[You Can't Make This Up] U.S. solar industry battles 'white privilege' image problem

Sweet I've been dying to discuss this!

 

Some things, if you made them up, just wouldn't be believable.

I too always saw this as an affordability and economy of scale problem. The hiring thing is interesting. Hiring via word of mouth just leads to the industry reflecting current breaks in American society, so expanding the hiring net, I think, is a good idea.

The other stuff: trying to get Hispanic and Black advocacy groups on board to support political initiatives seems just plain silly. I just don't buy the connection, outside the utility companies playing politics by getting certain groups in their corner. I'm gonna have to read more on this topic so I can form an informed opinion.

 

We should probably take all the subsidies the government pays out to the oil and gas industries and shift it to subsidize renewable power for the middle and lower classes. It would go a long way to defund ISIS and White-ISIS.

 

They look Asian to me

 

So does this mean that rich consumers of other races can't afford it? What a poorly written line.

 

The one worthwhile argument I found in there was the utility death spiral argument. In the utility death spiral, solar adopters stop paying their 'fair share' of the utility's costs, leaving the burden to be split by the remaining customers. Since utility costs have a large fixed component, that means the remaining customers each have to pay more to support the same infrastructure. And since solar customers tend to be wealthier and whiter, it's a burden on the poor and minority.

That's all true, but really not an extreme enough view. If people keep going solar (and they will), the whole business model for the electric utility is untenable. It plain doesn't make sense to pay for poles and wires and substations and power plants, when you can do the same thing with an appliance on your roof. Either someone has to get creative about the utility value proposition, or there won't be any anymore. Saying that that's an imposition on poor people or black people isn't thinking big enough.

What I think is ironic about it is that the progressive pricing structure for electric service is what causes the problem. The utility's costs for transmission and distribution are primarily fixed costs. But, they bill customers on a volumetric basis. They do this so that the poor don't get slapped with a big bill for just the connection to the grid. People can make their connection to the grid inexpensive by reducing their usage. And reducing usage does mitigate the need to pay for more power plants, but it doesn't change the transmission costs.

The honest course of action I see is to charge everyone a flat bill for being connected to the grid. If you have solar on your roof, you still pay the same as everyone else if you want to have grid power too. But that doesn't solve the death spiral; maybe delays it. Affluent people will put a Tesla battery in their garage or Bloomboxes in the backyard and cut the cord to the utility entirely.

The poor don't need to get the short end of it though. If they're living in multifamily dwellings, the industry is creating vehicles to finance solar there. Even for homeowners, there's a feeling it will be a low risk loan because electric bills immediately go down when you install and immediately go up when you repossess. Homeowners aren't likely to default on solar unless they are defaulting on the mortgage at the same time. The industry might have a perception problem, but I don't think there will be any more of a racial or economic disparity in solar than you will have in houses or cars once the industry matures.