Rooftop solar is the future, but it's also a scam. It didn't have to be, but the US decided the best way to roll out distributed, resilient, renewable energy was to let Wall Street run the show. They turned it into a scam, and now it's in terrible trouble. which means we're in terrible trouble.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic holy shit man, you want to see more of that shitshow? look into nem3.0, how it got approved by the cpuc and who those people are and who lines their pockets. its like marvel movie villains
@pluralistic then even after that, theres the whole 'power purchase agreement', which is just slime. i put solar on my house in 2020 and i wanted to add some more panels and just trying to get that done has been an utter nightmare. baker electric wants 6 grand to add 4 panels. which is fucking insane. and nobody else will touch it "because warranty"
i think the 'slow ai' concept is dead on. the original prompt was 'fix power' and now we're down the rabbit hole, tripping our collective balls off
NEM3 is so messed up. It is absolutely nuts that the public utility in CA has determined they are in competition with the people of the state, and are doing everything they can to destroy clean energy.
@mastodonmigration@Viss@pluralistic if I'm reading it right, the NEM 3.0 purchase rates spike sharply during early evening peak consumption hours, which suggests that they're creating some manner of perverse incentive for solar + storage owners.
Effectively what it does is end being able to sell energy back to the utility. If you install solar now in CA you need to also get an expensive battery. It makes the entire thing not cost effective.
If the public utility were trying to incentivise clean energy they would be installing lots of storage and creating a rate plan to encourage rooftop solar.
It really doesn't pencil out anymore. There are a lot of solar companies, that did well in NEM 2, that are struggling and trying to convince people to buy batteries, but it is a mess.
@pluralistic After a couple painful electric bills this summer, we decided to take another look at solar. We have a reasonable location for it - house is at the top of a hill, few large trees around, back of house faces ssw, new roof.
While we could pay cash, it would drain a lot of our cash reserves. We talked to two different companies - one pushed financing, the other a PPA, and each said we’d be crazy to go with the other option.
Financing over a reasonable period has us paying it off around when we’d be retiring and selling the house. So, we wouldn’t be saving any money, and would essentially be buying solar for the next owner of our house, with no guarantee that energy needs would match up and allow us to recoup the investment.
Go with a PPA, and there could be issues when we sell, with many people saying they’d never buy a house with a PPA attached because of headaches with transfer, etc. So, just like a decade ago, we don’t move forward with solar.
@pluralistic I investigated solar panels a few years ago, but didn't move forward since I refused to sign an arbitration agreement. Very shady businesses practices.
@thestrangelet@pluralistic i tried several solar places. vivint and semper solaris refused to let me redline their contract. baker electric only agreed because i paid in cash, but they still played very very dirty, and now they're "business blackmailing" me.
@Viss@thestrangelet@pluralistic That sounds like an absolute nightmare. What if you have the skills to build a system yourself? Do you still need to deal with these knuckleheads to get permits/grid tie?
@therieau@thestrangelet@pluralistic for it to be 'proper', the work has to be done by licensed electricians. if there is framing or roofing to be done, that work needs to be licensed too - that makes it 'up to code'
beyond that, it becomes an issue with the existing equipment. the agreements the installers have basically say 'if anybody but us touches your gear, the warranty is void', so if for example, the 3000 dollar inverter takes a shit? they wont replace it if they can find modifications
@therieau@thestrangelet@pluralistic of course, this implies they can find those modifications. the people i dealt with at baker were a mixed bag, about 25% of them were competent. one crew flat out broke my air conditioner and it took them nearly two weeks to roll a truck out to fix it. in the summer, during a heatwave.
these people are sociopaths with contracts that protect their behavior. its so fucked.
@thestrangelet@pluralistic Those forced arbitration contracts are a widespread problem. I really feel our attorneys general, et al ought to be prohibiting such contracts. It should not be possible to have a contract where people waive their legal rights.
@glightly@thestrangelet@pluralistic its wild that the whole forced arbitration thing, when applied to tech companies and tech workers is a big deal, but completely overlooked when the solar company tries to argue: "you only want us to remove this arbitration clause because you plan on stiffing us on the bill"
and when you explain "no, its because if your guys destroy my roof or set my house on fire, we go to big boy court", they refuse to let you redline the contract.
@glightly@thestrangelet@pluralistic Forced arbitration should absolutely be done away with… but that would require us as a nation to spend a LOT more money on the federal and state court systems.
@glightly@thestrangelet@pluralistic My favorite forced arbitration contracts are from doctors' offices. One terrible doctor I had sent me one of those and I was out after that.
I just don't think it's a good sign for your doctor to say that you need to waive that right. It feels (right or wrong) that it indicates practices worth suing over are happening so regularly that they just need you to sign away any right to pursue it.
I've had plenty of doctors who never made me sign that clause.
@clarablackink
In some cases, they may be receiving a significant discount from their liability insurer if they're doing that, and getting pushed into it by the insurance company. In other cases, they may actually be working for a practice owned by a hedge fund that's still operating under independent branding — increasingly common. Of course, they may also just be super-shady. :-/ @glightly@thestrangelet@pluralistic
@pluralistic Meanwhile, here in Australia, my solar system was through a bulk buy program organized by my local council (local government). They did all the research, organized the installers, and I pay it off over 10 years (interest free) in my council rates. If I had been low income, it would have been partially subsidized. I do regret the inverter they picked had to be upgraded when I later put a battery in, but otherwise a perfectly adequate system.
Cory's essay explains to me why there appears to be so much anger and antipathy towards solar from USAsians vs the Australian experience. We have shonks too, and solar on the never never is being pushed harder than previously. However, we have significantly better regulation of shonky finance and building work, and we occasionally even enforce them.
Solar in Australia has been a brilliant & popular success - but we should, and easily could, do far more.
@pluralistic To my knowledge, most of the vendors who are part of the California Solar and Storage Association (https://calssa.org) are reputable businesses, many of them small single-owner.
CALSSA is good allies with Solar Rights Alliance (https://solarrights.org), the California consumer organization that defends rooftop solar rights. People concerned about rooftop solar in California should sign up for their list at their web site.
@pluralistic I tend to agree with others in this thread that rather than bashing the entire rooftop solar industry, it would be better to report on the California PUC and how they're completely the lapdogs for PG&E and the other utilities. NEM3.0 in particular has devastated the small rooftop solar companies and demolished the market for rooftop solar in California.
@pluralistic whoa, that's really bad. Rooftop solar hasn't had that much traction in Europe, but what's gaining a lot of traction is shared installations. A bunch of people lend money to build a very large dedicated installation, then they get the money repaid with interests plus a cut of the profits realized by selling electricity. The shared nature of these projects reduces risk and their large size maximizes efficiency.
And here I am, about to pay off the solar loan I took out in 2017, quite a few years ahead of its term. Only real regret I have is that, because of a tree my former neighbor had, I opted not to max out my roof coverage. That tree is now gone ...but, as a parting gift, he'd planted a tree elsewhere in his yard, that's eventually going to block part of the early morning sun for a couple months each year (assuming the power company doesn't have to remove it because he planted it right under the utility lines).
There's a (superficial) good case for turning markets loose on the problem of financing the rollout of an entirely new kind of energy provision across a large and heterogeneous nation. As capitalism's champions (and apologists) have observed since the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, markets harness together the work of thousands or even millions of strangers in pursuit of a common goal, without all those people having to agree on a single approach or plan of action.
Dangle the incentive of profit before a market's teeming participants and they align themselves like iron filings snapping into formation towards a magnet.
But markets have a problem: they are prone to #RewardHacking. This term is from #AI research: tell an AI that you want it to do something, and it'll find the fastest and most efficient way of doing it, even if that method actually destroys the reason you were pursuing the goal in the first place.
@pluralistic that isn't hacking though, that's just the solution. Real monarchs rely on their servants carefully making the most sense of any request. The request itself doesn't have to make any sense, only that the solution pleases the monarch, in an unspecified way.
For example: if you use an AI to come up with a Roomba that doesn't bang into furniture, you might tell that Roomba to avoid collisions. However, the Roomba is only designed to register collisions with its front-facing sensor. Turn the Roomba loose and it will quickly hit on the tactic of racing around the room in reverse, banging into all your furniture repeatedly, while never registering a single collision:
This is sometimes called the #AlignmentProblem. High-speed, probabilistic systems that can't be fully predicted in advance can very quickly run off the rails. It's an idea that pre-dates AI, of course - think of the #SorcerersApprentice. But AI produces these perverse outcomes at scale...and so does capitalism.
Many sf writers have observed the odd phenomenon of corporate AI executives spinning bad sci-fi scenarios about their AIs inadvertently destroying the human race by spinning off in some kind of paperclip-maximizing reward-hack that reduces the whole planet to grey goo in order to make more paperclips.
This idea is implausible, but the fact that so many corporate leaders are obsessed with autonomous systems reward-hacking their way into catastrophe tells us something about corporate executives, even if it has no predictive value for understanding the future of technology.
Both #TedChiang and @cstross have theorized the source of these anxieties isn't AI - it's corporations. Corporations are equilibrium-seeking complex machines that can't be programmed, only prompted.
CEOs know that they don't actually run their companies, and it haunts them, because while they can decompose a company into all its constituent elements - capital, labor, procedures - they can't get this model-train set to go around the loop:
Stross calls corporations #SlowAI, a pernicious artificial life-form that acts like a pedantic genie, always on the hunt for ways to destroy you while still strictly following your directions.
Markets are an extremely reliable way to find the most awful alignment problems - but by the time they've surfaced them, they've also destroyed the thing you were hoping to improve with your market mechanism.
Which brings me back to #solar, as practiced in America. In a long #Time feature, #AlanaSemuels describes the waves of bankruptcies, revealed frauds, and even confiscation of homeowners' houses arising from a decade of financialized solar:
The problem starts with a pretty common finance puzzle: solar pays off big over its lifespan, saving the homeowner money and insulating them from price-shocks, emergency power outages, and other horrors. But solar requires a large upfront investment, which many homeowners can't afford to make. To resolve this, the finance industry extends credit to homeowners (lets them borrow money) and gets paid back out of the savings the homeowner realizes over the years to come.
But of course, this requires a lot of capital, and homeowners still might not see the wisdom of paying even some of the price of solar and taking on debt for a benefit they won't even realize until the whole debt is paid off. So the government moved in to tinker with the markets, injecting prompts into the slow AIs to see if it could coax the system into producing a faster solar rollout.
Ideally, one that didn't have to rely on waves of deadly power-outages during storms, heatwaves, fires, etc, to convince homeowners to get on board because they'd have experienced the pain of sitting through those disasters in the dark.
The government created subsidies - tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof - in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did!
Armies of fast-talking reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.
These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home.
They underprovisioned the solar that they installed, leaving homeowners with sky-high electrical bills on top of those debt payments.
If this sounds familiar, it's because it shares a lot of DNA with the subprime housing bubble, where fast-talking salesmen conned vulnerable people into taking out predatory mortgages with sky-high rates that kicked in after a honeymoon period, promising buyers that the rising value of housing would offset any losses from that high rate.
The fraudsters knew they were acquiring toxic assets, but it didn't matter,because they were bundling up those assets into "collateralized debt obligations" - exotic black-box "derivatives" that could be sold onto pension funds, retail investors, and other suckers.
This is likewise true of solar, where the tax-credits, subsidies and other income streams that these new solar installations offgassed were captured and turned into bonds that were sold into the financial markets.
These markets produced an insatiable demand for more rooftop solar installations, and that meant lots more fraud.
Which brings us to today, where homeowners across America are waking up to discover that their power bills have gone up thanks to their solar arrays, even as the giant, financialized solar firms that supplied them are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, thanks to waves of defaults.
Meanwhile, those bonds that were created from solar installations are ticking timebombs, sitting on institutions' balance-sheets, waiting to go blooie once the defaults cross some unpredictable threshold.
Markets are very efficient at mobilizing capital for growth. America has a lot of rooftop solar. But 70% of that solar isn't owned by the homeowner - it's owned by a solar company, which is to say, "a finance company that happens to sell solar":
And markets are very efficient at reward hacking. The point of any market is to multiply capital. If the only way to multiply the capital is through building solar, then you get solar. But the finance sector specializes in making the capital multiply as much as possible while doing as little as possible on the solar front. Huge chunks of those federal subsidies were gobbled up by junk-fees and other financial tricks - sometimes more than 100%.
The solar companies would be in even worse trouble, but they also tricked all their victims into signing #BindingArbitrationWaivers that deny them the power to sue and force them to have their grievances heard by fake judges who are paid by the solar companies to decide whether the solar companies have done anything wrong. You will not be surprised to learn that the arbitrators are reluctant to find against their paymasters.
I had a sense that all this was going on even before I read Semuels' excellent article. We bought a solar installation from #Treeium, a highly rated, giant Southern California solar installer. We got an incredibly hard sell from them to get our solar "for free" - that is, through these financial arrangements - but I'd just sold a book and I had cash on hand and I was adamant that we were just going to pay upfront.
As soon as that was clear, Treeium's ardor palpably cooled. We ended up with a grossly defective, unsafe and underpowered solar installation that has cost more than $10,000 to bring into a functional state (using another vendor). I briefly considered suing Treeium (I had insisted on striking the binding arbitration waiver from the contract) but in the end, I decided life was too short.
The thing is, solar is amazing. We love running our house on sunshine. But markets have proven - again and again - to be an unreliable and even dangerous way to improve Americans' homes and make them more resilient. After all, Americans' homes are the largest asset they are apt to own, which makes them irresistible targets for scammers:
That's why the subprime scammers targets Americans' homes in the 2000s, and it's why the house-stealing fraudsters who blanket the country in "We Buy Ugly Homes" are targeting them now. Same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: "That's where the money is":
America can and should electrify and solarize. There are serious logistical challenges related to sourcing the underlying materials and deploying the labor, but those challenges are grossly overrated by people who assume the only way we can approach them is though markets, those monkey's paw curses that always find a way to snatch profitable defeat from the jaws of useful victory.
To really understand the transformative power of solar, don't miss @debcha's How Infrastructure Works, and learn that we could give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder) by capturing just 0.4% of the solar rays that reach Earth's surface:
But we won't get there with markets. All markets will do is create incentives to cheat. Think of the market for "#CarbonOffsets," which were supposed to substitute markets for direct regulation, and which produced a fraud-riddled market for lemons that sells indulgences to our worst polluters, who go on destroying our planet and our future:
We can address the climate emergency, but not by prompting the slow AI and hoping it doesn't figure out a way to reward-hack its way to giant profits while doing nothing. Founder and chairman of Goodleap, Hayes Barnard, is one of the 400 richest people in the world - a fortune built on scammers who tricked old people into signing away their homes for nonfunctional solar):
These are the final days for my Kickstarter for the audiobook for The Bezzle, sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by #WilWheaton! Pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback:
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