing.
What I haven’t been commenting on is which things I think are going to happen whether I like it or not, which things I think would be good but only if we also remove the other distortions they currently counterbalance, and which I don’t think are politically feasible regardless of what their practical impacts would be.
I think within a few years it will become clear to many farmers that agrivoltaics would be a net benefit to themselves, so long as policy doesn’t stand in their way. There’s a lot more buried in that caveat than I feel like going into here, though.
Yes, and I’m realizing I went into a digression that wasn’t really relevant to my original point. In this particular post I just wanted to discuss the first principles calculation, that tells you that the sunlight hitting a relatively small area can supply all our electricity needs. The fact that just the area on roofs even makes a dent is one of the things that makes sense from this perspective, since roof area is not that large. Where to put solar panels is an economic question that doesn’t particularly matter for any of the points I’m going to make in this sequence, although I do want to get into the economics of batteries in some detail in the next two posts because that’s one of the things that limits how much solar capacity you can install. And, yes, the other big limitations are transmission and permitting—that’s a relevant point and I see now that you were trying to communicate how these other limitations can be addressed. I won’t really be getting to transmission and permitting, because this sequence was prompted by considering how I should update on battery storage exceeding expectations.
Reading your comment and then rereading mine, I think I’ve been doing a terrible job explaining myself. I am not generally in favor of central planning, and am generally in favor of permitting reform, more utility scale solar, fewer subsidies, removal of net metering, and introduction of real time electricity pricing.
What I haven’t been commenting on is which things I think are going to happen whether I like it or not, which things I think would be good but only if we also remove the other distortions they currently counterbalance, and which I don’t think are politically feasible regardless of what their practical impacts would be.
I think within a few years it will become clear to many farmers that agrivoltaics would be a net benefit to themselves, so long as policy doesn’t stand in their way. There’s a lot more buried in that caveat than I feel like going into here, though.
Yes, and I’m realizing I went into a digression that wasn’t really relevant to my original point. In this particular post I just wanted to discuss the first principles calculation, that tells you that the sunlight hitting a relatively small area can supply all our electricity needs. The fact that just the area on roofs even makes a dent is one of the things that makes sense from this perspective, since roof area is not that large. Where to put solar panels is an economic question that doesn’t particularly matter for any of the points I’m going to make in this sequence, although I do want to get into the economics of batteries in some detail in the next two posts because that’s one of the things that limits how much solar capacity you can install. And, yes, the other big limitations are transmission and permitting—that’s a relevant point and I see now that you were trying to communicate how these other limitations can be addressed. I won’t really be getting to transmission and permitting, because this sequence was prompted by considering how I should update on battery storage exceeding expectations.