Much too confident and dogmatic, with no data or analysis to support the claim.

It would be instructive to read “The Decisive Moment – How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind” by Jonah Lehrer. It discusses the latest research findings on decisions, and flaws in decision-making.

“The central error diagnosed…was the sin of certainty…hubris, the vice of close-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly.”

The point is that neither the rich old hippy nor the struggling urban sprawl loser ought to be supported in this way because neither is sustainable and both amount to poor uses of public funds

I would also prefer to see power generation being seen to be a responsibility of governments at the various levels or collective organisations rather than throwing that responsibility into the lap of private individuals. It would be cheaper to build a network of small to medium scale distributed power stations located within residential areas rather than trying to aggregate a large number of privately owned micro installations or relying on a few mega-sized power stations built a large distance from urban centres. Wind farms can only be built in a limited number of places. One problem with PV panels is that people tend to move house every so often.

Distributed solar power stations built and maintained at the local council level could be an optimal way to generate electricity. It would also be at a good scale to store energy with the grid in sodium-sulfur batteries and the like. It also has the advantage that unlike large commercial ventures for solar energy, they would be at a lesser risk of going broke and having the whole project cancelled. You could still have commercial companies that specialise in designing and building solar power stations for councils.

in defense of your lucky 1 million rich old hippies that have graciously accepted the $ 8000.00 of government grant, vis a vis your struggling urban sprawl looser.

Have you considered that the rich old hippie more likely practices water conservation and considers her/his social and ecological footprint, does ethical investment, works from home or close to, buys locally and has his own chickens for eggs and meat.

I ask you which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

If even hubby and I despite being both reasonably well paid can’t afford to buy the house we’ve rented for nearly 20 years (=debt service on about 700-800k) then we’d have to be a lot richer to get PV here.

In practice to qualify you are going to have to be someone 100-200 basis points away from being a distressed seller of an outer urban property and thus barely able to afford the PV even with the subsidy or someone who has owned their property long enough to be able to service the debt with a modest income.

Self evidently, urban sprawl is a bad thing, since those people working all that overtime to service the loan and sitting near-stationary on the motorway for 20 hours each week aren’t doing themselves or the environment any favours, but they are demanding miles and miles of extra pipe-length for water and cable length for data and power all of which must be serviced and maintained, not to speak of all that extra concrete. They have to drive to the shops and their kids to school since densities are too low to support public transport. And what happens when they decommission the system 20 years hence?

Can you really believe that a PV system on their roof they can barely afford and which is subsidised by the state and by the feed-in tariff, if there is one can be more than a tiny green speck on that massively brown footprint?

How is that even equitable?

I don’t see that model as supportable, Elise.

it’s lovely that the current economy is much more efficient than the systems first set up at the start of the modern industrial revolution, but why you consider that an appropriate benchmark is where your logic completely falls apart.

The question is not “is the current economy more efficient than the oldest industrial technology”, the real question is “what efficiency target do we have to meet to make an adequate enough contribution to avoiding extreme climate change?”

The value that the data you linked to shows is the rate at which the economy has been able to change towards greater efficiency, and that provides a necessary limiter to coming up with unrealistic suppositions about the possible rate of change. Of course if we really want to see how fast the economy can adapt in an emergency that threatens the survival of key industries, we should look at the OPEC crisis as a guide.

Households with private solar would get a double benefit, the rest could benefit by the municipal socialisation of solar.