I’ve said it a million times, we had the opportunity to get into the market early under Bush JR, but he shot down investing in the tech. Now who is one of the top exporters?

It's more complicated than that. Supply shocks cause short term instability in markets that require long term revenue streams to offer service.

Because we privatized our infrastructure, and because private firms divert a bunch of their revenue to profit, we have a bunch of material infrastructure that needs to be maintained by firms more interested in extracting profit than keeping them functional.

That's the real threat of solar panels. If we cut into private profit margins, they'll allow the infrastructure to collapse rather than maintain them with declining profit.

It's nuanced. Domestic solar panel production is lagging and cheaper shit from China is gonna make it worse. It is not necessarily evil to want to have local production, and if we live under capitalism then it has to make money.

I agree though that for the most part even our good politicians do whatever they can to maintain the status quo, and that is generally bad for us and good for corporations and the billionaires

A $20k LiPo4 battery in every home can remove almost all base load needs and is available today.

Get to 100% solar, then figure out how much coal/gas/oil can slowly be removed.

We have already escaped scarcity. In fact, we have escaped scarcity to such a degree that the parasitic elites have to artificially enforce scarcity onto us in order to maintain their positions as parasitic elites.

We were the gray goo the whole time

Even if population doesn’t, the constant advancement and use of portable electronics, electric cars, and a warming earth will require more environmental controls for living spaces. These will drive up demand for electricity.

So in theory a baseline maintenance fee could solve this. You just make it so the metered charge counts against that fee until it's covered, so the people who don't have alternate sources of electricity aren't affected.

I think the "capitalism" part comes around because most electric grids (in the US) are privately owned and actively try to turn a profit. For those companies, the fact that some people use solar panels will just become an excuse to charge everyone a fee.

This.

For those not in the industry, the drivers for this are green tags and production tax credits (more common in wind).

Green tags are basically attaboys for funding the generation of renewable electricity, and are tradable.

Production tax credits are a $/MWH tax incentive for generating renewable power, and are, again, tradable.

In both cases, then, there are incentives for renewable projects to keep producing power even when the wholesale power price at the point of interconnection is negative, as there are generation incentives that still make it better than idling.

From an environmentalist perspective, this is fantastic, as virtually all of this renewable generation represents offset coal and gas peaker plant generation.

Depends on the region and supplier, but generally speaking the price per kW of solar install has been dropping like 20-50% per year.

Let's say you spend $5,000 on 5 kW of panels and your monthly energy bill is ~$200. It'll take 25 months or just over 2 years for the panels to break even.

However, panel substrate materials tend to die after 25 years of service life, so for the remaining 23 years that they exist, they will be making you ~$4,600/year (since you no longer pay for electricity).

The main positive of solar is that the sun will literally outlast human civilization and is about the closest thing to free energy that we have in our fucked up world. No one rushes over with an umbrella in public parks and charges tariffs.

Just food for thought.

I'm an engineer who designs solar array for a living, here's how the math breaks down in fairly typical round numbers.

The all-in cost is around $2-3k per kilowatt (thats equipment, installation, permitting, utility approvals, etc), so a 5kW system (pretty typical residential size) would cost $10-15k. Each kilowatt produces about 1000-1500 kWh every year (depending on your latitude and how much sun your roof gets), so if your electric company charges you $0.10 per kWh, that 5kW system will generate $500-750 worth of energy annually. Without incentives it would pay itself off in 20 or 30 years, but if your state has good solar incentives that can be much shorter, if you pay a lot more for electricity it pays itself off sooner as well.