All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?
Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project.
EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play
The extra costs and limits are ostensibly because of safety. Yes, I know that engineers can game the system, but they're listing real reasons why the plant should shoulder the costs to the larger grid.
- He didn't consult with somebody who had any experience in planning such a project, but a person who - while maybe personally impressive - had zero experience and started by writing scripts to find suitable properties. Isn't the project already doomed at this point? You are looking to invest 7m USD, who will you consult for this?
- He wouldn't do the project unless he was able to get insurance for it. The whole issue of exploring and acquiring mineral rights was just to get insurance for the project. Why not forego insurance? EDIT: Okay, needed insurance for financing the project. I assumed the project would be financed through the crypto gains.
- From ballpark numbers his projected cost of 1,37 USD per Watt DC seems very high (~2 USD per Watt Peak AC). In Europe large scale PV has reached 600 EUR / kWp so building a 4.5 MWp plant should cost more like 3m USD rather than his projected 9m USD. Of course 4.5 MW is small (10000 panels) so this might be part of the issue.
Relying on tax credits and otherwise "optimizing" tax payments and "good intentions" do not sleep well together in my opinion.
solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working.
build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic.
"Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. "
where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
People here in Australia expect feed in tariff to drop to nothing in the next few years, but electric prices are still climbing.
Our new government has promised battery subsidies as well, so I expect batteries to take off. There is a lot of money to be saved by time shifting all that sun that is wasted during the day until the evening when you get home.
there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many.
less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house.
or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it.
Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0]. We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access, but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC jurisdiction).
Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading tools when developing projects because they were the most advanced.
Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process
I'm used to think that California is an overpriced legal quagmire if you want to build something. I didn't expect Texas to fare not much better.
I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"
Why exactly is that bad?
Sometimes I wonder if any of the people who complain about this bought an electric car or roof solar with tax credits or rebates.
Or maybe its just HN anti-crypto bias.
Because you could have just paid your taxes like the rest of us have to. Instead you made a big drama and are asking us to agree with you how unfair it all is that you have to pay taxes.
Tell me about your intentions without telling me about your intentions.
I think paying taxes allows the government to be able to afford to do the things it is responsible for (health, security, prosperity, equality).
If an infrastructure project is only possible with government support (in this case subsidies), then let the government make it happen and let the population benefit from it. For example the Apollo program.
If a solar farm is not possible to do in the free market without subsidies, then DON'T DO IT until the market is right. (Anyway, what was the author's plan if he got deep into the project and instead of having a disappointment from connection fees, the new president cuts the subsides he needed? Subsidies are political and temporary, you cannot build a sustainable business on them.)
Pay your taxes, and contribute to building society. It's as simple as that.
Not that I blame him. The lesson is though, never do anything just to avoid taxes. He would never have got into the solar business without the tax "opportunities".
Yea, corruption. Tax breaks on past gains are just handouts and everyone wants a handout.
To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-year.
To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a big objection, and it's not that way because of corruption.
Reinvesting money getting special treatment provides zero benefits to the economy. It falls under the fallacy that rich people can avoid investing their fortunes, inflation already makes that a nonstarter. The only result here is a handout.
Taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits doesn't work because it would bankrupt every business with slim margins, which is most of them, while effectively cutting taxes for the ones with the thickest margins and creating a massive tax subsidy for vertical integration.
> It falls under the fallacy that rich people can avoid investing their fortunes, inflation already makes that a nonstarter.
If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals. Moreover, the return from typical passive investments (e.g. S&P 500) significantly exceeds the rate of inflation.
The preference for investment is as opposed to spending. If inflation is at 3% and someone is getting a 10% return from stocks, they can avoid real value loss while still spending up to 70% of the nominal profits. But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions.
Investment isn’t a business expense.
> If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they could just buy a stack of precious metals.
Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation.
> But we'd rather people build factories and develop new drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and third personal mansions.
Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains. Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.
Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense today expecting a return in the future.
> Capital gains of precious metals “yield” drops you below inflation.
This is a defect in the tax code. Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.
> Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P gains.
And then those companies get a tax deduction. Or in many cases they do make those returns without doing those things, because a lot of those companies have high returns by buying off regulators to constrain competition and then charging high margins to captive customers, which is another thing we don't like to promote over the ones actually making productive investments.
> Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.
The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.
Investments like land aren’t necessarily consumed. You can reasonably deduct when an actual expense happens, but buying steel etc to be used next year doesn’t guarantee it is actually used rather than sold.
> Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.
It’s a useful feature to discourage the exact wasteful approach you proposed.
> The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal consumption.
Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I can redirect money I would have spent to buy something else.
In many cases you're buying something intending it to be consumed, even if it hasn't been yet, and have to buy it ahead of time because you have to get it installed or connected or forged etc. before it can start being used.
If you then sell the steel instead of using it, the sale price gets added to your income and the cost was already deducted previously, so that cancels the previous deduction and you're back to paying the tax on it.
> Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I can redirect money I would have spent to buy something else.
In order to get a tax deduction for buying land to build a solar farm, you have to buy land to build a solar farm. You can't spend that money on something else and still get that tax deduction. You can spend other money on something else, but the amount of money you have available to spend on other things has gone down, and the point is to increase your incentive to build the solar farm, which it is effective in doing.
An interest free loan means you’re ahead in that transaction but society is worse off when people do useless things to avoid taxes.
> You can spend other money on something else, but the amount of money you have available to spend on other things has gone down
One can’t invest all their money in any given year or one lacks the ability to buy food. You also can’t spend all your money in a given year or you go broke.
Thus both saving and spending are always happening and the government reducing the amount of money you’re required to save means you can up spending. There’s zero meaningfully differences between piles of money here.
Except that you had to sit on some asset in the meantime instead of using it for something. Or if that asset was a productive investment that yielded returns, the government is ahead in that transaction, because the returns from investing the deferred taxes increase your taxable income.
> One can’t invest all their money in any given year or one lacks the ability to buy food. You also can’t spend all your money in a given year or you go broke.
You can both invest all of your assets by taking on new debt to buy food and spend all of your assets and have nothing left. Both of those are things some people actually do. And for people who neither spend nor invest 100% of their assets, different incentives will affect the proportion of each one they do.
> Thus both saving and spending are happening and reducing the amount of money required to save means you can up spending.
Suppose you're paying a tax rate of 33% and have access to investments with a 10% return. If you have to pay the tax when you get the money then if you get $100 you immediately lose $33 and can only invest $67, and if you get 10% interest on the $67 then you can only reinvest $4.49. In other words, your compounding rate is now 6.7% instead of 10% and after 10 years you'd have $128.
If instead you pay the tax when you spend the money, your compounding rate is 10%. So if you started off with $100, after 10 years you have $259 before tax and then you pay a third of that in tax and get to spend $174.
So in one case you have the choice between spending $67 today or $128 in ten years, in the other case your choice is between spending $67 today or $174 in ten years. That increases the incentive to invest the money now and spend more of it later, instead of spending it now.
You do then get to spend more of it later, but the extra money you get to spend is value that only exists because of the additional investment.
And then the government gets $85 in taxes in 10 years instead of $33 today, i.e. it got a 10% ROI too.
No, you benefited from sitting on that productive asset. Getting a free stock option is still a meaningful benefit even if you never case it in.
Further assuming the asset kept up with inflation you’re better off after the sale vs holding cash for that same period.
> by taking on new debt to buy food
The money you got from that loan is an asset you’re not investing in that hypothetical. As to “spend all of your assets and have nothing left” yes I mentioned going broke was an option repeating what I already said isn’t an argument here.
> Suppose you …
Ignoring the possibility to just spend more today and also spend the same amount in 10 years is disingenuous here. Especially as assuming consistent rules you also benefit 10 years from now, so you get to spend more today and also spend more in 10 years.
Really free money lets you spend more, there’s no way around that. Further with the US tax code nothing says investments need to be in the US or capital gains ever get taxed this often is a pure dead loss for US taxpayer.
If you buy a ton of steel with no intention of ever doing anything other than selling it for the same value as you paid for it in a while, you haven't benefited from it and have in fact cost yourself value in opportunity cost because other investments return more than that.
If you get a free stock option and then there is a 30% chance it turns out to be worth something, the government benefits from the same 30% chance that you'll get money from it which will then be taxable income.
> The money you got from that loan is an asset you’re not investing in that hypothetical.
Loan principal doesn't create net assets. You get new money and new debt at the same time and they cancel.
> As to “spend all of your assets and have nothing left” yes I mentioned going broke was an option repeating what I already said isn’t an argument here.
I took your implication to be that it was something bad and so nobody would purposely do that. But people purposely do it all the time. They have some money and then choose to spend all of it instead of investing any of it.
> Ignoring the possibility to just spend more today and also spend the same amount in 10 years is disingenuous here.
Even that scenario still requires the amount of investment to increase. What you'd be doing is spending some but not all of the taxes deferred on the amount you initially invested, e.g. instead of spending $33 and investing $33 you invest $37 and spend $42, and you had ~$12 extra because of the taxes deferred on the $37. But now you're investing $37 instead of $33, and that's the minimum you could invest to get the same after-tax amount in ten years because now you haven't paid the taxes yet.
Doing that is also more disfavored because you get better returns from diverting more money to investment but the benefits of immediate spending haven't increased.
Your argument was buying a productive asset useful for the business. My argument is that’s a prediction which may be false, you suggesting no they are just randomly buying steel is losing your argument upfront.
> Loan principal doesn't create net assets. You get new money and new debt at the same time and they cancel.
Leverage is based on loans generating assets that can be invested. It’s clear your not actually arguing in good faith.
You implied that they could just buy something that isn't a productive investment and then claim it as a business expense to defer the taxes. Which they could, but why would they when they could make more money by purchasing a real productive investment? Whereas if it is a real productive investment then the government benefits from the increase in the tax base.
The relevant question isn't the yield they're getting -- they already have the incentive to maximize that on their own -- it's whether they want to invest it or spend it to begin with.
> Leverage is based on loans generating assets that can be invested.
Loans are often used when you can get a lower interest rate to borrow money than the expected returns from an investment opportunity. The yield there isn't the loan principal -- that all has to be paid back -- it's the difference between the rate of return and the interest on the loan.
The difference is relevant exactly because of what deferring taxes does to that math. If your effective compounding rate is 10% rather than 6.7% and the loans available to you are at 8% interest (or any other number between 6.7 and 10), the difference determines whether it makes sense for you to make the investment.
Again deferring that choice isn’t making an investment. A jeweler buying 1kg of gold doesn’t need to be making a productive investment to claim they are.
Thus creating an incentive to tie up productive assets for tax reasons rather than maximizing total efficiency.
> Loans are often used
We can get into all kinds of game people pay with loans and the tax code but that’s irrelevant here.
My initial point is someone can’t invest all their assets as you previously claimed people could via loans which is a silly tangent because that cash is investable. Which means both investing and spending money occurs when anyone is investing and thus deferred capital gains are simply a handout. Zero net gain for society lots of gains for the people getting the handout.
Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
He couldn't get insurance without a waiver. He couldn't get a mortgage without insurance. So he didn't want to invest his own cash exclusively.
Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like.
If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?
Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.)
Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ .
> This is a much better read than I expected.
Hm...
First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external entities)
Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really worried about it.
That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about 10x the time.
I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share your concern about living in a media world where it feels like "basically nothing can be trusted".
For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post mortem docs privately.
However... Look at this HN page! Not a single person here realized (before my still-downvoted comment) that this was a 'movie treatment', or that the 'quotes...were also mostly spat out by the LLM as well'. They all are taking it as 100% gospel, and engaging with it in good faith, as if it were genuinely a 'technical post-mortem' (as it takes pains to present itself) instead of your fiction-writing hobby,
Just make it clearer that this is a fictional story.
> I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a cinematic re-enactment
Yes. This is why ghost writers are supposed to be credited as such if they are contributing non-trivial content rather than simply serving as a amanuensis or an editor, and cinematic re-enactments are flagged as such if it wouldn't be obvious to a reasonable person (by reputable documentarians, anyway).
If that's the biggest issue, and the story matched the detailed notes fed into the LLM, I wouldn't call it "fictional".
I'd expect ChatGPT to make no typographical errors in a list of post titles.
At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
ERCOT has the most generator-friendly interconnection process in the nation and leads the country in both renewable generation and utility-scale solar installations.
Mineral rights are dominant over surface rights in most jurisdictions, including other states like California. To call it "insane" just shows how little experience Mr. R has in land development.
OP lost the game playing on easy mode because he was purely chasing tax breaks with zero experience. The area OP is trying to develop in is a QOZ for a reason; he should have expected there to be upgrades necessary to delivery that level of power to a substation in an area where nothing else is going on.
OP is actually lucky that this project failed. Expecting to get the ISO-average solar PPA price for a project in Coleman County is nuts. This solar farm would have lost even more money had he continued.
The insane part is the management of mineral rights, shattering into a thousand untracked shards and too ruinous to insure against without waivers. Not the existence of them.
> The area OP is trying to develop in is a QOZ for a reason; he should have expected there to be upgrades necessary to delivery that level of power to a substation in an area where nothing else is going on.
The biggest problem was that it still needed a ton of limitation even with upgrades.
Seems like people who zero industry experience got a taste of common issues that renewable developers deal with on a daily basis nationwide and decided that it must be Texas’ fault.
Are all those mineral rights issues exactly the same across the entire country? Even if so they make for an insane system.
I say this as someone in the energy industry who operates many renewable assets across the U.S., some in Texas, and participates in the markets. Texas is a power nightmare, worst in the country. Everyone in Texas is investing in desperate immediate need and toa lesser degree, future potential, but that potential isn’t here yet and the cost of wholesale power spikes to egregious levels regularly.
I’ve been a market participant in every American ISO for over a decade and have helped build both thermal and renewable generation. I couldn’t disagree more and the numbers don’t back up your story.
Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
>"What's the tax treatment on crypto profits if I roll them into a Qualified Opportunity Zone investment?" I'd asked my accountant. His eyes had lit up—the first clue I was onto something interesting.
If you find yourself in the position of giving tax advice to your accountant, he's either a crummy accountant or playing you to get more fees. And it looks like the most rosy estimate was -$1.5m NPV to gain ~$1.1m ($8.7m x 0.32 x 0.4) in tax benefits? I can't see what the plan was.
> Mr. R's application stood out immediately...Our first Zoom call revealed a muscular man with a shaved head and a perpetually amused expression
It seems that everyone involved had dollar signs in their eyes. The cherry on top was moving to a country he knew nothing about for "lower taxes."
I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
number 2, btc mining environmental impact, I generally disagree,but I can understand the argument, however ...
number 1, the crypto exposure aspect
a) what prevents your from selling the BTC the moment you mine them to pay for OPEX, and then invest what is leftover in tradfi?
b) While many on this site will violently and deeply disagree in spite of being proven wrong over and over and over again (the definition of insanity, etc...), I'd argue that being "over-exposed to BTC" over the last 15 years has not exactly been a bad thing if you can stomach the volatility.
No mineral rights like Texas, except for the occasional lignite open-pit mining, but that is very limited to certain regions. And even then, you'd be reimbursed handsomely for your troubles and the torn down equipment and land.
Grid connection would have been easier, because the electricity company is required to provide timely and cheap connections to the next sufficient connection point. However, there are exceptions, if they can prove that they cannot get contractors, so you have to wait some time, usually two to three years after you sign the contract for the connection.
Before connection contract signing, you need to enter an auction for the price of the power you will be providing. Fixed for 20 years. However, those 20 years start at signature, so the first 2 to 3 are wasted because of no connection. And you are competing with tons of other solar installations, so you can't really predict your profits when planning. Btw. they can even fail to connect you after you already built your plant for the same reason, so you may either wait or risk it...
Then you have to get approval from the local planning bureau. For that you need a number of assessments: You need to prove that there is no environmental impact, e.g. on rare species of vermin and weeds, no impact on nearby population e.g. through noise, reflection, or other annoyances. Then you have to get approval for the land-use change, because usually you are building on land zoned agrarian use, that has to be changed (and usually can never be changed back, so the land is worthless afterwards even if you don't actually build). You have to get approval from various environmental protection agencies that certify you are not in any kind of protected zone, or if you are (half of Germany is), then you are not affecting anything important (which is a 50/50 chance). Then your plans have to be submitted for public review, where local groups of busybodies, can enter their objections. If there are objections, the approval can be delayed or denied. You can of course "bribe" the public with a few well-placed donations to local groups, or by declaring your enterprise to be open to local investment for which you then sell shares and hand our corresponding parts of your profits. This of course necessitates a change in legal form, which of course needs another few rounds with lawyers, tax advisors, the tax office and a whole lot of due diligence because you are now handing out shares to small investors, which is kind of protected and therefore complicated...
Believe me, the OP's story is very harmless compared to what this would take here, even though the above is the simplified process after a few rounds of laws that were intended to accelerate building green energy.
P.S.: You need a fence and cameras. First because no insurance will allow it without the fence, some idiot kid could climb a panel and fall. Second because there are professional solar panel thieves around here, stealing them at night by the truckload.
I have been heavily downvoted for it before, but the US is one of the worst places to do business. Culture is the primary issue, but even beyond that its a legal nightmare.
Oh and infrastructure sucks. The culture and management of critical infrastructure is so horrific that if you have any experience dealing with intelligent practitioners you will bounce off the yanks extremely quickly.
My family lived in rural Malaysia for some time and some of us had similar symptoms for years before it was determined that parasites were at fault. Once they were killed, recovery was fairly quick.
In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding, one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers.
Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if someone is already discussing this idea?
I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)
This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the government was receiving directly the tax and then buying these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax incentives is basically admitting that people with money are selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game" to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they were not detrimental to society.
Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a government project, then the probability of success would have been higher (I know some government projects are really mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the government would have been in better position to 1) get experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better complementarity.
So, a lot of these people who hold this belief are agreeing (not explicitly, they just know it's true but don't want to say it out loud) that rich people are doing what is better for them, not what is better for the society. Which is why people view negatively rich people who profit from government tax incentive.
I think you summarize my understanding on why using tax incentives are seen as a negative trait with the sentence
> We want to softly encourage some behaviors and discourage others
If you have to encourage behaviors that are good for the society and discourage behaviors that are bad for the society, it means that some people, without these incentives, will prefer to do the "bad" behaviors rather than the "good" behaviors. I understand that people will not like these people.
Again, tax incentives are totally useless if the rich people are people with normal moral who will naturally try to do the correct thing. The government, not you, is already choosing the domain where it applies tax incentives. So the argument that you don't want to give tax because you think you will do a better job at choosing the project than the government does not hold: if you are doing something where the government provides a tax incentive, you are doing something that the government wanted to be done. And the government is also more than happy to get good advice and support on such projects, but again, there, those generous rich people are not doing anything despite their nice posture. If indeed they don't trust the government to do "good things", it's funny that they don't do them themselves and instead jump on the first tax incentive opportunity. Posture is cheap, but when it comes to invest extra, without government help, for something that is "good", there is no one remaining from the group of the people who explains that a government collecting tax is not a good way to have nice things done.
Natural gas just has more resources to buy politicians in the USA than solar does, that's the nature of the problem. Maybe the investor in this story should have spent have his crypto fortune on buying Texas politicians before even beginning this project - but buying off a lot of politicians is expensive, it's more the province of billionaires than of millionaires.
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can always just be disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid connection to stay cool.
Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
You are propagating some decades old ideas which don’t hold anymore.
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.
You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.
btw, it was really challenging to find a way to contact you, lol (out of this way) btw2, we are based in Argentina :). Let us meet Mr R!
It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over.
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Oh come on.
And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is.
The conclusion in the post:
> Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
Okay, how small of a connection would they have to restrict him to for me to be correct?
> BESS, simple curtailment at peak hours, or angle diversity would solve the problem.
That much extra curtailment is a major problem. That much extra angle diversity hurts output. Batteries are a workaround for not being able to properly hook up the panels.
Onsite BESS permits you to not only get by with a smaller hookup but also sell your energy at times when people are willing to pay for it.
I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is not a proper hookup.
Straightforward math.
He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits, this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
That doesn't make pure solar installs bad. Pure solar installs are net positive.