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Comment by testing22321 | Hacker News Reader

This is the kind of thing that every western ( or “rich” ) government should have mandated years ago.

The best time was years ago, the second best time…

We see the results of initiatives like this in BC, Canada. About 10 years ago they passed a law that when any government building is getting a renovation of any kind, public EV chargers must be built in the parking lot.

The result is that every single town without exception has EV chargers now. The future is coming, despite some doing their best to slow it down.

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> This is the kind of thing that every western ( or “rich” ) government should have mandated years ago.

If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.

If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.

Does South Korea do mandated parking minimums like I hear is common here in the US? That would tell whether this is a tax on business property in general, or a tax on driving / personal mobility specifically.

> If it's not cost effective but you want it anyway, you can explicitly subsidize it instead of mandating it.

Or, as happened in actual reality, you tell the owners they have to put it in place. Imagine that - the two weirdly specific things you came up with aren’t actually the only two options. Who would’ve thunk.

Thinking about it from an individual (not business) point of view, the upfront capital won’t be repaid for 10-years or more and does little to change the value of the lot. The lot value is probably most dictated by location and capacity. Solar does nothing to affect location, and may even harm capacity. Parking lot customers might choose a lot of its shaded, but ultimately it’s a captive market due to location.

If I owned the lot, I could take on no-risk (which may be why the lot was purchased to begin with), or take on a 6-figure investment that could bankrupt me if the demand for the lot vanished. (I suppose in that case you’d at least be making money on selling power back to the grid.)

Should we explicitly subsidize the kitchen equipment restaurants need in order to comply with food-safety regulations instead of mandating it? How about the mandatory sinks in the bathrooms of businesses (or even the mandatory toilets) - subsidize those instead of mandating them e.g. through OSHA?

> If it's cost effective there's no need to mandate it.

You should see how hard PG&E is working to prevent commercial and multifamily buildings from going solar. If the legislature voted to force PG&E to get out of the way, to allow property owners to do obviously cost-effective upgrades to their own properties, plenty of people would call it a “mandate”

Electric utilities are "natural monopolies" that get to monopolize territory in exchange for being well regulated. It's preferable to having 3, 4, 5 utility poles stuck at the same corner all running wire for competitors. But it means you don't have market conditions driving optimization between competitors.

Moreover electric transmission and distribution gains from limiting solar investment and there's a history of utilities being in tension with solar power and lobbying against it. Solar skips the power lines and utilities need people to need power lines.

Some things suddenly become cost effective when mandated, because it causes economies of scale to come into existence where they previously didn't.

Even if no more energy infrastructure is destroyed from the moment of this post, the Iran war will do more to speed this up than decades of science, I think.

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