• California to become first U.S. state mandating solar on new homes
    51 replies, posted
https://www.ocregister.com/2018/05/04/california-to-become-first-u-s-state-mandating-solar-on-new-homes/
Now make it a federal mandate
NIMBYS will be NOMHR
Yeah, good luck while that tiny-handed bag of cholesterol is still in charge.
Yeh, nationwide is silly. If we're talking green power what's efficient depends entirely upon where you live. In some places you'll want wind farms, in some places hydroelectric, etc..
I'm surprised solar vacuum tubes and air source heat pumps aren't bigger in America. Solar tubes work pretty well in the UK and it ain't exactly known for sunshine over here. Heating water via standard immersion heaters is super inefficient so that's a big thing that needs to change. Heat pumps are 150-300% efficient and gives you water at 65c.
Instead of addition to solar, how about more backing behind nuclear power?
This sure will help housing costs Like honestly, I can't decide if this is an amazing or terrible idea.
Even latest generation nuclear sucks. It's good at energy production (safe, reliable), but it sucks in terms of size and cost. If we had LFTR, sure. Nuclear is still better than fossil though, and current designs are good enough as a stopgap until MSR gets developed.
A nationwide mandate for this kind of shit would be a fucking awful idea because it would raise the cost of housing with no return to homeowners in areas where it's not worth it. Meanwhile in places like Florida we've got power companies quite literally creating fake 'solar power friendly' laws to be voted onto the books which actually create more restrictions for personal solar power because they're afraid of what widespread personal solar will do to their bottom line. Leading into 2016 there were usually a half a dozen or so guys who'd probably been paid by the power companies to be there handing out petition pamphlets to get the measure voted on around the uni campus I attend. Thankfully the truth came out and got spread around so it didn't pass but it's amazing what lengths they'll go to to make sure that you can't power your own house or sell surplus back to the grid. I presume California is in a similar situation where it's generally worth it due to the climate, though I would worry about what it does to the baseline cost of the house. Getting into homeownership might be harder if the base price is higher, even if the long-term gains happen to be good.
GL also short-term scalability lol It'll likely be a relatively small addition to the problem compared to the already existing NIMBY-ism and lack of good public transit.
The article in the OP says the new standards add $15,000-$30,000 (so I expect it to be $30,000+) onto the construction costs of all new homes. That's a massive increase.
California's building homes?
Boy, the added cost of solar panels sure is gonna solve our inflated housing cost crisis driving away the entire middle class.
California has an inflated housing cost because they're not building enough housing.
Yes, and this can only help that
Where dem Tesla solar roofing tiles at.
Solar panels aren't the reason they won't build housing.
Sspecializing in one energy is just a really bad idea tbh
No, but it still increases the price of a property by the value of the solar panel installation on top of the already inflated price.
When we're talking about the problems of housing in california one important thing to keep in mind is what these rules actually apply to as well. If anything, government raising the cost of single-family homes is a good thing here, because it discourages wasteful land usage. And for the overall cost of the house, reduced energy costs would also have to be taken into account. It's hard to tell with that what the sticker price will be for the majority of people mortgaging/renting.
... wouldn't that be made up for by extra-long days, even continuous sunlight above the Arctic Circle, in summer? I know it would generally be at a low angle, but you've also got generally high cost for electricity distribution, because of terrain and low population density. It actually kind of makes sense to use solar up north, if it's cheap enough.
At the moment, the up front cost is the problem people have, and even the article admits that the cost won't be recouped until ~25 years later, and that's assuming there's no maintenance or replacement needed. That's also ignoring inflation and the opportunity cost of having to wait a decade for that money to come back instead of being able to invest that extra money. California's housing crisis has to do with there being way too few homes, not "wasteful land usage."
And what do you think is leading to there being too few homes? Just an analogy, singapore has crammed almost twice the amount of people on a tiny rock that's about half the size of LA alone. Land use matters a LOT.
California building regulations are a huge part. For example, from 2012 to 2017 the San Francisco area added 400,000 jobs, but only gave out 60,000 new housing permits. Of course you're going to see massive spikes in house shortages when the government literally won't let people build more houses. California isn't Singapore. Space isn't the issue.
It kind of is when your jobs are all concentrated in a small amount of locations, forcing people to either pay up a fuckload of money to live near their job, or suffer the health costs of a long commute of driving (cause you ain't got good public transit either.) Also people are allowed to build houses, but not the high-density housing needed.
They aren't allowing enough homes at all, including suburban developments. You also have the incredibly high levels of fees for developers, the highest in the nation Take the Inland Empire. I doubt it's a coincidence that the IE has the highest impact fees in the US, and also has the least amount of housing being built. Whether high or low density, the state and local governments are putting too many blocks in place of new development. On public transit: it's simply impossible in a place like LA. The population is spread incredibly far and wide.
The population is spread too far and wide for the reasons I put out, of valuable land being eaten up by single-family homes who then go on to support regulations to keep it that way. Along with the high emphasis on cars wasting a ton of space with mandatory parking and huge roads. You don't even have to get to the fees, for the high-density housing that is needed, it's straight illegal. In that document I liked it shows a graph on page 3 and explains what I mean, under old housing practices LA would have been capable of supporting a population of 10 million people, and now that's down to 4.3 million. The reason for that is because in the 60s people got damn terrified and began fighting growth very hard. Single-family homes have been a blight on these areas.
Can you explain, then, why there are huge housing shortages in places like the Inland Empire, where there is a ton of empty space all around it, according to your theory?
You're going to have to be more specific since the inland empire is pretty big. Coachella, for example, isn't very expensive. And a lot of this has to do not just with land itself, but where the land actually is.
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