San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings (theguardian.com) 300
San Francisco will soon become one of the first major cities in the U.S. to require solar power on new buildings. The rule, which received approval from San Francisco's Board of Supervisors this week, is set to go into effect in January 2017. According to the legislation, all new buildings with 10 stories or fewer -- both residential and commercial -- will have to use either solar panels for electricity or a solar system to heat water. The Guardian notes that smaller Californian cities such as Lancaster and Sebastopol already have similar laws in place, but San Francisco is the first large city to adopt the new standard. "In a dense, urban environment, we need to be smart and efficient about how we maximize the use of our space to achieve goals such as promoting renewable energy and improving our environment," Supervisor Scott Wiener said in a statement. Vox has more details.
going from illegal to mandatory overnight (Score:3, Insightful)
San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings
What about heat pollution? What if you wanted to build a nice roof garden instead?
Why does absolutely everyone have to do exactly the same thing all the time?
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San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings
What about heat pollution? What if you wanted to build a nice roof garden instead?
Why does absolutely everyone have to do exactly the same thing all the time?
Put a bucket of water in the roof garden to heat water?
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Put a solar panel up there and instead of turning the sunlight to heat, turn it to electricity. Or are you burning coal in there?
Re:going from illegal to mandatory overnight (Score:4, Insightful)
Roof garden is OK by the new law.
Surprisingly they also let you keep water that falls from the sky.
As for thermal pollution how can solar panels create more heat than the black shingle roof that was there before?
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A lot of roofs in warmer climates are white not black and some are clay tile.
I'm not sure if it is enough to think about but anything that electricity runs through generates heat due to resistance.
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Surprisingly they also let you keep water that falls from the sky.
Are you being cute, or is that a reference to certain localities that will actually fine you for not letting the water run off?
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It is illegal to capture rain water in Hawaii and Colorado, in Colorado it has to do with prior appropriation, there is currently a bill in their state legislature to make an exception to the capture laws to allow for limited rain barrel collection but it's currently stalled. California passed a similar law in 2012, prior to that it was illegal to capture rain water. The whole thing comes down to how water is considered property in the western US. In Hawaii it's due to the way the natives viewed water as sp
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Under western US law that water is almost guaranteed to belong to someone else, capturing it is stealing from them. I might not agree with the system of allocating a scarce resource, but given that it's the law then the laws against capture of others property is a natural extension.
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Water rights have nothing to do with libertarians. Go ahead and wallow in your ignorance.
People died in the range wars that led up to current water rights laws. Not that you care, you just think you're funny.
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Give proof it isn't.
Don't let the door hit you on the way out... or STAY OUT if you're not here..
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American buildings are extremely inefficient by international standards. The market seems to have failed to do anything about it, so intervention is required.
Before complaining about it how about seeing what the law says. I don't know who competent your lawmakers are, but I'd hope roof gardens are catered for.
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"What about heat pollution?"
Heat Pollution? In San Francisco? Typical weather in much of the city is low overcast, 60F(16C) with wind and fog or even light drizzle. But how well will solar panels work under the near perpetual marine layer? Badly I should think. Won't that be a problem? Could be..
But that's someone else's problem, not mine.
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"What about heat pollution?"
Heat Pollution? In San Francisco? Typical weather in much of the city is low overcast, 60F(16C) with wind and fog or even light drizzle. But how well will solar panels work under the near perpetual marine layer? Badly I should think. Won't that be a problem? Could be..
But that's someone else's problem, not mine.
Well, lets ask around on Google if it's a good idea [1]
Sunny places are often also very hot, but solar panels (like other electronics) work best in cool weather. With an average annual temperature of 57 degrees, solar panels love San Francisco. Solar power output is actually higher in San Francisco than in Sacramento, even though Sacramento gets more sunshine, because of Sacramento’s heat.
[1] https://pureenergies.com/us/ci... [pureenergies.com]
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Can you provide a credible reference instead of a fact-free brochure posted by an entity partial to the subject?
Roof gardens (Score:3)
I'm with you on this one. It would be beautiful to see cities with flat roof gardens.
As far as the solar panel we could put them on the side of the house. Maybe even do some design to look good. And I'm not sure solar panels use the same light as plants. We could possibly develop transparent solar panels for an awning over the garden. This might let us have our cake and eat it too.
My dream home: Below ground living quarters; two or three floors; ground level parking lot and then a workshop and storage floor
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I think your dream home might work well in arid climates. In humid regions, I fear that mold would be a huge issue, Also, unless you build on a steep hillside with services available on a road below you, you are probably going to have to pump waste uphill to a sewer. What could possibly go wrong with that?
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Putting them on the sides of buildings would be inefficient. Panels need to be pointed at the right azimuth (doubt the building will just happen to have a face at the right angle) and tilted upward. That's why nobody puts them on surfaces that are perpendicular to the ground. They do roof or ground mount. It's not by accident.
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San Francisco Adopts Law Requiring Solar Panels On All New Buildings
What about heat pollution?
What a silly question.
1. Solar panels don't increase local heat, they decrease it, relative to dark roofs or dirt. They convert energy that would turn into heat into electricity. In a building, that electricity is likely converted back into heat somewhere in the building... but that conversion of electricity to heat would happen anyway. Without the solar panels it would be derived from, say, heat created elsewhere by burning coal.
2. Have you ever been to San Francisco? A little heat pollution would make
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Because our planet is dying and that trumps your right to be a unique snowflake.
Changing is not the same thing as Dying. The climate on this planet has been radically altered more than a few times and there is evidence of life going back an extremely long time through it all. Mass die offs and extinctions aren't a new thing by any means.
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There is however, a distinct lack of evidence for industrialized homosapiens living through all those previous changes in climate.
I didn't say Humans existed. I said life. Only Human arrogance would believe it is required to continue to exist beyond a certain point and based on how our species as a whole has been acting as of late, I'm not so sure we deserve to continue existing in our current numbers/form.
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Speaking as a human, I agree with your statement but find it less than useful for my decision making.
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Also we're in a new era of mass extinction called the anthropocene.
No we are not. Anthropocene has no official basis. It may someday (it is in discussion) but for now, we are still in the Holocene.
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You can dispute the name, but humans are still a mass extinction event.
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Geologically, how does the Holocene differ from the last interglacial period of the Pleistocene?
Re:going from illegal to mandatory overnight (Score:5, Insightful)
Because our planet is dying and that trumps your right to be a unique snowflake.
Sorry to break the news. Mother Earth doesn't need humans. Never has, never will. Go ask the dinosaurs if you don't believe me.
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Because our planet is dying and that trumps your right to be a unique snowflake.
Sorry to break the news. Mother Earth doesn't need humans. Never has, never will. Go ask the dinosaurs if you don't believe me.
I tried but couldn't find any. Please tell me where I can find a live one.
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Please tell me where I can find a live one.
Great white sharks are the closest living relative for the dinosaur. Find one. I'm sure you will get a mouth full.
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I assure you that the Earth will go right on living whether humanity is here or not. The planet got by just fine before us, and will get by just fine after we're fertilizer and everything we created is dust.
At least it's not a huge price burden (Score:5, Insightful)
With the ridiculous land values, installing a system like this would only be a tiny fraction of the home value, at least.
Re:At least it's not a huge price burden (Score:5, Insightful)
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That is not how I read it. I read it as saying that the new reg builds on the state's 15% solar capable requirement by saying now you have to put panels on ALL of that 15% solar capable. So in your example of a roof with 25% solar capable, you would be required to put panels on 15% of the roof (not 15% of the 25%).
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Why do you hate poor people?
For people that find it hard enough to pay the rent even a small cost like this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. As pointed out in one of those articles from the summary the city would get greater carbon reductions and reduced housing costs if they only allowed for taller residential buildings in the city.
Taller buildings are more efficient buildings. Taller buildings means more people per area, reducing costs and spreading the tax burden. People would be happi
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blah blah nuclear... we know already.
the problem isn't the nuclear itself, it's all the side crap like the totally inefficient way the fuel is USED...
thorium, on paper is a great idea, so is pebble bed. we should do that. we should build reactors that use the VAST MAJORITY of the fuel before it is designated waste and stored in a pool...
fix the underlying technical issues, deal with the proliferation possibility. once we get past that a reactor is simple.
that's why solar is a good idea NOW. even if w
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You're paying for this no matter what. If you're a renter in a new building, it goes into the rent. If you're a renter in an old building, the higher costs for new buildings drives up your rent too because people who can't afford the higher rents for the new buildings are now competing for your old building.
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Solar _pays for itself_ in many many cases. (I personally have such low electricity bills, and have relatively low electricity rates, that it doesn't really make sense for me now.) The renter's electric bill would be lower.
Expense? (Score:3)
I also think it's strange that buildings over 10 floors are exempt. They'd seem to be the most ideal candidates.
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| "I also think it's strange that buildings over 10 floors are exempt"
The buildings owned by the wealthy and (presumably) politically powerful are exempt from this mandate. Inexplicable!
Re:Expense? (Score:4, Interesting)
In general the [potential] wind velocities on the roof of very tall buildings make installing solar impractical.
It's not a conspiracy.
Expense! (Score:2)
San Francisco seems to be having a pretty major housing issue. What's the best fix? Make it more expensive to build things!
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San Francisco seems to be having a pretty major housing issue. What's the best fix? Make it more expensive to build things!
The cost of housing in San Francisco has absolutely no relationship to the cost of building a house in San Francisco. This is actually something that is of benefit to this initiative. The housing prices are so removed from reality that no one will notice an extra few thousand spent on a solar panel.
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The cost of housing in San Francisco has absolutely no relationship to the cost of building a house in San Francisco.
The issue is there isn't enough housing. Adding to the cost of building homes doesn't incentivize building more homes. When you increase taxes on cigarettes do people buy more cigarettes?
This is actually something that is of benefit to this initiative.
What? What initiative? Affordable housing or bolting solar panels to everything?
The housing prices are so removed from reality that no one will notice an extra few thousand spent on a solar panel.
It's pretty far from a few thousand. A cheap system averages $25,000 to $30,000, without incentives, for a single house. It's not just the cost of the panels, it's the inverter and electrical hookups.
I'm thinking more along the lines of apartmen
Probably not (Score:5, Informative)
How will small businesses that are just making ends meet cope with this mandate?
How do small businesses cope with mandates of elevators and wheelchair accessibility and sprinkler heads and exit signs and the thousands(!) of other code requirements?
[Buildings over 10 floors] seem to be the most ideal candidates.
Probably not. For one thing, tall buildings tend to be located near other tall buildings. Unlike low-rise buildings which are often approximately the same height, the height difference of skyscrapers can be 100s of feet. Shading becomes more of a challenge. But probably more importantly, the roof space of tall buildings is essentially too valuable -- it's needed for communication and mechanical units. Finally, skyscrapers make up a remarkably tiny percentage of roof space in San Francisco, so their inclusion or exclusion has a trivial impact on achieving the goals of the legislation.
Re:Expense? (Score:5, Insightful)
How will small businesses that are just making ends meet cope with this mandate?
A small business that is "just making ends meet" can't afford to have a new building constructed. They would be leasing space or buying an existing property.
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Uh, they could contract it out to Solar City and get a discount on their electricity rate without having to buy anything.
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The same way a lot of small businesses in California are dealing with the number of business unfriendly mandates like this, they pack up and move to Arizona or Texas.
The population in California is growing but this is largely due to immigration, legal and otherwise. The people that have an education, speak fluent English, know a trade, and are generally employable and have employees, tend to leave for greener pastures in other states. The people left behind are not the same level of wage earners as those
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You're right. California is where great companies are born. Arizona and Texas is where they go to die.
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The people that have an education, speak fluent English, know a trade, and are generally employable and have employees, tend to leave for greener pastures in other states. The people left behind are not the same level of wage earners as those that leave.
Yes, that must be why California's constant dollar per-person GDP [deptofnumbers.com] is going up faster than the national average. Oh, and California's percentage of wages going to worker is also growing faster than the national average so it must be all low skill workers that
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I also think it's strange that buildings over 10 floors are exempt. They'd seem to be the most ideal candidates.
No, the ratio of roof area to occupied area is a tiny fraction that of a single family house, in addition the roof area of those building are almost always dedicated to mechanical plants (HVAC, elevator motors, etc).
Location, Location, Location (Score:4, Insightful)
Not all locations are conducive to solar energy. Some properties are in shadows most of the day due to topography and surrounding terrain. Some properties face the wrong way so sun only hits directly half the day.
How many of these systems will be installed and never maintained? How many of these systems will just be shut off?
There will be many systems that will never recoup their costs installed under this new regulation.
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Some properties are in shadows most of the day due to topography and surrounding terrain.
Sorry but no. There's no mount doom in San Francisco. You'd have to be building in a cave to not be able to generate power due to topography in cities that are so close to the tropic of cancer. This isn't Finland where the sun skirts the horizon.
Some properties face the wrong way so sun only hits directly half the day.
You're talking about one hell of a sunny and cloud free city. People in north Germany have no problem paying back their solar panels even when they are pointed in non-ideal directions, and they'd give anything to have half of SF's sun pointing on their roofs.
How many of these systems will be installed and never maintained?
Maintai
Re:Location, Location, Location (Score:4, Informative)
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If you read the actual bill
Citation please. I could not find it.
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There is always rolls of flexible solar panels, which is fairly inexpensive to deploy and can cover a large area. Toss some of those on a roof, add a PWM charger, have it charge a 12 volt AGM deep cycle battery or two, add an inverter, and one has a nice little circuit to handle the parasitic current draws like chargers.
Heat Death of the Universe (Score:5, Funny)
I hope those SJWs in San Francisco realize that all those solar panels will contribute to the Sun burning out sooner. There's already not enough sunlight to go around. Just ask Greenland.
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Oh God... wish I still had mod points. LOL
San Francisco Has New Buildings? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does San Francisco allow people to put up new buildings?
I thought they just put up as many barriers to build things as they could. Hey, wait a sec...!
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It's sort of like Vermont banning fracking. There aren't any economically recoverable gas/oil deposits in Vermont, but they banned it anyway.
Trying to build a new building in SF is next to impossible, but by god if anyone tries it they'll put solar panels on the roof!
Collective virtue signaling.
Half-way There! (Score:4, Insightful)
My first thought... (Score:3)
OK so which SF politicians just coincidentally also own a solar panel company?
Solar power has its limits (Score:2)
I've seen a number of studies that tackle the limits of solar power from a number of angles, these include technical and economic.
A technical problem with solar power is that peak output is at noon but peak load is near sunset. Temperatures typically reach a maximum at about 4:00. People tend to go home to cook supper at about 5:00. Along with a few other factors that add to the electric load the viability of solar power peaks at about 30% of total production. Anything more and additional solar power ca
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OMG, NO! Not cheap electricity! Anything but that! OH THE HUMANITY!
If it's cheaper to pay people to use it than it is to throttle production, so be it! It's not a bad problem to have if you're a consumer. Not that any consumer will ever be paid to use electricity, that will be absorbed at the distributor level.
Meanwhile, I can set the dishwasher and dryer to run during that cheap peak production. It mi
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You present a few moronic arguments, like the one above. If the grid sees too much capacity b
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Apparently you seem to know very little about how the grid works. Except hydro power, of which California has little, none of the baseload-producing methods can be throttled fast enough to compensate for peaks and troughs of the solar power.
Everything is easy when you don't have the understanding.
... and on cloudy days, use artificial suns. (Score:2)
I'm all for this. On cloudy days, we can both provide extra sunlight, reduce the nuclear weapons stockpiles, generate rooftop solar power, aaaand launch kilotons of hardy payload to the stars.
The utilities are going to hate this... (Score:2)
...and not for any kind of reasons of profitability. There are severe infrastructure hurdles to overcome with any kind of off-site power generation, and SF has just declared that they are going to do all in their power to exacerbate them.
First, let's forget about how utilities generally have to pay you for what you generate that winds its way back to their network, although production at this scale can certainly become significant to a utilities bottom line (which means increasing prices per kWh for the res
They are doing it wrong (Score:2)
Total energy? (Score:2)
Have we reached energy parity with PV solar panels yet? ie. does the amount of useful electrical energy generated over the life of the panel exceed the amount of energy required to manufacture it? It certainly wasn't a few years ago when I last looked.
Also have they sorted out the massive pollution that arises as from the PV panel manufacturing process?
I'd like to know, as I am considering installing a few but there's no point if they still do more harm than good.
Practical questions (Score:2)
I am required to put panels on my roof. Do they need to be plugged in or can they just be roof ornaments?
If they have to be plugged in, then I need an inverter. Does it need to work?
If so, can I undersize the inverter or does it need to be the right size to handle the full generation of my panels?
If the latter, suppose I need two inverters and eventually one burns out. Do I need to replace it?
If so, what kind of monitoring do I need to detect when the inverter goes bad?
How long do I have to replace a broken
And of course it will be repealed.. (Score:2)
As soon they find it to be sexist somehow.
Re:Really??? (Score:4, Interesting)
A hill so very steep that it's in perpetual shadow for the entire year? That's a pretty steep hill, even for San Fran.
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A hill so very steep that it's in perpetual shadow for the entire year? That's a pretty steep hill, even for San Fran.
The shadow does not need to be perpetual. If a roof is shaded for even part of the day, then it would make more sense to put the panels elsewhere. Solar panels make sense in many situations, but mandating them everywhere is stupid. But this all academic anyway, since very few new buildings are likely to be built in SF. Last year, more than 95% of building permit applications are denied, by the same politicians that complain about a lack of affordable housing.
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Last year, more than 95% of building permit applications are denied, by the same politicians that complain about a lack of affordable housing.
How many of those building permit applications were for affordable housing? I wouldn't be surprised if they were all for luxury condo units. Developers love luxury project because they can make more money. My apartment complex has gone through three corporate owners in as many years, each of them splashing exterior paint and redoing the landscaping to charge luxury rents.
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They can do it because you want to live there. Its called economics.
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They can do it because you want to live there. Its called economics.
Luxury development is a nation-wide problem.
Out of every five multifamily rentals built in the country's biggest cities from 2012 to 2014, four were luxury apartments "that command rents in the top 20 percent of the market," the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The 82 percent figure that real estate researchers at CoStar Group came up with in its analysis for the newspaper is an average of data from 54 separate metro areas. The percentage is even higher in some cities from the list, such as Atlanta's 95 percent luxury construction rate from the three-year period.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/05/22/3662239/luxury-housing-80-percent-developers/ [thinkprogress.org]
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How many of those building permit applications were for affordable housing?
It doesn't matter. If they are all luxury condos, then the people moving into them are moving out of other housing. The supply of housing will still go up, and prices will then go down. Economics 101.
That's how it's supposed to work, but it's not really. Because those landlords in the units being moved out of don't want to admit their property is past prime and they need to lower their rent accordingly. So you end up with what I have in my hometown (a college town). Lots of under-inhabited luxury apartment buildings waiting for that student with parents with deep pockets that isn't going to come, and a population of local residents who can't find housing affordable for local wages (which are also being
rooftop garden (Score:4, Insightful)
what about rooftop gardens
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Grow mushrooms
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A good friend of mine lives in the city. His one story house is down the north slope from his neighboring two story row-house. His roof doesn't get any sun much of the year, and when it does it ain't much.
That said, adding panels during new construction adds very little to the cost.
This is a building regulation. Exemptions from building regulations aren't that uncommon.
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Hi. You made a bit of a fly-by assertion that piqued my interest. Can you explain further how adding panels at the time of construction adds very little to the cost?
Re:Really??? (Score:5, Insightful)
and if I'm building on the north side of a hill???
Did you read the bill? They are typically more than one liners. There's probably all sorts of caveats and exclusions in the details. Not to mention that just because the law says something any builder can request a variance.
So its a bit premature to just assume you would actually need to put solar panels on a building that gets no sunlight.
idiots....
Once you've determined the bill actually does require you to put panels on your permashaded building AND your request for a variance has been denied you can call them idiots.
Until then though, I figure the idiot is more likely to be you.
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Weird to have you beat someone up for not reading the bill when you didn't even read TFA.
Not that weird. Common sense applies here.
California already had a stupid law saying x% of new buildings statewide must be "solar capable", meaning not shaded.
That's not quite what it means. It means they must be constructed so that they themselves don't preclude the use of solar on their roofs by their own design, it obviously doesn't mean that they passed a law requiring new buildings to somehow defy physics and receive sunlight even if there is a mountain or neighboring building blocking it.
That is the stupid law.
How is it a stupid law? It's a pretty modest 15% and easily achievable.
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Don't worry, San Francisco hasn't allowed any new buildings to be built in decades.
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No, because solar panels steal all the sunshine and the town will be thrown into perpetual darkness!
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No I couldn't imagine some city in Alabama doing this - Most of us who live in Alabama are smarter then this. If it made economic sense, business and builders would be doing this already.
Solar panels more than pay for themselves during their lifetimes, usually several times over with today's technology. What it illustrates is short-term thinking -- saving a small amount of money today instead of a larger amount tomorrow.
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with or without the subsidies?
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This is false, unless by "lifetimes" you mean "unicorn farts". Solar companies in the west begin negotiations by asking what your current power bill is, then sell you a system that produces EXACTLY the amount of energy you need, and they put you on a payment plan that costs just a hair under what you were paying the power company. That payment plan is typically 25 years... the exact time frame that they will warranty the equipment. So in reality you're just renting power from someone else... the only thi
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As a homeowner you may come out OK if you take into account all the subsidies. Economically, solar cells are still not competitive (they will be competitive in about 10 years if current trends continue).
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Solar panels more than pay for themselves during their lifetimes, usually several times over with today's technology
That's a truckload of BS. Remove the subsidies and you'll be lucky if they break even. Remove the unfair rates the PU has to pay for the energy these panels push into the grid and you're always ending with a net loss.
This law, as applied to San Francisco, serves exactly two purposes: window dressing to make the city look even more "progressive" and enriching a few solar companies, who happen to have their headquarters in the Bay Area. It makes no sense financially because the total available solar radiance
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Unfair rates? How are they unfair rates? Isn't the typical rate the _lowest_ rate that a customer would pay?
So the customer is generating electricity, being able to net zero their usage throughout the year with a big enough system..
What's unfair?
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Loans for solar are government subsidized and often come with no interest. Even if they did come with interest, have you seen interest rates recently?
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Wasn't there a politician stating that the energy cost for making panels (fabbing the silicon, smelting the aluminum/steel for the frames) is far more than a panel will ever get back in its lifetime?
Yes, and he was a moron and wrong.
Same fucking bullshit was spouted about hybrid cars.
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But their lifetime is rather longer than the amount of time anyone is likely to own the building, and (given the way real estate works) you can expect that they won't add much to resale value.
Uhhh, what? They certainly added to the resale value of my home. And the improvements my mom made to her house greatly increased its value as well.
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Solar construction is picking up in the oil states.
Plunging oil and gas has generated more than 84,000 pink slips in Texas, according to the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers. But many rig hands, roustabouts, pipe fitters and even some engineers are finding a surprising alternative in the utility-scale solar farms rising from the desert near the border with New Mexico.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/as-oil-jobs-dry-up-workers-turn-to-solar-sector-1461280612 [wsj.com]
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Hostility towards knee-jerk nasty responses which clearly have not involved even reading and comprehending TFA is not that astonishing.
While laws can be stupid it may be worth not *assuming* that they were created blindly by drunken morons.
And indeed 5 minutes' reading shows that there are all sorts of caveats, but in particular all this law seems to do is require fitting solar on the area that a state law already mandates being 'solar ready'. So not *that* dramatic.
Rgds
Damon