California to make "Solar "mandatory for new Homes!!!!!!
Real Estate Agent · Las Vegas, NV · Member since 2015 · 2k+ posts · 1k+ votes
California to make "Solar "mandatory for new Homes!!!!!!
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Investor · Valencia, CA · Member since 2017 · 171 posts · 130 votes
7yHi @Account Closed I'm happy to run numbers with you in AZ, because what you have posted is certainly no reflection of the reality I work with there. My latest customer, for example in Prescott Valley had a utility bill averaging $183. We eliminated that bill with a solar system that costs him $149/month for 20 years with no increase. If you factor in inflation on the utility at 4% annually then he will save tens of thousands over 20 years. He did not come out of pocket one cent to do that with the zero down loan.
For sure batteries are the next massive step that is and will happen in solar and renewable, but for now the utility is the "battery" through net metering. The over-production from solar is purchased by the utility. At night power is purchased back from the utility. The goal to offset that overall bill to zero - depending on the roof space etc.
There are some small utilities in AZ that have punitive conditions for solar, but for the overwhelming majority, the numbers for solar in AZ are excellent. Batteries are already economically viable in CA because of the cost of utility power. It will be around 24 months before that's the case in AZ
222 Replies
Originally posted by @Andrew Smith:
Originally posted by @Steve K.:
Originally posted by @Eric Schultz:
Steven Picker
I do commercial construction for a living. One of my current clients is a leader in the state of California for Zero Net Energy (ZNE) and LEED Gold new construction projects. It’s only a matter of time (maybe a decade or two) where the California Building Code will require a combination of photovoltaic (PV) systems with battery walls and building system submetering on all new construction.
What most people don't realize is that PV solar panels have what is called a degradation factor. The panels' energy output reduces by 0.25% - 3% per year depending on the make/model. The panels also must be cleaned regularly. Between these two things the advertised energy cost offsets for the property owner slowly decreases year after year, reducing the ROI.
Also, recent tariffs on PV panels and inverters has driven costs up lately.
Current price points are not where they need to be to make this economical statewide yet.
Of course the degradation factor is taken into account when we do energy forecasts. It's less than 1% on avg., high quality panels less than .5%.
I have never cleaned my panels nor do many of my 1,000's of customers (only the really anal ones, or the large scale bank-owned ones required to do so by investors). All of these systems are producing better than forecasted, dirty or meticulously cared for, basically same end result. If there's a dust storm or something, they can easily be cleaned or you can just wait for it to rain like I do. If you clean them daily you might make a few extra pennies a day. Or if you think it's necessary, as some managers of large scale arrays lead us to believe (mostly to justify their position "managing" and array with no moving parts, or to appease investors who have little solar knowledge and just like to have something to point out and think it's important), then paying some guys to run around with spray bottles and squeegees for a few hours isn't going to be a deal breaker on a multimillion dollar system. Soiling is a non-issue in my experience. In areas with heavy dust like the Mojave or the Gobi where the largest solar arrays are, cleaning them is a teeny tiny expense compared to the many millions of dollars worth of electricity those large arrays produce.
Yes, the recent tariffs increased the cost of imported panels by 30%, and the same president signed off on extending the 30% tax credit. So now we mark them up 30% and then down 30%. Makes sense to me... free market! Interesting fact: both policies were signed into law by the party of "less government"; the 30% tax credit in 2005, extended in 2017, and the 30% tariff in 2017. Less government achieved by more government? Energy subsidies are extremely complex, and solar isn't unique in that regard. If you look into subsidies for any form of energy it's migraine-inducing. Despite the tariffs panel prices have dropped by 75% since 2009 and will continue to drop as they are increasingly mass produced.
Current prices have been more than economical for renewables in CA for quite some time that's why almost all new generation is coming from solar and wind.
With regard to the tariffs though the 30% tariffs is on the components. The 30% tax credit is on the entire system. So on a $21K system it would be 30% on $7K in tariffs but 30% tax credit on $21K in rough numbers so the tax credit is worth a lot more than the tariff.
100% concur in wondering what happened to less Govt, free market and free trade too. Tariffs are taxes.Yes thanks for clarifying, in our office we calculated the tariff as a 5-10% increase on total system cost, while the tax credit reduces it 30%, just trying to avoid getting too granular with this crowd ;)
@Steve K. and @Andrew Smith graciously giving their time and experience to this thread has lead me to looking into solar energy more and see what some thinkers and doers I respect have to say on not just solar, but energy in general.
I came across Bill Gate's annual letter, which has a bit about energy:
I figure I'd pass it along to the community since this thread is still going.
- Investor · Valencia, CA · Member since 2017 · 171 posts · 130 votes7y
Thanks @Bill F.
It's an interesting letter for sure. I grew up with Hunterston Power Station in Scotland in my World. Did the tours and loved the notion of "cheap" power as does everyone I suppose. I will never forget though being literally shut down for asking what the cost of decommissioning and security was. I wasn't an "activist", just wanted to know a "big picture".That shutdown inspired me to look deeper and my feelings of being lied to and grossly misled have only got worse over the years. The article I posted on San Onofre should genuinely scare everyone. Even without the potential for disaster there, the economics of clean up, storage and security make "cheap nuclear" even more of a lie now than then.
A great example of the lies is in the "state-of-the-art" new nuclear facility in Hinkley Point, Somerset UK. A recent cost overrun projection of $1.5bn adding to massive costs before we even consider the long-term clean up, storage and security costs. This hits poorer people as all consumers will pay on their utility bills, just as happened with San Onofre:
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42065837It is a bit depressing that Gates would focus on this. Every energy plan has a price. The issue with solar and other renewables is the intermittent production requiring storage solutions. It would be so much better if Gates and his network could focus on some kind of "Manhattan Project" to develop solutions. There is promising technology like graphene supercapacitors but a long way to go. I know that the US has the capability to find solutions if it has the will. Gates joining forces with the likes of Musk would go a long way towards that.
It's definitely true it's only part of the solution too. My Wife guilted me in to becoming vegetarian as eating meat was not congruent with my renewable message! Of course she's right and I haven't honestly missed red meat. Reducing red meat consumption would have a massive benefit for the climate.
Nuclear still uses the "steam engine" to produce power. The average US household family of 4 uses 400 gallons of water a day directly - drinking, eating, washing etc. However the power plants that produce their power use on average 1200 gallons PER DAY of fresh water for that family's power use!
1200/day = 438,000 gallons/year of fresh water for the power used in each average household of 4!! Rooftop solar requires 0 gallons/year.
To see how your diet impacts the climate, there's a fun calculator here: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714
- 7yJay HinrichsBusiness MemberReal Estate Consultant · Summerlin, NV · Member since 2014 · 45k+ posts · 66k+ votes
Originally posted by @Andrew Smith:
Originally posted by @Christopher Lombardi:
@Steve K. I agree, NJ is screwed as well. CA, IL, NY and NJ, the 4 states that have a mass exodus happening right now. These politicians are idiots. As for the solar panel thing, financially, solar panels never make sense. They cost much more than getting your electricity the traditional way from the power companies. I'm not sure how CA plans to pay for it or specifically what the law said, but I'm sure its going to hurt everyone. As far as how good they are for the environment, solar panels dont last very long and when disposed of, the toxic metals that they contain are very harmful to the environment. Right now they dont have enough solar panel recycling facilities to have them recycled so the way it is now, instead of polluting with fossil fuels, its polluting grounds and water with toxic metals.
Actually, isnt CA almost exclusively nuclear power anyway right now?
This must be a record for the most factual inaccuracies and false statements in one paragraph.
1) Solar achieved grid parity with fossil fuel power almost a decade ago. In many States - especially CA - it is far less expensive for homeowners to produce their own power from solar than purchase from utilities.
2) Solar panels typically have production guarantees for 25 years with 0.5% degradation/yr max. That means that they are guaranteed to produce 87.5% AT LEAST in 25 years of what they start out life producing. That means they will likely continue producing for decades more. That does vary by manufacturer, but that is typical for reputable solar.3) Because of the lifespan there are simply not enough degraded panels to make recycling economical. If you have no raw materials i.e. degraded panels, it's pretty hard to recycle them. NO DOUBT panels will be recycled as more degrade and recycling becomes economically viable. Combine this with manufacturing and recycling using solar power as their own power source and it's pretty obvious that solar is massively less impactful than fossil fuels.
4) In 8 seconds on Google, the data appeared as if by magic showing nuclear being 9% of CA's production https://www.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html
5) As a sidebar on nuclear, people need to become educated on San Onofre. SoCal's Fukushima in-waiting. The lies told about nuclear are horrific. I't's my son's generation and beyond that will have that to deal with though so no issue for short-termists I suppose. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chapple-san-onofre-20180815-story.html
To dispel an other couple of myths and falsehoods:
6) Dirty panels do not produce significantly less power than clean ones. Unless you live next to a guano mine then power production is reduced by less than 1% with typical dirt. Panels clean easily with one decent rainfall. The maintenance costs then should be $0. There are industries being spawned like solar panel cleaning companies. While these are unnecessary, it is for the greater economic good I suppose.
7) Tariffs, while ludicrous, have not significantly increased costs. Roughly 65% of the cost of a system is in human beings rather than the equipment. That's another reason not to wait to go solar if considering it on the basis that costs will fall. Even if panels reduce some relative to cost/KwH that will be offset by labor cost increase and certainly by the scheduled reduction in tax credits starting this year.
8) Not every home can go solar. Roof aspect/shading etc mean that not every home qualifies. This is factored into the mandate.
9) A lot of myths would be dispelled if people consider the underlying grid right now. Right now we dig, mine or drill for fossil fuels. We transport them all across the planet burning more fossil fuels to do it, and requiring massive human and economic costs in protecting the supply lines. We then burn them to boil water to turn turbines. Literally steam engine technology. Energy loss in power plants averages 65%. Add a further 10-20% in losses on the grid transportation and it's around 23 quadrillion BTU of loss. Solar panels sit in place on your roof producing power. It is converted in an inverter on your garage wall and brought into your house. Which do you think is more efficient? Seriously. Which requires trillions of dollars of maintenance and which does not?
10) CO2 has been known as a heat trapping environmental gas for over a century. Adding trillions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere is impacting the climate. We can see it in real time right now. One residential solar system offsets the same CO2 as planting around 5000 trees that grow for 10 years. Sometimes we have to cut down a tree or a few trees to make solar work on a home. We sacrifice one or a few for 5000. If you visualize a BMW X5. Now think what that weighs. That weight of CO2 is saved from the atmosphere EVERY MONTH because a home goes solar.
11) Globally, around 1 in every 4 deaths are related to the environment. From extraction to transportation to burning and disposal, to climate change, fossil fuels are a huge factor. Their use and the grid we know got us to being the greatest nation on earth and all developed societies have energy in common. It has come at a massive price, we know it. We can and must do better. CA leads the World in being proactive.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/09/21/globally-about-1-4-human-deaths-are-due-environmental-factors-10198in the west we get a fair amount of energy from Hydro as well.. and well everytime I fire up my airplane with 310 HP very small mufflers and 100 LL I feel a little guilty.. but I drive to the hanger in my Tesla so that off sets my carbon foot print.. and burning 20 GPH we off set that by going almost 200 miles in that hour..
- Investor · Valencia, CA · Member since 2017 · 171 posts · 130 votes7y
Originally posted by @Jay Hinrichs:
Originally posted by @Andrew Smith:
Originally posted by @Christopher Lombardi:
@Steve K. I agree, NJ is screwed as well. CA, IL, NY and NJ, the 4 states that have a mass exodus happening right now. These politicians are idiots. As for the solar panel thing, financially, solar panels never make sense. They cost much more than getting your electricity the traditional way from the power companies. I'm not sure how CA plans to pay for it or specifically what the law said, but I'm sure its going to hurt everyone. As far as how good they are for the environment, solar panels dont last very long and when disposed of, the toxic metals that they contain are very harmful to the environment. Right now they dont have enough solar panel recycling facilities to have them recycled so the way it is now, instead of polluting with fossil fuels, its polluting grounds and water with toxic metals.
Actually, isnt CA almost exclusively nuclear power anyway right now?
This must be a record for the most factual inaccuracies and false statements in one paragraph.
1) Solar achieved grid parity with fossil fuel power almost a decade ago. In many States - especially CA - it is far less expensive for homeowners to produce their own power from solar than purchase from utilities.
2) Solar panels typically have production guarantees for 25 years with 0.5% degradation/yr max. That means that they are guaranteed to produce 87.5% AT LEAST in 25 years of what they start out life producing. That means they will likely continue producing for decades more. That does vary by manufacturer, but that is typical for reputable solar.3) Because of the lifespan there are simply not enough degraded panels to make recycling economical. If you have no raw materials i.e. degraded panels, it's pretty hard to recycle them. NO DOUBT panels will be recycled as more degrade and recycling becomes economically viable. Combine this with manufacturing and recycling using solar power as their own power source and it's pretty obvious that solar is massively less impactful than fossil fuels.
4) In 8 seconds on Google, the data appeared as if by magic showing nuclear being 9% of CA's production https://www.energy.ca.gov/almanac/electricity_data/total_system_power.html
5) As a sidebar on nuclear, people need to become educated on San Onofre. SoCal's Fukushima in-waiting. The lies told about nuclear are horrific. I't's my son's generation and beyond that will have that to deal with though so no issue for short-termists I suppose. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-chapple-san-onofre-20180815-story.html
To dispel an other couple of myths and falsehoods:
6) Dirty panels do not produce significantly less power than clean ones. Unless you live next to a guano mine then power production is reduced by less than 1% with typical dirt. Panels clean easily with one decent rainfall. The maintenance costs then should be $0. There are industries being spawned like solar panel cleaning companies. While these are unnecessary, it is for the greater economic good I suppose.
7) Tariffs, while ludicrous, have not significantly increased costs. Roughly 65% of the cost of a system is in human beings rather than the equipment. That's another reason not to wait to go solar if considering it on the basis that costs will fall. Even if panels reduce some relative to cost/KwH that will be offset by labor cost increase and certainly by the scheduled reduction in tax credits starting this year.
8) Not every home can go solar. Roof aspect/shading etc mean that not every home qualifies. This is factored into the mandate.
9) A lot of myths would be dispelled if people consider the underlying grid right now. Right now we dig, mine or drill for fossil fuels. We transport them all across the planet burning more fossil fuels to do it, and requiring massive human and economic costs in protecting the supply lines. We then burn them to boil water to turn turbines. Literally steam engine technology. Energy loss in power plants averages 65%. Add a further 10-20% in losses on the grid transportation and it's around 23 quadrillion BTU of loss. Solar panels sit in place on your roof producing power. It is converted in an inverter on your garage wall and brought into your house. Which do you think is more efficient? Seriously. Which requires trillions of dollars of maintenance and which does not?
10) CO2 has been known as a heat trapping environmental gas for over a century. Adding trillions of tons of CO2 to the atmosphere is impacting the climate. We can see it in real time right now. One residential solar system offsets the same CO2 as planting around 5000 trees that grow for 10 years. Sometimes we have to cut down a tree or a few trees to make solar work on a home. We sacrifice one or a few for 5000. If you visualize a BMW X5. Now think what that weighs. That weight of CO2 is saved from the atmosphere EVERY MONTH because a home goes solar.
11) Globally, around 1 in every 4 deaths are related to the environment. From extraction to transportation to burning and disposal, to climate change, fossil fuels are a huge factor. Their use and the grid we know got us to being the greatest nation on earth and all developed societies have energy in common. It has come at a massive price, we know it. We can and must do better. CA leads the World in being proactive.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2016/09/21/globally-about-1-4-human-deaths-are-due-environmental-factors-10198in the west we get a fair amount of energy from Hydro as well.. and well everytime I fire up my airplane with 310 HP very small mufflers and 100 LL I feel a little guilty.. but I drive to the hanger in my Tesla so that off sets my carbon foot print.. and burning 20 GPH we off set that by going almost 200 miles in that hour..
:) I fly too! I also love my old Ariel Atom racecar. My carbon offset currently sits at 70 million pounds of CO2 from our solar installs though so I sleep soundly even though burning a few dead dinosaurs!
Thanks @Bill F., I hate to be the guy correcting people on here, and I’ve tried to avoid getting into back and forths, and I would go insane without @Andrew Smith. But a lot of the things people have said in this thread about solar, presented as fact, are so far from the truth it would be the equivalent of writing “Interest rates are currently 35%, real estate investing doesn’t work”. Correct me if I’m wrong Andrew but I don’t think that’s even an exaggeration. If somebody wrote that on here, I would hope a qualified mortgage lender would pipe up and correct them, so that everybody doesn’t think interest rates are 35%. Cooking dinner now but I will read that article tonight, thanks for sharing.
- 7yMike D'ArrigoPro MemberTurn key provider · San Jose, CA · Member since 2010 · 4k+ posts · 3k+ votes
Originally posted by @Account Closed:
The first state in the nation to make solar mandatory for new builds starting in 2020 . Pros? Cons?
In a state where most housing prices are already sky high, it's just going to create more make housing more affordable and reduce new construction I don't see any pros.
@Bill F. Here are my thoughts on the Bill Gates letter (interesting read by the way):
I'm all for R&D of any kind. We're going to have to figure something out, because demand for energy is expected to triple by 2050.
Nuclear would be ideal if not for these glaring issues: waste, possibility of proliferation, and
potentialmathematical certainty of disaster. If Bill Gates can solve these problems, he'll be the richest man in the world (again).It's a tall order though. To begin with, nuclear is incredibly expensive, even for Gates. That aside, we still have no permanent waste facility anywhere on earth. A portion of the waste remains dangerously radioactive for many, many thousands of years (longer than human civilization has existed). Not all of it, to be fair, as most of it returns to the radiation level of the original ore in less than a century and can be safely released, but a portion of it has a negative impact for many, many future generations which is a pretty crappy legacy. The waste issue has always been extremely contentious. Gates will have to create a way to generate nuclear power with zero waste, or solve the waste problem too.
As far as nuclear thus far, it's biting us in the ***. The 99 aging reactors left in the US (and an olympic-sized swimming pool of radioactive waste from each one of them sitting around in temporary storage with nowhere to go) may just be our country's biggest liability.
As of right now, renewables are a completely viable option. NREL has determined that solar and wind generation (technology we have today at a much larger scale), plus some sort of storage, combined with a more flexible energy system including a mix of decentralized small-scale power-heat cogeneration units, biomass, greater savings in energy usage, increased electricity grid optimization and better trimming of loads on the grid is more than adequate to supply 80% of our power from renewables by 2050. But only if we start right now, and go pedal to the metal, which is a great segue into the larger issue: transportation. Electricity production is only responsible for 25-30% of greenhouse gas emissions, while the rest is mostly transportation and heating. Transitioning to electric transportation methods and using electricity (provided by renewables of course) or other carbon free sources for heat will also be necessary to have a carbon free energy system.
Storage remains the holy grail of renewables, much like waste is for nuclear. As of now the best ideas for storage are massive battery banks (lithium ion, graphene, etc.), thermal batteries, molten salt batteries, pumping water up to a reservoir during the day and releasing it through hydro turbines at night, solar panels that are so sensitive they work at night... if anybody has a better idea DM me with it ;).
Will it be nuclear, renewables, or all of the above? I can't say, but I'm glad Bill Gates is working on it.
@Steve K. and @Andrew Smith Thanks for the input guys and again thanks for taking the time to share your expertise on solar with us all.
However, I’m going to have to push back on some of your points.
Pointing to issues with a British power nuclear plant as a reason not to build a plant in the US is a false equivalency. One of the main hurdles to building new plants is regulation and Great Britain does not share the same regulatory environment as the US.
You both mentioned waste and proliferation/security. On the topic of waste storage, the US could have had a centralized repository at Yucca Mountain, but it was abandoned for reasons other than technical or safety issues. Those aren’t my words, they are the GAO’s. The waste is currently stored at the over 100 sites where it is produced. How is it riskier to store the waste in one location in the desert instead of all over the country is beyond me. And before you say Transportation!, I’d encourage you to look into the qualification needed to become a guard on any nuclear transport. Paul Blart mall cop they are not.
On waste production/proliferation, Bill Gates has already put his money where his mouth is via Terra Power and their Traveling Wave Reactor; a tech that uses depleted uranium, which we have a lot of. The only reason there isn’t a working prototype is due to the gov approval process taking over 10 yrs. It got so bad that Terra Power had to go to China to start the prototype. They are also working on molten sodium reactors, but because the US steam reactors use a double loop system very little of the waste in the secondary loop, which spins the turbines, is radioactive.
Steve, you raise a great point about CO2 generation. The only thing I have to add is that with the increase in electric cars the burden of generating power for them simply shifts from fossil fuels to the grid. Can solar help, absolutely. However, when people do most of their charging? At night. Not to say that charging stations don’t get used, but currently, a lot of the energy supplied to electric cars comes from the gird at night time.
I will never have the expertise in the area of solar, or a host of other areas that you guys do. That’s why I work pretty hard to find quality thinkers and see what they have to say on issue that I’m not familiar with. Bill Gates is one of those people. He is mostly political neutral and has a proven track record of thinking critically about the best way to solve a problem. He has also invested in geothermal, CO2 storage, solid state battery tech, bio fuels. Sure, it may be disappointing that this is where we are at and this is where he has chosen to focus his time. Maybe he did looking into the idea of a “Manhattan Project” for energy storage and found it unfeasible. After all he does two entire staffs working for him at the Gates Foundation and Cascade Investments to do a deep dive into this. Looking at his investment portfolio. He doesn’t really have an incentive to pick a winner, since he’s invested in everything. That’s why his words carry more weight with me than the NREL, which gets all of its funding to study renewable energy; it is not in their interest to say nuclear is the answer.
It’s pretty clear that no one method is the answer and we will have to be open to lots of different ideas if we want to reduce CO2 emissions even if they are ideas we don’t agree with, such as nuclear energy or mandatory solar.
Steve, could you send me the data on the certainty of nuclear of disaster? I’d be interested to see the risk in terms of probability and severity.
Again, Ideas so good, they have to be mandatory. I am a proponent of solar power, but not a fan of the government compelling individual homeowners to have them on their homes. Distributing out the production of power to home owners forces them, and developers, to assume the burden of installation, maintenance, replacement, and financing, causing massive inefficiencies in all of these, (including the installation in many poorly-placed locations) rather than having the power company responsible for this. This law FORCIBLY takes money out of the pocket of home owners, & puts it into the hands of developers, installers, and financing companies, rather than finding ways to INCENTIVIZE investors & homeowners to adopt the technology (tax credits, easing of other environmental constraints to building, etc). This makes an already expensive place to live, even more expensive.
California wants to reduce dependence upon fossil fuels, and foreign sources of energy - both good ideas - though how we are going about it is poor execution, and largely inefficient. If the state were serious about it, the legislature would work to get PG&E to install large scale solar energy production facilities, taking advantage of economies of scale, centralized locations (land is dirt cheap in the central valley, Mojave desert, etc), and the existing grid, making the entire enterprise much more efficient, and less expensive for everyone.
Steve (& others) who are involved professionally in the industry - I do appreciate the information & experience you are sharing on this thread, & I agree there is a lot of miss-information about solar. I am a proponent of solar power, just not of home owners & investors being compelled to adopt it whether they want to or not. I recall back in graduate school having an discussion on plausibility of solar power, & calculating that the entire needs of the US power grid could be satisfied by installing PV cells on just the Nevada triangle (which is already largely owned by the federal government).
First of all thanks for providing legitimate counter-points and advancing this conversation beyond,“Solar is bad! No it’s not!”
Mathematicians at the Max Planck Institute calculated that nuclear events as bad or worse than Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima will occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors which was 440 at the time (2012), we have 447 now with 150 or so more currently being built)):
https://phys.org/news/2012-05-probability-contamin...
I’m sure these findings have been argued against by those that want us to believe nuclear is 100% safe. We don’t know when another nuclear disaster is coming, but we know one is coming. It's a mathematical certainty because we've already had over thirty accidents. What’s to stop it from happening again? The same people who told us it was safe back then? The AP1000? South Carolina spent $9B on those for nothing.
For the number of nuke plants it would take to power the earth (800-12,000 depending on who you ask), combined with the time the waste remains deadly (1,000 to 1,000,000 years depending on who you ask), it seems probable things could go wrong considering we've already had over 30 accidents with only about 400 plants. I don't consider myself a mathematician or an authority on splitting atoms, nor should anyone reading this, but I do know a little. I know insurance companies rate nuke plants uninsurable. I know I wouldn't buy a building I couldn’t insure. I know in real estate if there’s a possibility something can wrong it eventually will.
Nuclear was poised to meet the world’s energy needs… then Chernobyl and Three Mile Island happened. Hundreds of shovel-ready projects cancelled. France kept going, Japan and a few others but everybody took a step back. It took four decades before the “Nuclear Renaissance” kicked off around 2010, which of course brings us to Fukushima and that was the end of the Renaissance. Low priced Natural Gas also severely undercut nuclear at this time, with 12 nuke plants prematurely closed in the US. Fukushima has cost $160B and is still going, so that has got people seriously worried.
An eye opener is that leading up to Fukushima, Japan was completely sold on nuclear. As an island nation with few natural resources, they depended on it. Then Fukushima came and they closed down all forty-eight plants to take a closer look at safety. Eight years later only five plants have resumed. Hundreds of nuclear projects around the world were cancelled after Fukushima. Many existing plants were scheduled to be phased out. Even France moved away from nuclear. Nuclear was dead.
Or was it? China is building new plants as well as Saudi Arabia, Russia, some Eastern European countries, mostly totalitarian regimes with no regard for human life or the future of the planet and wait... what? Japan?! Japan is building more nuclear?
Enter Bill Gates. Maybe he’s on to something. It’s possible he’s avoiding the battery space because it’s rapidly becoming overcrowded, and he sees nuclear as being overlooked. I personally hope he’s right and we find a way to make nuclear work. I have a customer who works at a company in Denver that is working on a small, modular reactor that could be deployed quickly in remote sites. That sounds cool. The nuclear of today is much different than it was in the 60's, it's just the risk factor holding us back.
Waste remains the world’s biggest game of hot potato. Shooting it into space is cost prohibitive (plus, what if the launch fails?). Dumping it in the ocean is tempting and from 1946 until 1993 a dozen or so countries did, especially France, until Jacques Cousteau realized what a terrible idea that was, and decided to dedicate his life to defending the oceans because nuclear waste being dumped in the oceans frightened him so much. We still have no idea what to do with it. The best idea seems to be simply burying it.
Which brings us to Yucca mountain. Yucca started before I was born so I haven't been following it the whole time. I’ve been following since the late nineties when I lived in Northern AZ. $15 Billion taxpayer dollars have been spent on Yucca so far, and we’re still in the planning stages. Nevada is against it whole-heartedly. It became Harry Reed’s personal crusade. Yucca is an old volcano on Western Shoshone/Southern Paiute land with a fault line underneath. Proponents swear it's a great place to dump nuclear waste, but most Nevadans disagree. They still harbor a lot of mistrust for government, due to history. Our first nuclear waste dump was near Yucca in the 60’s (Beatty). The government assured Nevadans it was completely safe but then it leaked and had to be shut down and much later after changing hands a bunch of times caught fire and it remains a very expensive unsolvable problem that nobody wants to pay for like all nuclear waste. The feds also assured Nevadans they would be completely safe when their state became a nuclear bombing range (more nuclear bombs were dropped on Nevada than anywhere else in the world, about 100 above ground and 800 below ground tests were conducted there and the landscape is now riddled with craters you can see using google earth). The people living nearby these sites are now known as "downwinders". 85% of Nevada is federal but many Nevadans (understandably) resent and mistrust the government (Sagebrush Rebellion). So it’s an issue of states rights and Native American rights, which aren't small issues.
Currently Yucca is a zombie project with not much hope of moving forward. Nevada has filed many lawsuits over the years, using different ways to deter the project like preventing the government from using their roads to transport the waste (Flagstaff followed suit), and also suing for funding to conduct their own independent study to determine if the site is actually safe. Nevada even has a state agency tasked with warding off nuclear waste. One argument against it is that Nevada doesn't even have any nuclear power plants in the state, so why would they take the waste? It seems unlikely Yucca will be a solution any time soon, and my understanding is that the build-out phase is expected to take decades to complete, so even if it becomes an option it’s not an immediate solution. It's the most studied and expensive piece of real estate ever, and may end up being the most expensive liability on the planet.
I’ve heard a few Scandinavian countries are working on geologic storage by drilling deep down into granite bedrock, and that sounds promising. Nice little gift for some poor sucker in 5,000 years.
Don't get me wrong, I hope nuclear works out. If it does I’ll start selling it. I'd love to close a deal worth $50Billion. I'm not under the impression renewables can go from 2% of the grid to 100% overnight, with no storage solution and no pain felt such as a couple Californians being required to install solar that they probably would have installed anyway. Solar and wind technology is pretty good and nobody is dying from it, so I see no reason not to push that 2% from renewables up as high as possible until we figure something better out.
- 7yJay HinrichsBusiness MemberReal Estate Consultant · Summerlin, NV · Member since 2014 · 45k+ posts · 66k+ votes
@Steve K. close to home for us is Hanford.. and Trojan those living in or on the Columbia river.. Puget island and that area. ( not to be confused with Puget sound).. there is definite cancer clusters from waste leaching into the Columbia
We know first hand since my wife was born and raised there and she sees it in real time with her 300 relatives ( Norwegian settlement from mid 1800 s) Need to ask Brandon Turner he lives next to one in Montasanto also . and yes since I moved to Summerlin Yucca which I have not looked up yet is a rallying cry.
- Investor · Valencia, CA · Member since 2017 · 171 posts · 130 votes7y
Hi @Bill F. as with @Steve K. thank you for an interesting topic.
It's not just the UK experience that impacts my thoughts. San Onofre is a national disgrace. In part caused by the false promises of Yucca mountain. We are one (small) tsunami away from an incident that would for ever change California and have massive global economic impact too. [sarcasm] Good thing CA doesn't get earthquakes [/sarcasm].
There are many articles on the subject but this one gives a good summary: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/28/17765538/san-onofre-nuclear-generating-station-radioactive-spent-fuel-waste-yucca-mountainIt would take a lot - including solutions that didn't financially burden our and future generations - to move me from "colour me skeptical" on a nuclear solution. Germany is proving that it is not necessary: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-13592208
Meant time we do have an almost indescribably large fusion reactor available to us for free and the tech capability to harness its power. I know I'm biased but...
- Investor · VA · Member since 2015 · 21k+ posts · 19k+ votes7y
I think this is getting slightly blown out of proportion. Being involved on a daily basis with commercial and residential properties there are a significant amount of changes being done to energy codes which are causing new construction costs to significantly increase. Having tighter homes with low air changes per hour is leading to more homes requiring spray foam insulation (more $) and more efficient HVAC systems with ERV's. Solar is just one additional component.
Have some free time check out the IGCC (international green construction code) which many municipalities are now requiring properties to meet as part of their code. These are no longer optional they are required.
What is the payback time in California for solar? I know in VA it is 14 years but if I was in MD or DC it is under 5.
7e investments53 Reviews @Steve K. thanks for linking to the article and engaging in a positive dialogue about the issues.
You are 100% correct that neither you nor I will be mathematician/nuclear engineer. However, I happen to know someone who is just such a person. I sent him that article and had a conversation about it with him. The two most illumining points he had about the Planck article.
1. They only included civilian reactors. The US Navy alone has around 100 reactors and has never had an accident. That’s 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operation. So that begs the question, why can the US Navy run a tight ship (pun intended) for all these years using similar technology in more adverse conditions, but others can’t? Maybe it is not the technology that’s the the only problem, but the people who operate them and the culture that those people work in…The article also counts Fukushima as three failures since three reactors failed. There is an argument to be made that this isn’t the most effective way to calculate risk since these three reactor failures were caused by the same series of events.
2. They lump Chernobyl and Fukushima into the same category, but they are orders of magnitude different in their causes and effects. Chernobyl is the worst not only by INES scale, but also due the fact that it was 100% preventable by correct operations and training. Fukushima was not an operations malfunction, but rather a design issue paired with an Act of God. Three Mile Island, while an due to operator error, had no more of an impact on surrounding residents than if they had lived in a higher altitude city, such as Denver. Put another way, the affected people would have got twice the radiation if they had got a standard chest X-Ray.
The 30 accidents you’ve alluded to, how many of those reach the level of 5 or above on the INES Scale, which corresponds to an accident with “wider consequences” (wider than local)? The answer is six. One of those being Three Mile Island, which we already talked about, so that should give you an idea of what defines “wider consequences”. How many of those six have taken place in the last 30 years, a time frame that pairs up nicely with the rise of computers? One.
The lack of private sector insurance for nuclear power plants as some sort of proof of their risk is a specious argument. Companies won’t insure houses in the flood plain, so the government steps in. When I deployed, no insurance company would write me a health care or life insurance policy, so I got it through the government. It is a fundamental fact of capitalism that the private sector won’t step in unless it is in their best interest to do so give the probability and severity of an accident. In this case, it could have nothing to do with the probability of an accident, but only the severity.
As for waste, I don’t have anything more to add than we had a viable solution, Yucca, which was closed down, not for safety or technical reason, but political ones. Those words come not from a pro- atomic energy group, but the GAO. We all can have logical and sound responses for mistrusting the government because of past transgressions. That does not change the facts of the current situation that the mis-trust may be mis-placed.
The federalism issue aside if it’s a good idea to for government to mandate solar, this is a classic moral conundrum, a choice between, in this case, some not so attractive options. Continue to burn dead dinosaurs and increase the CO2 levels, find a way to store radioactive waste for LONG periods of time, or put our faith in the unproven technology of battery storage. Storing waste is bad, but is it as bad as pumping more and more CO2 into the environment and raising the mean global temp? Honest question, because I don’t know. The choice between nuclear boils down to the upside vs down risk implicate in that question.
What I don’t understand is why some people take the zero defect approach to these issues and will rule out viable options in favor of non-invented storage tech, which also has some potential not so nice environmental impacts. I agree 100% with you that we should push solar/wind/geo thermal up to their max rate, but they have their limits and we need to attack this problem from more than one angle.
Why do you believe people get so dogmatic in their approaches to solving the problem?
Thanks for posting those links. Did we read the same article? From The Verge piece you posted:
Here is San Onofre's seismic data.
I think applying the national disgrace moniker is hyperbolic to say the least. Trail of Tears, Teapot Dome, the Japanese Internment...ect. Those are national disgraces. This is political maneuvering for power/votes getting in the way of solving a nationwide problem.
I'm by no means advocating an all nuclear solution; as I said in my post above, this is an issue that calls for many different solutions to be tried simultaneously. You have said before, the largest issue with solar is that it does no produce power 2 hours a day. Nuclear solves that problem. I don't see a reason that we can't work to solve the short comings of each generation method while pairing these two and other renewable sources of energy together in order to reduce CO2 emissions.
It seems to me that when the word "Nuclear" is mentioned, people lose sight of the real issue at hand, which is the raising of the mean temperature caused in no small part by increased CO2 levels.
- Investor · Valencia, CA · Member since 2017 · 171 posts · 130 votes7y
Originally posted by @Bill F.:
Thanks for posting those links. Did we read the same article? From The Verge piece you posted:
Here is San Onofre's seismic data.
I think applying the national disgrace moniker is hyperbolic to say the least. Trail of Tears, Teapot Dome, the Japanese Internment...ect. Those are national disgraces. This is political maneuvering for power/votes getting in the way of solving a nationwide problem.
I'm by no means advocating an all nuclear solution; as I said in my post above, this is an issue that calls for many different solutions to be tried simultaneously. You have said before, the largest issue with solar is that it does no produce power 2 hours a day. Nuclear solves that problem. I don't see a reason that we can't work to solve the short comings of each generation method while pairing these two and other renewable sources of energy together in order to reduce CO2 emissions.
It seems to me that when the word "Nuclear" is mentioned, people lose sight of the real issue at hand, which is the raising of the mean temperature caused in no small part by increased CO2 levels.
I'd say it's hyperbolic until it actually happens - see caging children at borders. Pontes certainly has an opinion, as do others:
https://sanonofresafety.org/earthquake-and-tsunami-risks/I respect the thought of the nuclear option for the 2 hour window. I haven't changed opinion that a focus on storage rather than nuclear would lead to a far less impactful solution. Storage solutions in fact already do exist - especially residential, they are just a little too expensive for most consumers right now. Even with no further tech advancement, manufacturing efficiency will bring them mainstream soon regardless. We need to advance that tech for utility scale and solve issues such as requiring cobalt mines for batteries.
Originally posted by @Bill F.:
@Steve K. thanks for linking to the article and engaging in a positive dialogue about the issues.
You are 100% correct that neither you nor I will be mathematician/nuclear engineer. However, I happen to know someone who is just such a person. I sent him that article and had a conversation about it with him. The two most illumining points he had about the Planck article.
1. They only included civilian reactors. The US Navy alone has around 100 reactors and has never had an accident. That’s 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operation. So that begs the question, why can the US Navy run a tight ship (pun intended) for all these years using similar technology in more adverse conditions, but others can’t? Maybe it is not the technology that’s the the only problem, but the people who operate them and the culture that those people work in…The article also counts Fukushima as three failures since three reactors failed. There is an argument to be made that this isn’t the most effective way to calculate risk since these three reactor failures were caused by the same series of events.
2. They lump Chernobyl and Fukushima into the same category, but they are orders of magnitude different in their causes and effects. Chernobyl is the worst not only by INES scale, but also due the fact that it was 100% preventable by correct operations and training. Fukushima was not an operations malfunction, but rather a design issue paired with an Act of God. Three Mile Island, while an due to operator error, had no more of an impact on surrounding residents than if they had lived in a higher altitude city, such as Denver. Put another way, the affected people would have got twice the radiation if they had got a standard chest X-Ray.
The 30 accidents you’ve alluded to, how many of those reach the level of 5 or above on the INES Scale, which corresponds to an accident with “wider consequences” (wider than local)? The answer is six. One of those being Three Mile Island, which we already talked about, so that should give you an idea of what defines “wider consequences”. How many of those six have taken place in the last 30 years, a time frame that pairs up nicely with the rise of computers? One.
The lack of private sector insurance for nuclear power plants as some sort of proof of their risk is a specious argument. Companies won’t insure houses in the flood plain, so the government steps in. When I deployed, no insurance company would write me a health care or life insurance policy, so I got it through the government. It is a fundamental fact of capitalism that the private sector won’t step in unless it is in their best interest to do so give the probability and severity of an accident. In this case, it could have nothing to do with the probability of an accident, but only the severity.
As for waste, I don’t have anything more to add than we had a viable solution, Yucca, which was closed down, not for safety or technical reason, but political ones. Those words come not from a pro- atomic energy group, but the GAO. We all can have logical and sound responses for mistrusting the government because of past transgressions. That does not change the facts of the current situation that the mis-trust may be mis-placed.
The federalism issue aside if it’s a good idea to for government to mandate solar, this is a classic moral conundrum, a choice between, in this case, some not so attractive options. Continue to burn dead dinosaurs and increase the CO2 levels, find a way to store radioactive waste for LONG periods of time, or put our faith in the unproven technology of battery storage. Storing waste is bad, but is it as bad as pumping more and more CO2 into the environment and raising the mean global temp? Honest question, because I don’t know. The choice between nuclear boils down to the upside vs down risk implicate in that question.
What I don’t understand is why some people take the zero defect approach to these issues and will rule out viable options in favor of non-invented storage tech, which also has some potential not so nice environmental impacts. I agree 100% with you that we should push solar/wind/geo thermal up to their max rate, but they have their limits and we need to attack this problem from more than one angle.
Why do you believe people get so dogmatic in their approaches to solving the problem?
Bill I think your question “Why do you believe people get so dogmatic in their approaches to solving the problem?" speaks to a very serous issue we’re facing as a nation, which is flow of information. It’s ironic that we’re living in the age of information yet although we’re basically drinking info from a fire hose, we're not necessarily more informed. Many of us get our news from social media, which is influenced by who we friend and unfriend so we’re essentially living in an echo chamber where we only reinforce our existing beliefs. Online news is heavily influenced by cookies and advertising which reduces it to “click bait” type stories. Quality unbiased journalism is nearly impossible to find. The degradation of responsible journalism in general combined with intentional manipulation by our enemies, increasingly sophisticated propagandists infiltrating the news... It’s hard to know what info to trust. I think there is a big need for unbiased news and our country is in an existential crisis regarding flow if information. Thanks Zuck.
It’s increasingly rare to have conversations like we’re having here where we may disagree civilly and in the process gain access to info we wouldn't come across normally and alter our thinking because of it. For example you’ve brought up some good points on nuclear and I will be more open minded about new nuclear tech moving forward. I’ll be watching TerraPower and I hope they succeed. I’ll also make an effort to come across less dogmatic about renewables, although I still believe they’re the best solution we have and that we can make our grid more flexible and improve storage technology and solve all of the issues renewables currently have. As Andrew has pointed out Germany is a great example of achieving an energy system powered largely by renewables, and they’re doing it now. We can too, and we will.
So I will try to be more open-minded about nuclear power based on this conversation, you’ve made me realize I’m a little outdated on my nuclear info just like I was getting frustrated with others about being totally clueless about solar. Point taken, thank you for that.
We’ve been spending many trillions of dollars on nuclear for half a century and whether or not we’re better off from it is questionable at best. We have a big mess on our hands with the 99 aging reactors we now have to decommission which will cost about another trillion dollars or so plus we still have the waste issue. If we put the amount of money into renewables that we’ve spent on nuclear, or even a fraction of it, I bet we can solve the storage problem in quick order and have a clean efficient grid with no risk of accidents that effect millions of people.
Let’s use some of what you said in your post as an example of how the age of information can actually make us less informed. You mentioned the navy has never had a nuclear accident. I didn’t know that, so I entered into my search engine, “The navy has never had a nuclear accident”. The top result is this article about a speech given by John McCain in 2008 where he confirms that the navy has been floating around with nuclear reactors on board ships and submarines for 60 years with nary an accident: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/jun/09/john-mccain/navys-record-unblemished/
Great, I found what I wanted and confirmed my pre-existing beliefs; the navy has an unblemished record with nuclear. Civilians just screwed nuclear up for everybody because they don't run a tight ship like the navy does. Pretty legit sounding article and John McCain (RIP) was a no b.s. kinda guy, so check that off the list, right? Not so fast. If I had instead entered “The navy HAS had a nuclear accident”, because I prefer to find that truth, the first result is this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_navy, which informs me that two U.S. nuclear subs sank and were not able to be recovered, the USS Thresher in 1963 and the USS Scorpion in 1968. Both sank for reasons unrelated to their reactor plants and still lie on the Atlantic sea floor. They’re not currently leaking radiation, according to the navy, so not technically a nuclear accident at this point. But certainly a nuclear accident waiting to happen. Those subs will eventually degrade and release the radiation contained within into the environment and the food chain. Or a hostile nation could find a way to recover them and use the uranium/plutonium on board to make a dirty bomb and use it against us (was that a Tom Clancy novel?). So now I’m unsure if the navy actually has a clean nuclear record, because two nuclear subs on the bottom of the ocean seems like a pretty big deal to me. Perhaps only navy dogma can justify dropping the Thresher and Scorpion into “not technically a nuclear accident” category, whereas an unbiased view would be that the navy has a pretty major blemish on it’s record regarding those two sunken nuclear subs. So on the internet we find what we look for and we look for what we find. Adds pop up on the side based on our browser history and cookies lead us along and we’re pushed further into whatever we already believe.
My next search was “US military nuclear disaster”, and holy cow that was a scary reveal: https://www.ecosia.org/search?q=US+military+nuclear+disasterThe list of military nuclear disasters is very long: nuclear weapons lost from plane crashes or jettisoned from planes and not recovered, nuclear reactors catching fire, spilling of radiated water, plutonium fires. It’s a treasure trove of really scary stuff.
Rocky Flats is on that list, the site where triggers for nuclear bombs were made up until it caught on fire and released plutonium into the air and then got raided and shut down by the FBI. It’s right down the street from me (next to NREL). Last summer they wanted to open it up as a wildlife refuge, and make mountain bike trails there. It’s actually on the route to one of my rentals so I’m always driving by there, and I usually have my mountain bike along and ride on the way home. So I’d like to check it out (if it ever opens, I think theres a lawsuit holding it back because an independent study found unsafe levels of plutonium despite the government saying it was safe). I’m not sure I will ever ride there because I honestly don't know what to believe about the site being safe or not. If I google one thing, I’m told it’s perfectly safe. If I google something else, I can't sleep at night. I have a solar customer who was in charge of the cleanup and made a fortune on the project. He spent a decade on site and now his house is a mile downwind. He swears it’s safe. But, he was diagnosed with a rare thyroid cancer associated with exposure to plutonium. He swears it’s unrelated and he’s an intelligent person and an expert in nuclear cleanups. I’m not sure what to believe about that place. We live in the age of info, but what has that done to the quality of our info? I think that’s what makes us increasingly dogmatic and polarized in our beliefs.
Originally posted by @Chris Seveney:
I think this is getting slightly blown out of proportion. Being involved on a daily basis with commercial and residential properties there are a significant amount of changes being done to energy codes which are causing new construction costs to significantly increase. Having tighter homes with low air changes per hour is leading to more homes requiring spray foam insulation (more $) and more efficient HVAC systems with ERV's. Solar is just one additional component.
Have some free time check out the IGCC (international green construction code) which many municipalities are now requiring properties to meet as part of their code. These are no longer optional they are required.
What is the payback time in California for solar? I know in VA it is 14 years but if I was in MD or DC it is under 5.
Chris you're absolutely right. Earlier in the thread we discussed how it was really a shifting of cost more than an additional cost.
CA payback period for solar 2019= 5.5-7.4 years (https://www.energysage.com/solar-panels/ca/), or it could be cooked into the mortgage for new construction, estimated $40 per month on average, offsetting $80 in electricity, so net $40/mo. savings. Most people are financing solar these days, because $0 down low interest loans are available and payments are often less than the bill they're replacing. $0 down with savings day one is the name of the game.
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