I'm all for solar power on any scale, but especially for home owners.

Because there will never come a day when your local electric company writes you a note to say you and your ancestors have paid them enough, so please stop sending monthly checks. But if you invest in a few panels today, you can stop paying them forever if you do it right in just a few years.

Works just as well for businesses too.

The key is all the carbon and other shit we spew into the atmosphere has a tremendous cost as well. Just ask your homeowners insurance company.

Now add that to your ROI calculation!

...and since my AC in Florida now runs more than 30% less, how much longer do you think it and my refrigerator will last? What about my roof? You get the idea.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...783314,00.html

During the first half of 2011, the share of renewable energy sources used by Germans in their total energy mix grew to one-fifth -- a hefty boost over 2010. It's a small step toward Germany's ambition to phase out nuclear power.

It is a report that is bound to please Chancellor Angela Merkel. Just months after she expended significant political capital to guide Germany's future energy production away from nuclear and toward renewable sources, a report by a leading energy industry group indicates that production of renewables in the country is rising rapidly.

According to the report, released on Monday by the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW), renewables accounted for fully 20.8 percent of production during the first six months of 2011. "Renewable energies have crossed the 20 percent mark in Germany for the first time," the association said in a statement.

In 2010, green energy consumption totalled 18.3 percent of total demand.

The increase, the BDEW says, is unconnected to Merkel's decision to immediately close seven nuclear power plants in the wake of the March disaster at the Fukushima complex in Japan. But it does give a boost to Germany's long-term effort to phase out nuclear power completely by 2022. Chancellor Merkel has said the goal by then is to draw 35 percent of production from renewables.

Solar Also Rises

Total usage in Germany remained stable from 2010 at 275.5 billion kilowatt-hours, but energy from sources like wind, biomass, hydroelectric plants, solar panels and waste incineration rose to 57.3 billion KWh in the first six months of this year.

Wind power, the most important source, rose to 20.7 billion KWh, or 7.5 of total usage. Biomass (5.6 percent), photovoltaic solar (3.5 percent), and hydroelectric power (3.3 percent) were next in line. Waste incineration and other sources covered 0.8 percent of total demand.

The real change came in the photovoltaic sector, where output almost doubled -- up more than 76 percent since 2010. "Because of the volume of new photovoltaic installations and the amount of sun during the spring, solar energy knocked hydroelectric from third place for the first time," the BDEW said in a statement.

The BDEW saw two reasons for the boost in new installations: Equipment prices have plummeted by 50 percent since 2006, reflecting more competition, and the federal government decided against a planned cut in subsidies for private solar-power generation.

the subsidies in Germany will be cut now, they just change the law

the problem is that energy companies are forced by law to pay people who feed solar power into the net a higher price per kwh than people pay for their energy they buy.

means: i can feed solar power into the net and get paid 40 cents per kwh and at the same time buy "conventional" energy from the same company and pay 25 cents per kwh.

the effect: energy gets more expensive for everyone

stop subsidising all forms of energy and let the market sort out what works

and that includes subsidies to oil and nuclear companies

copied from a lib site:

small is beautiful thinking hasn't sunk into solar yet

The solar cos. want to build this installation 200+ mi. from LA in the middle of nowhere - for what? To provide power to LA? Just put up the panels on every home in LA and call it a mega installation. Get it done. We need 300 million solar roofs now, not some mega project 200 miles from where it's needed.

They want centralized control with high barrier to entry.

What you propose makes sense - unless you are trying to monetize a scarce resource.

One of the biggest reasons why distributed solar (or distributed anything) isn't taking off is because if everyone generated their own power there would be no central control over energy profits like there are with oil.

They don't want distributed power. They want a centralized power generation facility with a huge capital outlay to prevent competition.

I agree that the money they pay to buy it back for should be the same it's costing, or similarly based (credits) so it stays viable. But I guess the article I saw saying under 1% was quite old or maybe was bought and paid for "opinion". Even at 1% I'd consider it a win. You can't run before you crawl, and savings aren't always apparent from day 1.

Lol! Everyone needs to tone it down a notch.

I don't know the reasons why the solar panel company failed, but blaming Obama for it is just stupid.

Why don't people complain about the billions of tax dollars given to oil companies instead? They are already the most profitable companies in the world, and thanks to DUBYA, they get billions more in subsidies. Last week Obama tried to have this stopped, but of course the republicans said no.

It's funny to me that the libs think that taking their paychecks from them and giving it to Obama donors is the same thing as NOT taking money from anyone, including oil companies. Tax deduction for expenses != government check.

Blaming Obama, the current president is stupid, but blaming Dubya, a past president, makes sense.

fitty .......Billion Dollah giveaways :Graucho

in both cases = no money in pocket

Politics in most any discussion is like a dirty handed kid sticking his finger in a pie.

And the Energy Department has only awarded about 20 percent of the available funds in the program

Send me money, I make renewable energy every day with huge shits. Dry them out and use them for heatin, just like in the 20's and 30's.

Reminds me of the 3 billion annually Bush fucked us out of when he removed the bidding function of Medicare/Medicaid purchasing.

Damn ... They could have bought and used a few tomahawks missiles somewhere ....

Also in the news :

Auto sales on target for best quarter since 2008

I know I am getting hyper in this thread but it hot so close to home for me.

As someone who grew up in NY and Munich, it always blew my mind how far ahead Germany was with recycling and green tech.

I was a huge Regan supporter as a young republican. Once he got in office, he removed the solar panels Carter installed.

I Supported Bush 1 and when the "read my lips, no new taxes" turned out to be a lie, I dropped out of the party and have been independent since.

Renewable are the future. The space program was a giant subsidy and look at what we got from it.

Some things are not about money.

It's called lobbying. Welcome to politics.

good post.

We used to have the same type of subsidies over here as well. They canceled the whole system last year.

3 of my neighbors now have subsidized solar panels on their roofs. By the time they'll have earned their investment back, it will be almost time to replace their solar panels. And mark my words, that's when the fun will begin. Those panels contain heavy metals and other poisonous materials. I wouldn't be surprised if by then some well meaning green politician proposes a special safety tax for anyone disposing off anything that contains those heavy metals.

For several years we've had this system of subsidies and the end result is: a lot of home with solar panels that are incredibly inefficient and not suited to be used in this part of the world.

Under free market conditions, the way to convince potential clients to buy your solar panels, is to make sure they're actually efficient. By subsidizing an inefficient technology, politicians have not made the technology more efficient. They have given manufacturers of inefficient solar panels an incentive to keep producing those inefficient products.

In a free market, producers of solar panels would have 2 choices: improve the quality (efficiency) of their product to make it more appealing to potential customers or quit wasting resources and find something else to do.

when you find a country without a state or a market with zero government interference let us know. until then you solutions are about as useful as a witch doctor trying to fix the engine of an automobile.

So what are you saying? It's been proven time and time again that doing things a certain way (central planning) doesn't work, but we should continue doing it that way because that's the way it's being done?