You can optimize for different goals. If you want you could optimize for a minimum of new land use. That would however be stupid economic policy as there’s enough land and cheaper energy is more valuable.
Using central planing to enforce more expensive energy production because agrivoltaics are cool and reduce land use is not good policy.
Yeah, this is a US-centric perspective of mine but there’s no shortage of land here. This sounds to me like classic thriftiness about that which is not scarce, which isn’t real thriftiness. I mean, “effective use of both farmland and rooftops”… rooftops? What’s scarce here in the US is labor, not land. Why have all these people climbing up on rooftops? An interesting contrast is Texas (mostly utility solar) vs California (lots of rooftop solar). The interesting number, which I don’t know off the top of my head, is how many people are employed in the solar sector per unit capacity installed. I seem to remember California employs a lot more people, disproportionately to how much more solar it has.
It’s worth noting that the Californian choice isn’t free. Californian like residential solar to allow homeowners to feel good about themselves and use net metering to incentives residential solar. Grid electricity in California are double of what residential customers in Texas pay.
FWIW, I agree with that. But, while land is not scarce in the US, long distance transmission capacity is. There are definitely places where putting solar on roofs is cheaper, or at least faster and easier, than getting large amounts of utility scale solar permitted and building the transmission capacity to bring it to where the demand is.
And I don’t just think agrivoltaics is cool. I think it dodges a lot of usually-bogus-but-impactful objections that so many large scale new construction projects get hit with.
Why do you think it would require a central planner to implement agrivoltaics but the profit seeking market isn’t doing it on their own?
Your first post is about optimal policy. The optimal response to usually-bogus-but-impactful objections is permitting reform.
How do you know that if you would get rid of net metering subventions which are about letting other energy produces pay for residential solar and other subventions for residential solar, it would still be economical to build residential solar in the US over specialized installations?
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.
You can optimize for different goals. If you want you could optimize for a minimum of new land use. That would however be stupid economic policy as there’s enough land and cheaper energy is more valuable.
Using central planing to enforce more expensive energy production because agrivoltaics are cool and reduce land use is not good policy.
Yeah, this is a US-centric perspective of mine but there’s no shortage of land here. This sounds to me like classic thriftiness about that which is not scarce, which isn’t real thriftiness. I mean, “effective use of both farmland and rooftops”… rooftops? What’s scarce here in the US is labor, not land. Why have all these people climbing up on rooftops? An interesting contrast is Texas (mostly utility solar) vs California (lots of rooftop solar). The interesting number, which I don’t know off the top of my head, is how many people are employed in the solar sector per unit capacity installed. I seem to remember California employs a lot more people, disproportionately to how much more solar it has.
It’s worth noting that the Californian choice isn’t free. Californian like residential solar to allow homeowners to feel good about themselves and use net metering to incentives residential solar. Grid electricity in California are double of what residential customers in Texas pay.
FWIW, I agree with that. But, while land is not scarce in the US, long distance transmission capacity is. There are definitely places where putting solar on roofs is cheaper, or at least faster and easier, than getting large amounts of utility scale solar permitted and building the transmission capacity to bring it to where the demand is.
And I don’t just think agrivoltaics is cool. I think it dodges a lot of usually-bogus-but-impactful objections that so many large scale new construction projects get hit with.
Why do you think it would require a central planner to implement agrivoltaics but the profit seeking market isn’t doing it on their own?
Your first post is about optimal policy. The optimal response to usually-bogus-but-impactful objections is permitting reform.
How do you know that if you would get rid of net metering subventions which are about letting other energy produces pay for residential solar and other subventions for residential solar, it would still be economical to build residential solar in the US over specialized installations?
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.