What are the companies in this space doing the installations and system integration?
What are the bottlenecks on rollout other than prohibitory regulations?
What is the reasoning for the government prohibiting solar in “Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin”?
The article says these states "actively" discourage rooftop solar, but "actively" may differ from what most readers think:
> They typically make it difficult for homeowners or property owners to install solar and connect it to the grid, or they prohibit a third party from paying for the installation.
The "net metering" takes active work and costs by the utility to support, so some states never enacted it.
The "pay a third party" prohibition stems from existing utility monopoly rules that allow only the utility companies to sell electricity. So what they "actively prohibit" is not just solar - they actively probihit anyone but approved utilities from selling electricity in the state.
The answer to your last question is basically “red state politicians are deep in the pockets of coal and oil interests”.
It’s not exclusively a GOP thing, Manchin is theoretically a D but he sure is holding back a lot of stuff in the Senate due to him being massively invested in dirty energy, but it’s more a Repub thing than a Dem thing.
re: "prohibiting solar" -- many utilities are able to convince their public utilities commission or legislature that it's in the best interest of the state to prevent competition to protect their natural monopoly.
Very much this. We were in the middle of designing and installing a total solar array for our farm when the state ended every single subsidy and electricity buyback plan. We could install all the solar panels we want, but any electricity we pump into the grid is done for free (we don't get paid) and any power we take from the grid we pay 100% for with no credit for any power we pushed upstream.
This forced us to increase the panel array size by another 25% to 30% to make sure we had more coverage, increase the battery storage we needed, and increased the breakeven point to more than 30 years.
We decided to not do it. For a world that needs more renewable energy (I sort of hate that term) politicians work awful hard to make it not happen.
It's not just in the US that this sort of thing happens. Sitting here in sunny South Africa, where we have regular rolling/controlled blackouts (load-shedding) because the utilities simply aren't able to generate enough electricity to cover all the demand. You'd think they'd incentivize people generating their own solar like crazy, but they don't. They actively punish people that push back to the grid with onerous requirements. The dirty little secret is that a lot of us have "old" "analog" electricity meters, which can literally go backwards when you push to the grid, which many do.
It will take a few years to fix that probably. But ultimately, politicians won't want to be in between companies and consumers and some very significant savings on their power bills. No public utility is that strong. It's interesting how solar panels stopped being a divisive topic between different political factions. Everybody likes saving money on power bills. And lots of people are waking up to the notion that 1) they are paying a lot for power and 2) a lot of other people they know are not because they have solar panels. It's irresistible for lots of people.
As world + dog starts driving EVs, businesses will want to offer them power charging at their venues to provide a convenient way to top up. That requires cheap power and solar is a great way to get that. The collective power of lots of businesses and consumers demanding their right to access to solar will win ultimately. It's winning everywhere else. Of course there are some places where it is taking a bit longer than it should. But better late than never.
What are the bottlenecks on rollout other than prohibitory regulations?
What is the reasoning for the government prohibiting solar in “Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin”?