September 2, 2019, 10:12 am IST Sanjeev Sabhlok in Seeing the Invisible | India | TOI
The Modi government has been shovelling scarce taxpayer resources into solar energy, with a further $6.5 billion promised till 2022. This is over and above indirect subsidies that people pay through higher electricity bills because of renewable energy certificates. And while Donald Trump did the right thing by walking out of the Paris Agreement, Mr Modi unthinkingly remains committed to it and Niti Ayog has been touting subsidised electric vehicles.
Our party disagrees with this approach. First, because we oppose subsidies for any industry. But second, because we believe there is a strong case to impose Pigovian taxes on solar energy given the economic and environmental harm it causes.
Solar energy can do a few useful things. It can power a radio in an off-grid location. But it can’t support our day-to-day life.
The sun’s incoming energy is extremely dilute, requiring panels spread over vast swathes of land to absorb it, thus pushing out forests and harming biodiversity. The 648 MW Kamuthi solar plant in Tamil Nadu covers ten square kilometres. A tenth of that land would have been sufficient for a larger capacity nuclear facility.
A much bigger problem is that solar energy is only available when the sun shines. I installed a rooftop system last year. As expected, this system dies at night. But it is a complete joke during winter when it generates less than 10% of its capacity for days on end. It is simply not fit for purpose.
While the benefits to society of solar energy are close to non-existent, its costs are huge. Just by reading newspaper headlines you would never know. “Grid parity” and “cheap solar” has become part of the propaganda cleverly crafted by solar lobbyists and “researchers” to bilk taxpayers. Next time you read about cheap solar energy, insist on getting the full costs.
Rooftop solar is a massive drain. My rooftop system is a good example. Even after a taxpayer subsidy of $3,888 it cost me $10,730. And after a year’s use it has generated far less electricity than I was promised, so instead of a 6-year payback period it will now take 11 years – but only if I never spend any money to maintain it, the inverter never goes bad, the system somehow lasts 11 years and feed-in tariffs don’t reduce. Hard to think of a more effective way to burn money.
But what about large-scale solar projects which allegedly generate peak daytime electricity at a cost comparable with fossil fuels? Such claims are half-truths and hide much more than they disclose.
The only way to compare the costs of solar power with regular energy sources is to include all the costs of solar energy, including battery storage. And when that is done, solar turns out to be a deadly attack on the economy.
Batteries store almost no energy compared with regular fuels and this won’t get much better. Advances in battery technology are innately constrained by physical laws. In a March 2019 report, Manhattan Institute scholar Mark P. Mills showed that “$200,000 worth of Tesla batteries, which collectively weigh over 20,000 pounds, are needed to store the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil”. And that “the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would take $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft”. Imagine the ticket price for such a flight even if such a plane could take off.
Battery production processes consume vast amounts of energy, with “the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil” required “to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store a single barrel of oil-equivalent energy”. And the natural resources needed for batteries are extremely scarce. A dramatic escalation of mining would be needed to build a solar grid with its own batteries.
But even then it would take a thousand years. “The annual output of Tesla’s Gigafactory, the world’s largest battery factory, stores [only] three minutes’ worth of annual U.S. electricity demand. It would require 1,000 years of production to make enough batteries for two days’ worth of U.S. electricity demand”.
The idea of mass adoption of electric vehicles is a hallucination. EV batteries can hardly store any energy and need vast amounts of time to re-charge. And time is never free. These vehicles are not fit for purpose.
But don’t we get huge environmental benefits from solar? Not at all. Instead, solar energy is one of the worst enemies of the environment, even excluding the massive loss of natural habitat. Solar waste is extremely toxic. Michael Shellenberger has found that “solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than nuclear power plants”.
I guess there are no subsidies for oil? Solar takes up space, but don’t oil wells, pipelines, trucks, tankers? You make it sound like there are no oil use impacts on environment. Don’t get the article. Propaganda much?
Speaking of propaganda, your belief that the area used by oil wells and such is within 3 orders of magnitude of the area needed by solar panels indicates that propaganda is all you know.
Nobody said that oil has no impacts, that’s your straw man. The whole point is that the impact of solar is thousands of times worse.
And yes, there are no subsidies for oil.
Apparently you are completely unfamiliar with the energy industry.
Two words: “Severance Tax”
The severance tax in Alaska, for example, is so great that there is a $37B severance endowment that is parceled out among Alaskan citizens.
Exactly what sort of Solar Energy Endowment exists for energy derived from PV panels?
Democrats in the U.S. have changed the definition of subsidies. The new definition includes both standard subsidies (money taken from taxpayers and handed to companies and individuals), now termed ‘disbursements’, and tax deductions; many are fooled into thinking they are equivalent. Oil companies get basically the same tax deductions as every other business, and due to scale that adds up to billions of dollars per year. Solar and wind get the same tax breaks as oil, but on a smaller scale due to the fact the companies have much less revenue; in addition they also get disbursements that exceed oil by orders of magnitude. In addition to ignoring the economic difference between lower taxes and direct handouts, there is also the marginalization of the fact that oil companies get about 6 cents of profit per gallon in the U.S., while governments get about 40 to 80 cents per gallon.
Forward a Generation or two, people will be asking who were twerps who introduced solar panels,and electric cars etc, when thousands of hectares of agricultural will have to be excavated to bury hundreds of millions of batteries and solar panels. These are not an adequate for a Modern electricity driven society. Unless we start building power stations, theDark Ages beckon.
This whole thread is off target WRT the objectives of pushing solar in India. Even in India there is some idealisation of ‘old time village life’ that is ‘lost’ when it is possible to get adequate reliable power. Modi and co probably think of women singing as they follow the reapers to glean the fallen grain; villagers dong traditional dances around a fire at night; washing clothes in the river; lots more you can see in Indian oldtime movies. The purpose of pushing renewables in India is exactly the same as here: get back to a peasant lifestyle. Whether you can run a washing machine on solar is irrelevant to the real purpose.
i dunno; recent contracts in US average $0.02/kwh. hard to walk away from that.
as for the area it takes: the world and the us have lots of spare (non-arable) land. thats why landfills are so much cheaper than recycling.
All in, subsidized price? So, Green is a politically and socially practical choice, but an environmentally unfriendly solution.
Unfortunately, non-arable land is not necessarily being used. North of I-10, near Lake City, FL, Florida Power and Light purchased a HUGE amount of land to set up a solar panel park. It was purely arable land, I know because I drove by it on my trips across FL for over 20 years. I suspect that much non-arable land might fall under some sort of environmentally protected status in the US, which would negate its availability for any construction.
The time Greenpeace went to India to save the locals from global warming was fun.
Indian Village Wants “Real Electricity”, Not Greenpeace’s “Fake” Solar (2015)
I suspect that little fiasco may have colored the Indian political landscape significantly.
Phew, had me worried there for a min. I work in solar and the clickybaity headline caught my eye. I’m open minded to arguments but somewhat relieved to see no substantial rationale behind the “bad for environment and economy” claim.