The Solar in the President’s Climate Plan

In 2009 when then President Barack Obama promised that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 0ver 80% below 2005 levels it seemed like such a far reach. It meant that 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. This past week when President Joseph Biden’s administration released some details of his sweeping climate plan, it seemed less of a reach though their goal is even more ambitious. Solar is an essential part of President Biden’s 2035 clean electricity goal –  carbon-free electricity. This will be accomplished using solar, onshore and offshore wind, existing power plants retrofitted with carbon capture or green hydrogen, geothermal, hydropower, and nuclear. The President proposes that wind and solar combined will provide 75% of electricity by 2035 and 90% by 2050. Renewable power will grow from 30 GW today to nearly 400 GW in 2035 and 1,700 GW in 2050. 

From the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Futures Studydetailing the significant role solar will play in decarbonizing the nation’s power grid. The study shows that by 2035, solar energy will power 40% of the nation’s electricity. DOE goes on to state that deployment of power storage will enable more flexibility and resilience in the power grid.

“A clean grid requires massive, equitable deployment of diverse, sustainable energy sources.” DOE says that the U.S. must install an average of 30 GW of solar capacity per year between now and 2025 and 60 GW per year from 2025-2030. The model the DOE used  shows that the remainder of a carbon-free grid largely supplied by wind (36%), nuclear (11%-13%), hydroelectric (5%-6%) and biopower/geothermal (1%).

In their deployment of solar the DOE includes a large amount of roof top solar, pointing out that solar costs have declined 70 %to 80  % since 2010 – lowering the price of a typical 6 kW residential system by almost $30,000. Utility scale solar requires that thousands of miles of power lines be built to move electricity to urban centers from distant solar and wind farms located in rural areas with favorable weather. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has $73 billion for building thousands of miles of new power lines. Control of the electrical grid would belong to the utilities.

More progressive environmental organizations and community groups are pushing for greater investment in rooftop solar  panels, batteries and local wind turbines. They believe in building a distributed electrical grid. They argue that solar panels, batteries and other local energy sources should be emphasized because they would be more resilient and could be built more quickly. However, a distributed grid requires an infrastructure of sorts to maintain the individual components. 

As an example let’s take a look at the economics of my system after 11 years. The solar panels cost me almost as much in repairs, module replacement and roof leak repairs as the total value in electricity they produced. That is not a good reliability record.

There are several components to the cost and return of a solar system. The first cost is the cost of the system and the second cost is the design, permits and installation cost. The market cost of solar panels and installation costs have been falling for years. When I signed the contract to purchase my roof mounted solar system at the end of 2009 (though it was not installed until May 2010) the cost per kilowatt for the Sharp (made in America) panels I bought was about $6,700 plus permits and installation. DOE says the cost has fallen by more than $30,000. So that the same system that cost me $58,540 installed would cost less than $30,000,

Back in 2009 I was able to obtain a state rebate of $12,000 which is no longer available in Virginia. Also, as you can see from the chart above that a significant source of revenue is something called a SREC or  Solar Renewable Energy Certificates.  SRECs, are not real, but merely a credit for having made one megawatt hour of solar electricity that was used elsewhere. SRECS have no intrinsic value. In other words, if there is no buyer for the SREC, it is worthless. Like most consumer rooftop solar arrays I use l the power produced by the panels in my own home, nonetheless, my system generates around 9 salable  SRECs a year. Because SRECs are not physical items their value depends entirely on regulation which can change over time and are not planned to continue into the future.

While it lasts, for older systems like mine, the revenue from the sale of SRECs is higher than the value of the electricity the solar panels make and made the economics of my system favorable. Today’s pricing with the still available federal tax credit makes the return on investment in a solar photovoltaic system reasonable in almost all locations. There are other locations where various rebates and incentives and higher electricity rates make the return rich enough to support a market in financing alternatives, but it takes time and some level of expertise to optimize the solar incentives markets. Also, the incentives need to be paid for with either tax dollars, national debt, or higher electricity rates.

Solar systems do not last forever. All solar PV panels degrade and slowly over time produce less power. Solar photovoltaic panels have no moving parts , but there are things that can go wrong, wiring failures, snow lifting the solar panels and requiring a new rack and roof repairs to eliminate roof leaks, micro inverter failure and hale damage. Dirt buildup on the panels can reduce power production and the panels do degrade over time. All of these have gone wrong with my system. In all, over the last 11 years I have paid $12,782 out of pocket for repairs not covered under the system and component warranties and spend dozen of hours trying to get repairs scheduled and have warranties honored.  Before we deploy solar panels to every roof with a southern or western orientation, we need to have an equitable monitoring and maintenance plan for all systems or only the well to do will have reliable systems.