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Comment by no-dr-onboard | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: this comment is not about environmentalism or even the environmental impact. I’m not wading in those waters with HN.

It’s difficult to see this as a net positive given the financial hardship brought about to even make this headline a reality (note that even the headline is misleading and requires context).

It’s a bit like the person who goes out and purchases a vehicle, spends countless hours away from his family working on it, takes out additional loans to modify it, crashes it, repairs it and then wins 2nd place at the local meetup. You have to ask yourself, at what point was this worth it?

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Yes, it is. Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years, probably even better at utility scale which negotiates huge panel purchases. Batteries cost more, but can apply stored power when they can earn the most (during peak), reducing viability of polluting alternatives.

The cherry on top is that all future energy uses no more material and creates no more pollution, with materials mostly all recyclable at end of life. Over a 30 year horizon, fossil fuel infra cannot compete.

>Solar pays for itself in raw kWh over ~8 years

AFAIK in this thread the calculation that gave the answer of 8 years also included the bonus that comes from the government subsidies. What is the number if we excluded that subsidy?

That is part of the cost analysis. Costs continue to fall, only rising recently due to macro materials costs. In a few years when the subsidy vanishes, the difference should be nearly made up for by reduced cost.

And this subsidy only applies to residential AFAICT, not grid-scale which is the main discussion. Grid scale tends to come in far cheaper

I'm having trouble understanding how you can separate the cost/benefit analysis of renewable energy from environmentalism. The entire point is that the reasons for hitting these goals are not purely economic (in the short term - long term, running out of fossil fuels in a fossil fuel economy does not tend to be good for the economy.) The sentiment that aiming for full renewable supply is too expensive to be worth it feels like it misses the mark on why we're doing it.

What financial hardship? Pretty much all the other pathways are even more expensive, either in externalities or in internalized costs. There really are not that many realistic options that remain open (at least in the US).

The only reason we are where we are is because people are choosing the cheapest path rather than going through financial hardship and working on it countless hours. (Which I wouldn't recommend, either, of course; there is also a middle way.)

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