Solar Stupidity: Subsidy Bonanza Delivers Mass Rooftop Solar Rollout & Grid Chaos

Heavily subsidised rooftop solar is an enormous middle-class welfare scheme, the consequence of a political class wedded to vacuous virtue signalling.

At the theoretical level – when the sun is up and the sky is cloud free – solar panels are generating electricity around 6.5 hours a day (on average). During their most virtuous cycle, they’re dispatching power back into the grid, and reducing their owner’s power bills (attracting feed in tariffs multiples greater than the value of the electricity itself – initially some states were paying figures in the order of $540 per MWh – coal-fired power costs less than $40).

Those without panels pick up the tab for the subsidies gifted to their neighbours (whether in the form of feed in tariffs or renewable energy certificates), as well as the network costs that allow the virtuous to dispatch when the sun is in the right quarter, and to receive electricity from the grid, when the sky clouds up or the sun sets.

The ‘risk’ of sunset and cloudy weather is offset by their ability to draw power from the grid, the cost of providing insurance against that ‘risk’ is covered by those who pay full tote odds for their electricity, and with it carry the entire network costs. Solar panel owners only pay network costs when they’re drawing from the grid.

As JoNova details the situation will only go from bad to much, much worse.

Solar Power hits the death spiral vertical rise in Australia
Jo Nova Blog
Jo Nova
15 April 2019

Solar installations are rapidly accelerating in Australia, surging in the last quarter by an extraordinary 482MW. This is partly due to rapidly rising electricity costs, but in the last quarter, especially amplified by an extra $2250 subsidy in Victoria which adds to current subsidies like the SRES (RET) which already cover around half the cost of installation.

This is obviously a market destroying practice but will be hailed as evidence that solar power is “surging” due to “falling prices” and “increasing demand”. More fake news.

In the land of the Renewable-Crash-Test-Dummy we’re hitting the death spiral. Every installation costs non-solar owners more (with the tally at $200pa and rising fast) and there are fewer non-solar owners left to pay. Obviously, the whole market has to be changed to ensure that solar owners pay a fair share of networking and backup costs.

If solar power was cheap, useful or competitive, it wouldn’t need the subsidies. Instead, the nation keeps adding more useless infrastructure and wondering why the price of electricity is rising.

The tally of solar stupidity

Solar is inefficient, wilderness destroying, money-hungry, useless, grid wrecking equipment.

Without subsidies the German Solar industry lost 80,000 jobs in a bloodbath.

Last year China cut solar subsidies to reduce the price of electricity and PV projects dropped 43%, and solar stocks plummeted.

Spain added a solar tax to recover some of the costs and the lost 65,000 renewable jobs.

In Japan fifty solar PV companies went broke in 2017 as subsidies ended. 

Meanwhile in Australia, we’re we are so stupid we are putting subsidizing solar panels on top of subsidized irrigated farmland, and when we aren’t destroying farmland we destroy trees instead. Taxpayers even gave $300m to a Saudi billionaire for a solar plant that made a bare 2% of old dying coal plant’s power.

Solar panels waste so much land, the UK government had to hide their own comparisons of the land needed for solar compared to nuclear power.

Even with subsidies solar farms collapse sometimes because the maintenance costs were too high, including unspecified hail damage, and shonky bubble-market faulty installations which sometimes cause house fires. If the shonky installation doesn’t burn the house down, the batteries might instead.  Rooftop solar is destroying baseload profitability, raising the prices of all other cheaper generators and causing voltage and frequency surges, and is expected to cause blackouts.

Adding intermittent power causes supply squeezes that allow giant corporations to scam a billion dollars in price spikes for a single day’s electricity. For people who really hate the environment solar PV is probably the most expensive and useless way to reduce CO2 – in 2018 all 2 million solar panels cut Australian total CO2 emissions by a pathetic 1%.

Solar Panels are essentially useless most hours of the day, most days of the year, and sometimes the entire Eastern Seaboard of solar panels are only working at half speed even at midday. When they are working together they force the grid voltage as high as 253 Volts, making other equipment prone to breaking and even more costly to run.

The dangerous voltages triggers some solar panels to cut themselves off, right at the peak time of day when they are actually working. Solar electricity is so unnecessary that when an eclipse wiped out California’s massive solar input, the price of electricity got cheaper.

Australian subsidies are so large, unfair and pointless, in sunny Queensland the state government won’t even tell us how large they are.
Jo Nova Blog