Desert Solar

I happened to be listening to the PBS news today and heard an interesting, and infuriating, bit concerning a proposed new solar power plant for the Mojave Desert in Southern California.  This new power plant is supposed to be able to power 85,000 homes (I wonder how much power is assumed for a home?  Maybe 7000 watts of solar panels per home.)  In order to do so, they are expecting to get $1.5B in incentive money from the Federal government.  The new plant will undoubtedly be several square miles in extent, and be placed on almost "free" BLM land (more than likely a zero cost,  20 year lease).  In addition, it is probably going to require some new power lines and things like that - which will probably be incentivized by the government either in the form of outright grants or generous tax breaks.  Once on line, I assume even more juicy tax breaks on the profits of the plant.  It is hard to know for sure how much the total bill to taxpayers will be - but I think it is reasonable to assume a cost to the taxpayers of at least $2B over the 20 year or so expected life. They claim that it will create about 350 new construction jobs for one year (about $5.5M per job!).

Just for fun, I did a little math to see how that works out per house.  That comes out to about $24,000 per home.  An individual solar system to power an "average" home costs about $30,000.  If that money were to go into solar on homes instead of in the desert, the same money would provide about 75% of the cost of the solar for the 85,000 homes - and would result in the interesting result that 85,000 homes would no longer have a power bill for a $6,000 per homeowner investment! In reality, it is a little hard to figure out the projected costs because that many installations might push the price of solar installations up, or down.  I predict a downward trend.

It seems unfair that some people would get free "free" power, so to be "fair" the homeowner needs to somehow pay a "reasonable" amount.  One approach would be to provide low (or no) cost loans for the extra $6,000 so that the homeowner has an invested stake and ends up paying something toward the cost of installation, with no up-front cost.  The entire upfront cost to the homeowner would be zero dollars, with something like 3/4 of their current bill going to pay off the loan in 10 years.  The money going back into the system could end up leveraging the money so that close to 100,000 homes could get enough power from their roofs for the same tax dollar.

It wouldn't be "free" to the homeowner, but it would be without upfront cost, would reduce their utility bill, and would give them "free"  power after ten years in return for the use of their roof space.

The number of jobs necessary to install the 100,000 systems would be substantial. Assuming that a crew of three could install a system in two days - that would amount to 600,000 man-days, or about 2,400 full time positions - eight times as much as the power plant in the desert.

So, there seems to be a choice.  We (the taxpayers) could use this same amount of money to do one of two things:

1 - we could give it to a large corporation (almost certainly owned by an European company like the others being built or planned in the desert).  This would create power for 85,000 homes; would cost about $2B in tax dollars; would create 350 jobs in the desert; would require the building of new power lines; would result in the creation of a short lived "boom town" in the desert for a year or so, which would then have to be abandoned; would destroy several square miles of pristine desert ecology; and would result in an increase in utility bills for everyone involved (the prices will go up for this power because it is going to be sold as "offset" power to help companies and municipalities meet the new green house gas requirements). 

2 - We could spend the same amount of money; provide power for 100,000 homes; not impact any land or ecology (because it is already impacted by the existing homes); would use existing power lines; and would  reduce the utility bills for 100,000 tax payers (to be used to fuel the local economy); would provide 2400 jobs locally from the existing communities; and would be included in the municipalities' green house goals with no additional cost to the community.

The only downside to the second approach that I can think of is that it eliminates 100,000 customers from the utilities' income base.  We would be using tax payer money to offset power, and offset utility costs,  but it would also offset anticipated revenues to the  power companies.  There's the rub. 

It is this last reason that makes me think that utilities should be either publicly owned, or not-for-profit companies.  Because they are privately owned, we (the taxpayers) can't seem to make logical and reasonable decisions about how to spend our tax money to get us off of our  "addiction" to fossil fuels.