[HN Gopher] Requiem for a Solar Plant
___________________________________________________________________
Requiem for a Solar Plant
Author : akkartik
Score : 126 points
Date : 2025-06-21 22:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (7goldfish.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (7goldfish.com)
| stego-tech wrote:
| This is a good story that taps into a lot of the systemic
| failings in America that hinder progress. Failure of the state to
| prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights.
| Failure of utility companies to maintain their infrastructure to
| modern standards. Failure of governments to produce consistent
| and predictable business environments. Failure of bureaucracy to
| prepare creators and visionaries for success.
|
| All of this results in good intentions being squandered because
| too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical
| value on a balance sheet to just do something _better_ for
| everyone.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| yes, but... if youre manufacturing plant with expected
| electricity usage, then build solar plant next / close to your
| manufacturing facility. or municipality or water treatment
| plant or .... build solar plant because you need electricity,
| do not build solar plant because you need money. same as with
| agriculture, it is nonprofit endevour, you are not getting rich
| from corn, you are rich from corn sirup, from tortillas... (
| unless you are bill gates and divert tax breaks / subsidies
| away from agriculture and put them into your wallet instead,
| worsening situation forr every person inside of US borders )
|
| solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only
| because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand
| why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs
| invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it
| was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is
| working.
|
| build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not
| goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities,
| better republic.
|
| "Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over
| hypothetical mineral rights. "
|
| where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self
| sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power
| here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of
| magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are
| multiple bad things in that endeavor.
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| or let me say it differently, my house needs as much energy
| to make it luxuriously comfortable in coldest of days, as my
| neighbors house loses just thru chimney, when there is no
| fire burning... ( he needs 50times more energy then me, but
| he is not comfortable, he wakes up into cold house )
|
| there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality,
| schooling failed many.
|
| less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word
| for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is
| smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so
| smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less
| people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all
| this effect from on freaking house.
|
| or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my
| house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on
| sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least
| 10 people will die today,... why?
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm so confused by the chimney thing, a nice wood stove
| which I assume your neighbor is using because it's not
| practical or possible to heat your house with a fireplace
| can get you 70-80% efficiency and run overnight. They burn
| clean enough that I can't tell when my neighbors
| (presumably always) use theirs and they're directly across
| the street. The whole neighborhood knows when I use my
| fireplace.
|
| My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area
| where you absolutely don't have to--we have gas and
| electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the
| nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden
| tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords
| of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it.
|
| Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for
| working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about
| their experiences.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The same goes for household solar. You don't put it on the
| roof because you think you'll make money from feed in
| tariffs, you do it to reduce your electricity bill.
|
| People here in Australia expect feed in tariff to drop to
| nothing in the next few years, but electric prices are still
| climbing.
|
| Our new government has promised battery subsidies as well, so
| I expect batteries to take off. There is a lot of money to be
| saved by time shifting all that sun that is wasted during the
| day until the evening when you get home.
| cavisne wrote:
| Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He
| had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to
| society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed
| on that windfall.
|
| Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of
| nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)?
| Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the
| interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?
|
| Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the
| subsidies for an actual useful solar project.
|
| EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original
| cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came
| into play
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| These are all fair points.
|
| The extra costs and limits are ostensibly because of safety.
| Yes, I know that engineers can game the system, but they're
| listing real reasons why the plant should shoulder the costs
| to the larger grid.
| oezi wrote:
| As a European three things stood out for me:
|
| - He didn't consult with somebody who had any experience in
| planning such a project, but a person who - while maybe
| personally impressive - had zero experience and started by
| writing scripts to find suitable properties. Isn't the project
| already doomed at this point? You are looking to invest 7m USD,
| who will you consult for this?
|
| - He wouldn't do the project unless he was able to get
| insurance for it. The whole issue of exploring and acquiring
| mineral rights was just to get insurance for the project. Why
| not forego insurance? EDIT: Okay, needed insurance for
| financing the project. I assumed the project would be financed
| through the crypto gains.
|
| - From ballpark numbers his projected cost of 1,37 USD per Watt
| DC seems very high (~2 USD per Watt Peak AC). In Europe large
| scale PV has reached 600 EUR / kWp so building a 4.5 MWp plant
| should cost more like 3m USD rather than his projected 9m USD.
| Of course 4.5 MW is small (10000 panels) so this might be part
| of the issue.
| DamonHD wrote:
| AFAIK, because of protectionism (even pre Trump), US solar
| _is_ much more expensive than elsewhere.
| FpUser wrote:
| >"good intentions being squandered"
|
| Relying on tax credits and otherwise "optimizing" tax payments
| and "good intentions" do not sleep well together in my opinion.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| "Gambler attempts to convert lottery ticket winnings into
| clean energy to minimize taxes." is fine imho. It didn't work
| out, but if it had, the outcome would've been "good" and he
| still learned a lesson and shared with the rest of us. No
| different than a failed startup. You win or you learn.
| FpUser wrote:
| Oh, I am in no way judging them personally. Just do not
| bring that "we are doing it for the humanity" BS into what
| is in an essence a pure gamble.
| nick238 wrote:
| So with mineral rights in Texas, could you just buy/lease them
| out from under one of your rivals/enemies and just bulldoze their
| buildings for the lulz? "Sorry, I just really needed that
| teaspoon of dirt from under your multimillion dollar factory". I
| guess that's the whole idea of the insurance/waivers, so do you
| need 50% of the owners of the rights to agree?
|
| Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf.
| Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
| jeffbee wrote:
| This is not only Texas. It is everywhere. It is why "real
| estate" is a descriptive term that exists.
| oezi wrote:
| Well you need to find something to exercise the rights I would
| assume.
|
| He couldn't get insurance without a waiver. He couldn't get a
| mortgage without insurance. So he didn't want to invest his own
| cash exclusively.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas
|
| I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
| Calwestjobs wrote:
| capital in capitalism.
| dhosek wrote:
| If you give them the money after they do the favor, it's legal,
| the supreme court said so. Plus, apparently trump feels that
| bribing foreign officials is essential to American
| competitiveness so FCPA is going unenforced. Welcome to the
| future.
| giblfiz wrote:
| Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the
| thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure
| problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping
| our way thru it bit by bit.
|
| Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were
| in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had
| degraded)
|
| This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing
| transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it
| would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission
| grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We
| would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or
| solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be
| overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the
| results and estimate the transmission costs.
|
| Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used
| internally. The users of this product were all former ISO
| employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining
| whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before
| any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The
| users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission
| upgrades on $50m+ projects.
|
| The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under
| confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a
| competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated
| to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
|
| I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably
| bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues
| if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most
| of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already
| doing this sort of thing.
|
| [1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-
| softw...
|
| [2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/
| cwal37 wrote:
| imo, that's basically the dirty secret of grid data, post 9/11
| it seemed as if everything went behind the CEII wall, but in
| reality it has always been that if you're a legacy player or
| have the money you can make sure you have access to everything.
|
| It's a thorny issue and something I ponder in my day-to-day[0].
| We're members in ISOs where it makes sense, and can provide
| CEII data once we've confirmed customers already have access,
| but I would love to be able to show some of it publicly. It's
| also odd how things vary from market to market. Transmission
| outages: public everywhere, except ERCOT, where they're
| considered Secure. Generator bids: anonymized and delayed by up
| to 90 days everywhere, except ERCOT, where it's 60-days and not
| anonymized at all (yes, ERCOT is different wrt to FERC
| jurisdiction).
|
| Years ago I worked at a market monitor[1], and we got
| everything, just cloning the changes to ISO databases overnight
| every day, second-by-second PI (plant information) data, it was
| awesome. The potential advantages from data asymmetry are big
| enough that there are multiple companies with physical sensors
| out in the world measuring power lines in different ways to try
| and reconstruct grid activity in real time, and then others
| doing it entirely from access to CEII and a deep understanding
| of how the grid function. But all of this is heavily oriented
| towards traders, not developers, although I would use trading
| tools when developing projects because they were the most
| advanced.
|
| [0] https://www.gridstatus.io/live
|
| [1] https://potomaceconomics.com/
| hackernudes wrote:
| Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to
| create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with
| challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees
| to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth
| it.
| bri3k wrote:
| Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge
| on capital gains from said crypto money.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In the same way that any business expansion is a tax dodge,
| sure.
| bri3k wrote:
| He started out to find ways to lower his tax burden. Found
| something with solar infrastructure in a different state.
| Went ahead with it in spite of having no experience with
| the local laws or infrastructure projects and wondered why
| it failed?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm not shocked that it failed. But taking money that
| would have been profit and turning it into company
| creation/expansion is something that is taxed lower for a
| reason.
| Retric wrote:
| > for a reason.
|
| Yea, corruption. Tax breaks on past gains are just
| handouts and everyone wants a handout.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > past gains
|
| To focus on "past": I don't think deferring the gains for
| a couple years is a big deal. It's not a handout because
| he'll still be paying the same taxes if he doesn't end up
| reinvesting the money. It just offers him some more time
| to set up a business, instead of having to do it same-
| year.
|
| To focus on "gains": If you don't like the entire idea of
| reinvested money not counting as profits, oh boy that's a
| big objection, and it's not that way because of
| corruption.
| Retric wrote:
| Sign me up for some interest free loans then. Deferring
| capital gains is a huge windfall.
|
| Reinvesting money getting special treatment provides zero
| benefits to the economy. It falls under the fallacy that
| rich people can avoid investing their fortunes, inflation
| already makes that a nonstarter. The only result here is
| a handout.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Business expenses are tax deductions because business
| taxes are on profits and profits are calculated as
| revenue minus expenses.
|
| Taxing businesses on revenue rather than profits doesn't
| work because it would bankrupt every business with slim
| margins, which is most of them, while effectively cutting
| taxes for the ones with the thickest margins and creating
| a massive tax subsidy for vertical integration.
|
| > It falls under the fallacy that rich people can avoid
| investing their fortunes, inflation already makes that a
| nonstarter.
|
| If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they
| could just buy a stack of precious metals. Moreover, the
| return from typical passive investments (e.g. S&P 500)
| significantly exceeds the rate of inflation.
|
| The preference for investment is as opposed to spending.
| If inflation is at 3% and someone is getting a 10% return
| from stocks, they can avoid real value loss while still
| spending up to 70% of the nominal profits. But we'd
| rather people build factories and develop new drugs and
| technologies than buy second private jets and third
| personal mansions.
| Retric wrote:
| > Business expenses
|
| Investment isn't a business expense.
|
| > If all someone cared about was avoiding inflation they
| could just buy a stack of precious metals.
|
| Capital gains of precious metals "yield" drops you below
| inflation.
|
| > But we'd rather people build factories and develop new
| drugs and technologies than buy second private jets and
| third personal mansions.
|
| Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P
| gains. Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly
| discourages them using a private jet, just the opposite.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Investment isn't a business expense.
|
| Investment is the thing where you pay a business expense
| today expecting a return in the future.
|
| > Capital gains of precious metals "yield" drops you
| below inflation.
|
| This is a defect in the tax code. Taxing inflation as a
| capital gain is ridiculous.
|
| > Someone needs to do that for your hypothetical 10% S&P
| gains.
|
| And then those companies get a tax deduction. Or in many
| cases they _do_ make those returns without doing those
| things, because a lot of those companies have high
| returns by buying off regulators to constrain competition
| and then charging high margins to captive customers,
| which is another thing we don 't like to promote over the
| ones actually making productive investments.
|
| > Giving handouts to wealthy people hardly discourages
| them using a private jet, just the opposite.
|
| The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal
| consumption.
| Retric wrote:
| > Investment is the thing where you pay a business
| expense today expecting a return in the future.
|
| Investments like land aren't necessarily consumed. You
| can reasonably deduct when an actual expense happens, but
| buying steel etc to be used next year doesn't guarantee
| it is actually used rather than sold.
|
| > Taxing inflation as a capital gain is ridiculous.
|
| It's a useful feature to discourage the exact wasteful
| approach you proposed.
|
| > The tax isn't deferred on the money used for personal
| consumption.
|
| Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I
| can redirect money I would have spent to buy something
| else.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Investments like land aren't necessarily consumed. You
| can reasonably deduct when an actual expense happens, but
| buying steel etc to be used next year doesn't guarantee
| it is actually used rather than sold.
|
| In many cases you're buying something intending it to be
| consumed, even if it hasn't been yet, and have to buy it
| ahead of time because you have to get it installed or
| connected or forged etc. before it can start being used.
|
| If you then sell the steel instead of using it, the sale
| price gets added to your income and the cost was already
| deducted previously, so that cancels the previous
| deduction and you're back to paying the tax on it.
|
| > Money is fungible, you hand me money to buy land and I
| can redirect money I would have spent to buy something
| else.
|
| In order to get a tax deduction for buying land to build
| a solar farm, you have to buy land to build a solar farm.
| You can't spend that money on something else and still
| get that tax deduction. You can spend _other_ money on
| something else, but the amount of money you have
| available to spend on other things has gone down, and the
| point is to increase your incentive to build the solar
| farm, which it is effective in doing.
| Retric wrote:
| > If you then sell the steel instead of using it, the
| sale price gets added to your income and the cost was
| already deducted previously, so that cancels the previous
| deduction and you're back to paying the tax on it.
|
| An interest free loan means you're ahead in that
| transaction but society is worse off when people do
| useless things to avoid taxes.
|
| > You can spend other money on something else, but the
| amount of money you have available to spend on other
| things has gone down
|
| One can't invest all their money in any given year or one
| lacks the ability to buy food. You also can't spend all
| your money in a given year or you go broke.
|
| Thus _both_ saving and spending are always happening and
| the government reducing the amount of money you're
| required to save means you can up spending. There's zero
| meaningfully differences between piles of money here.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > An interest free loans means you're ahead in that
| transaction.
|
| Except that you had to sit on some asset in the meantime
| instead of using it for something. Or if that asset was a
| productive investment that yielded returns, _the
| government_ is ahead in that transaction, because the
| returns from investing the deferred taxes increase your
| taxable income.
|
| > One can't invest all their money in any given year or
| one lacks the ability to buy food. You also can't spend
| all your money in a given year or you go broke.
|
| You can both invest all of your assets by taking on new
| debt to buy food and spend all of your assets and have
| nothing left. Both of those are things some people
| actually do. And for people who neither spend nor invest
| 100% of their assets, different incentives will affect
| the proportion of each one they do.
|
| > Thus both saving and spending are happening and
| reducing the amount of money required to save means you
| can up spending.
|
| Suppose you're paying a tax rate of 33% and have access
| to investments with a 10% return. If you have to pay the
| tax when you get the money then if you get $100 you
| immediately lose $33 and can only invest $67, and if you
| get 10% interest on the $67 then you can only reinvest
| $4.49. In other words, your compounding rate is now 6.7%
| instead of 10% and after 10 years you'd have $128.
|
| If instead you pay the tax when you spend the money, your
| compounding rate is 10%. So if you started off with $100,
| after 10 years you have $259 before tax and then you pay
| a third of that in tax and get to spend $174.
|
| So in one case you have the choice between spending $67
| today or $128 in ten years, in the other case your choice
| is between spending $67 today or $174 in ten years. That
| increases the incentive to invest the money now and spend
| more of it later, instead of spending it now.
|
| You do then get to spend more of it later, but the extra
| money you get to spend is value that only exists because
| of the additional investment.
|
| And then the government gets $85 in taxes in 10 years
| instead of $33 today, i.e. it got a 10% ROI too.
| Retric wrote:
| > Except you had
|
| No, you benefited from sitting on that productive asset.
| Getting a free stock option is still a meaningful benefit
| even if you never case it in.
|
| Further assuming the asset kept up with inflation you're
| better off after the sale vs holding cash for that same
| period.
|
| > by taking on new debt to buy food
|
| The money you got from that loan is an asset you're not
| investing in that hypothetical. As to "spend all of your
| assets and have nothing left" yes I mentioned going broke
| was an option repeating what I already said isn't an
| argument here.
|
| > Suppose you ...
|
| Ignoring the possibility to just spend more today and
| also spend the same amount in 10 years is disingenuous
| here. Especially as assuming consistent rules you also
| benefit 10 years from now, so you get to spend more today
| and also spend more in 10 years.
|
| Really free money lets you spend more, there's no way
| around that. Further with the US tax code nothing says
| investments need to be in the US or capital gains ever
| get taxed this often is a pure dead loss for US taxpayer.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > No, you benefited from sitting on that productive
| asset. Getting a free stock option is still a meaningful
| benefit even if you never case it in.
|
| If you buy a ton of steel with no intention of ever doing
| anything other than selling it for the same value as you
| paid for it in a while, you haven't benefited from it and
| have in fact cost yourself value in opportunity cost
| because other investments return more than that.
|
| If you get a free stock option and then there is a 30%
| chance it turns out to be worth something, the government
| benefits from the same 30% chance that you'll get money
| from it which will then be taxable income.
|
| > The money you got from that loan is an asset you're not
| investing in that hypothetical.
|
| Loan principal doesn't create net assets. You get new
| money and new debt at the same time and they cancel.
|
| > As to "spend all of your assets and have nothing left"
| yes I mentioned going broke was an option repeating what
| I already said isn't an argument here.
|
| I took your implication to be that it was something bad
| and so nobody would purposely do that. But people
| purposely do it all the time. They have some money and
| then choose to spend all of it instead of investing any
| of it.
|
| > Ignoring the possibility to just spend more today and
| also spend the same amount in 10 years is disingenuous
| here.
|
| Even that scenario still requires the amount of
| investment to increase. What you'd be doing is spending
| some but not all of the taxes deferred on the amount you
| initially invested, e.g. instead of spending $33 and
| investing $33 you invest $37 and spend $42, and you had
| ~$12 extra because of the taxes deferred on the $37. But
| now you're investing $37 instead of $33, and that's the
| minimum you could invest to get the same after-tax amount
| in ten years because now you haven't paid the taxes yet.
|
| Doing that is also more disfavored because you get better
| returns from diverting more money to investment but the
| benefits of immediate spending haven't increased.
| Retric wrote:
| > If you buy a ton of steel with no intention of ever
| doing anything other than selling it for the same value
| as you paid for it in a while, you haven't benefited from
| it and have in fact cost yourself value in opportunity
| cost because other investments return more than that.
|
| Your argument was buying a productive asset useful for
| the business. My argument is that's a prediction which
| may be false, you suggesting no they are just randomly
| buying steel is losing your argument upfront.
|
| > Loan principal doesn't create net assets. You get new
| money and new debt at the same time and they cancel.
|
| Leverage is based on loans generating assets that can be
| invested. It's clear your not actually arguing in good
| faith.
| chairmansteve wrote:
| Not true. If you read the article, arguably his main
| motivation was to avoid taxes.
|
| Not that I blame him. The lesson is though, never do
| anything just to avoid taxes. He would never have got into
| the solar business without the tax "opportunities".
| kortilla wrote:
| Investing money isn't a tax dodge
| baking wrote:
| The taxes were for capital gains on his crypto assets,
| which is not an investment but pure speculation. The tax
| dodge was to find an actual investment with tax credits
| that would cover the capital gains on his speculation.
| giblfiz wrote:
| I'm the original author. I'm not sure why you got down-voted
| for this, this was absolutely a "tax dodge". The polite term
| is "tax mitigation strategy", I'm also not sure why this is
| seen as an openly negative thing? The government wants a type
| of thing done, they say "hey, we won't pay people directly to
| do it, but we will subsidize it thru tax incentives"
|
| I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's
| good for the world, I will do it in return for tax
| incentives"
|
| Why exactly is that bad?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| because there's not necessarily a demand for this site, or
| even a personal interest -- imo this sort of incentive
| produces worse outcomes than taxing people and farming it
| out to the lowest bidder, at least the lowest bidder has a
| business and reputation to maintain (thin, but not nothing)
| jeffrallen wrote:
| > Why exactly is that bad?
|
| Because you could have just paid your taxes like the rest
| of us have to. Instead you made a big drama and are asking
| us to agree with you how unfair it all is that you have to
| pay taxes.
| zekrioca wrote:
| What a nonsense. This is the government itself proposing
| the subsidie to build up long term renewables, which have
| a much more important role to local communities. Author
| then writes about their important experiences, listing
| important lessons and insights for future endeavours, and
| you call it a 'drama'.
|
| Tell me about your intentions without telling me about
| your intentions.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Idk, there's a certain double standard that I see semi-
| frequently. Direct subsidies and/or rebates to incentivize
| renewable energy? Good. Tax subsidies to do the exact same
| thing? Awful, terrible, tax avoiding scum.
|
| Sometimes I wonder if any of the people who complain about
| this bought an electric car or roof solar with tax credits
| or rebates.
|
| Or maybe its just HN anti-crypto bias.
| nine_k wrote:
| Not "a tax dodge", but "following the tax incentives".
| nine_k wrote:
| The missing flavor: Texas mineral rights are very bizarre (they
| dominate surface land rights, and there's no state registry of
| them), the detailed power grid analysis completely contradicted
| the preliminary analysis, and the costs of upgrading less than
| 2 miles of wiring to carry 3 MW is nearly $800k.
|
| I'm used to think that California is an overpriced legal
| quagmire if you want to build something. I didn't expect Texas
| to fare not much better.
| buckle8017 wrote:
| Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into
| a new industry and failing.
|
| They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
|
| His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid
| without it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving
| into a new industry and failing.
|
| It's _a significantly bad thing_ if something as
| straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires
| special knowledge to not get screwed over.
|
| > His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid
| without it.
|
| Oh come on.
| kragen wrote:
| Electrical generation is a competitive market. It's the
| expected and even desirable outcome that only the most
| efficient producers will remain profitable. You're not just
| plugging in solar panels; you're competing with other
| companies to see who can plug in the solar panels more
| cheaply.
|
| And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle
| additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without
| adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no
| idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows
| where that is.
|
| The conclusion in the post:
|
| > _Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most
| will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one
| might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar.
| Or at least solar plus storage._
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I didn't even say profitable. He can't get the ability to
| just hook up all the panels.
| kragen wrote:
| He did get that ability. They just won't let him produce
| over 3 megawatts, making the plant unprofitable. It's a
| total clusterfuck.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's a really pedantic answer. He can't _properly_ hook
| up the panels.
| kragen wrote:
| That's a simply incorrect answer. BESS, simple
| curtailment at peak hours, or angle diversity would solve
| the problem. If he'd known the problem was coming 18
| months ago, it wouldn't be a problem.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > That's a simply incorrect answer.
|
| Okay, how small of a connection would they have to
| restrict him to for me to be correct?
|
| > BESS, simple curtailment at peak hours, or angle
| diversity would solve the problem.
|
| That much extra curtailment is a major problem. That much
| extra angle diversity hurts output. Batteries are a
| workaround for not being able to properly hook up the
| panels.
| kragen wrote:
| You'll have to do your own calculations based on your own
| site data.
|
| Onsite BESS permits you to not only get by with a smaller
| hookup but also sell your energy at times when people are
| willing to pay for it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > You'll have to do your own calculations based on your
| own site data.
|
| I did my calculation already. It said that a 1/3 drop in
| hookup for panels that were already hookup-constrained is
| not a proper hookup.
|
| Straightforward math.
| kragen wrote:
| You're leaving out most of the relevant factors,
| presumably because you don't know them.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| So are you.
| baking wrote:
| > Oh come on.
|
| He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits,
| this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The tax credits aren't coming out of the grid somewhere
| else. The project is a negative to tax revenue, positive to
| the grid, and positive to CO2 levels.
| baking wrote:
| He's using the tax credits to undersell projects with
| storage that would have been more positive for the grid.
| Solar without storage in Texas is coal to Newcastle.
| Subsidizing bare-bones solar is not good for the grid.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Projects with storage can take advantage of the cheaper
| solar power by shifting their balance, installing fewer
| panels and more storage. This leaves the grid better off
| overall.
| baking wrote:
| Projects with storage can also take advantage of lower
| grid connection power limits because they are not forced
| to dump maximum power at peak supply times of the day.
| giblfiz wrote:
| Battery and and solar with battery have (nearly) the same
| tax credit advantage.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Because they don't want to upgrade the grid, don't want
| to compromise even in flexible cases, and want to keep
| everything as is.
| hwillis wrote:
| > His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid
| without it.
|
| Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can _always_ just be
| disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge
| inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
|
| Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep
| at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring
| batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient
| bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid
| connection to stay cool.
|
| Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are
| always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like
| that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
| giblfiz wrote:
| Hey, original author here. > Ah yes the age old
| story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry
| and failing.
|
| Yep, very much so. I was well aware that I didn't have a clue,
| and thought that I could make up for that with professional
| expert advice, elbow grease, a pretty good combination of tax
| advantages, and a willingness to learn.
|
| The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a
| "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of
| ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with
| the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that
| we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
|
| Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional
| complexity overhead they added, and because the way the
| interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a
| different MW class which would have dramatically increased a
| number of other bureaucracy issues.
|
| You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net
| negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries
| are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at
| mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts,
| which at this point I'm super familiar with.
| zekrioca wrote:
| Batteries are very important to reliability, but not the only
| way to exploit solar. Not all loads are the way you think they
| are. And it wouldn't have a net negative value to the grid (it
| is literally free energy, I am always shocked as to why this is
| so hard to understand) because the grid can always curtail it
| if it impacts grid's reliability, or if it increases
| transmissions costs beyond a certain threshold which they have
| already calculated (as a good legalised monopoly that they
| are).
|
| You are propagating some decades old ideas which don't hold
| anymore.
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| It's too bad that Texas' joke of an electrical grid defeated the
| project, but I think private profit on energy generation is
| really unlikely and produces a lot of bad incentives for plant
| operators.
|
| In California the companies also systematically under-invest in
| capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project,
| even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Every time I learn something new about Texas, I like Texas less.
|
| At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There's that to like.
| Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
| spauldo wrote:
| Try driving in Texas sometime. Roads are decent, speed limits
| are high, but the other drivers will make you borderline
| homicidal.
| bz_bz_bz wrote:
| I'm curious what part of this you thought was an indictment on
| Texas.
|
| ERCOT has the most generator-friendly interconnection process
| in the nation and leads the country in both renewable
| generation and utility-scale solar installations.
|
| Mineral rights are dominant over surface rights in most
| jurisdictions, including other states like California. To call
| it "insane" just shows how little experience Mr. R has in land
| development.
|
| OP lost the game playing on easy mode because he was purely
| chasing tax breaks with zero experience. The area OP is trying
| to develop in is a QOZ for a reason; he should have expected
| there to be upgrades necessary to delivery that level of power
| to a substation in an area where nothing else is going on.
|
| OP is actually lucky that this project failed. Expecting to get
| the ISO-average solar PPA price for a project in Coleman County
| is nuts. This solar farm would have lost even more money had he
| continued.
| kragen wrote:
| This is a much better read than I expected. Normally I'd insert a
| diatribe here about the US's anti-renewable-energy regulatory
| regime, but the author tells the story far more persuasively and
| compellingly than I could ever hope to.
| stevenzzzzzzz wrote:
| Many people even working in power/energy don't realize how much
| interconnection costs are a hinderance. Example: see study group
| DISIS-2021-001 in SPP (a grid region similar to ERCOT/Texas), a
| good 25 % of the planned capacity was hit with an interconnection
| cost approx > $300k/MW (which is similar to the cost of the OP).
|
| Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the
| interconnection queue / process
|
| https://www.interconnection.fyi/clusters/spp/disis-2021-001
| gwern wrote:
| One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs
| for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines
| trust.
|
| Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like
| ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or
| even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because
| that's not what real people sound like.
|
| If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be
| uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything
| else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?
|
| Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a
| single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself
| could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten
| part.)
|
| Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in
| https://7goldfish.com/ .
|
| > This is a much better read than I expected.
|
| Hm...
| kragen wrote:
| I wonder if you're right, and if so, to what extent he used it.
| The site does at least predate ChatGPT:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20180316124237/http://7goldfish.c...
|
| I'd expect ChatGPT to make no typographical errors in a list of
| post titles.
| giblfiz wrote:
| Hi Gwern, I'm the owner of 7goldfish, the developer in
| question, and a fan of yours via reputation and the occasional
| comment I run into on Reddit.
|
| First I want to acknowledge that draft one of this was LLM
| written, by Claude, though it reflects a pretty detailed
| outline of an experience pretty accurately. As you point out
| the quotes from both Mr. R and myself were also mostly spat out
| by the LLM as well (though not the quotes from external
| entities)
|
| Mr. R signed off on the draft before posting, and well, it was
| me. I tended to think of it more as a "movie treatment" than a
| technical post-mortem, so I wasn't really worried about it. I
| also was only expecting this to get circulated within my own
| small/medium sized community so, in general, wasn't really
| worried about it.
|
| That said, I definitely love using LLMs to write. To be
| perfectly honest they write considerably better and faster than
| I do (as you noted, lots of typo-o's and similar. I was still
| spelling at a 6th grade level when I graduated from Uni with CS
| degree), though I still feel like I have both ideas and
| experiences worth sharing. If you click any of the earlier
| stuff you will probably see the clumsy results that take about
| 10x the time.
|
| I waffle on the idea of how much disclaimer of "written via
| LLM, but with multiple revisions and actual thought" vs "just
| don't bother saying anything" it's worth including. I'm curious
| if you consider having a ghost writer to be lying, or a
| cinematic re-enactment. I notice as I say that that it sounds
| defensive, and I want it to be a genuine question, as I share
| your concern about living in a media world where it feels like
| "basically nothing can be trusted".
|
| For what it's worth, the numbers should be about right, though
| there is only so much energy we were willing to spend on the
| post-mortem. If there is some informational reason you would
| like to get into it deeply I would be happy to share the post
| mortem docs privately.
| kragen wrote:
| Nice.
| gwern wrote:
| I think writing fiction with LLMs is fine. "based on a true
| story" or roman a clef fiction is also fine. I would have no
| objection to this if it were clearer that this was a "movie
| treatment". (As LLM fiction goes, this isn't even all that
| bad.)
|
| However... Look at this HN page! Not a single person here
| realized (before my still-downvoted comment) that this was a
| 'movie treatment', or that the 'quotes...were also mostly
| spat out by the LLM as well'. They all are taking it as 100%
| gospel, and engaging with it in good faith, as if it were
| genuinely a 'technical post-mortem' (as it takes pains to
| present itself) instead of your fiction-writing hobby,
|
| Just make it clearer that this is a fictional story.
|
| > I'm curious if you consider having a ghost writer to be
| lying, or a cinematic re-enactment
|
| Yes. This is why ghost writers are supposed to be credited as
| such if they are contributing non-trivial content rather than
| simply serving as a amanuensis or an editor, and cinematic
| re-enactments are flagged as such if it wouldn't be obvious
| to a reasonable person (by reputable documentarians, anyway).
| ur-whale wrote:
| If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he
| convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only
| locally to mine Bitcoin?
| giblfiz wrote:
| Hey, I'm the original author here.
|
| I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY
| over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy
| burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one"
| situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive
| for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that
| bucket.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Hey, sorry to hear about the predicament, when business
| collides with insane regulations, it's a very frustrating
| thing to be caught in.
|
| number 2, btc mining environmental impact, I generally
| disagree,but I can understand the argument, however ...
|
| number 1, the crypto exposure aspect a) what
| prevents your from selling the BTC the moment you mine them
| to pay for OPEX, and then invest what is leftover in tradfi?
| b) While many on this site will violently and deeply disagree
| in spite of being proven wrong over and over and over again
| (the definition of insanity, etc...), I'd argue that being
| "over-exposed to BTC" over the last 15 years has not exactly
| been a bad thing if you can stomach the volatility.
|
| And I'm very sorry to hear S'pore wasn't good to you, this is
| one of my very favourite place on Earth (in particular the
| food).
| drewm1980 wrote:
| It's good that you repented and at least tried to do
| something good with the money, but it would have been even
| better to donate it to an environmental organization with
| better judgement than you have. Proof of work crypto mining
| was an inexcusably bad idea for humanity from day one.
| zekrioca wrote:
| As for (2), there are so many other ways to exploit that
| electricity. Mining Bitcoin isn't the only way. But I agree,
| you should have considered batteries, and more flexible loads
| into your calculations as to how to be profitable. 3MWh is
| considerable for many usecases.
| wglb wrote:
| This is an excellent writeup. This rhymes with the complexities
| noted in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-
| bran....
|
| Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get
| something off the ground.
| pshirshov wrote:
| Why to shut it down instead of opening an aluminum refinery or
| running any other industrial process with high energy
| requirements?
| compiler_queen wrote:
| Zero sympathy from this quarter - what started as a tax dodge to,
| let's face it, defund schools, hospitals and social security,
| ended up as a "poor me" self-effacing blog post.
| N_Lens wrote:
| Actually I believe the money you're talking about is being used
| to bomb many places on the planet.
| mattnewton wrote:
| tax incentives to create solar infrastructure are designed to
| create solar infrastructure, I don't understand why it's being
| described as a pejorative "tax dodge" when the government
| directs funds this way rather than takes the money directly and
| buys those things.
| cauch wrote:
| I guess tax incentives feel strange because it feels a bit
| like a thing the government needs to do because of bad
| behaviors.
|
| As you say, the situation would be 100% identical if the
| government was receiving directly the tax and then buying
| these things directly. So why don't they do that? Because
| people with money will find ways to dodge taxes anyway. Tax
| incentives is basically admitting that people with money are
| selfish and cheaters, and that we need to "play their game"
| to achieve what they should normally and ethically do if they
| were not detrimental to society.
|
| Interestingly enough, if the person would have paid their
| taxes normally and that this money would have been used for a
| government project, then the probability of success would
| have been higher (I know some government projects are really
| mismanaged, but so was this one anyway), because the
| government would have been in better position to 1) get
| experts opinions/supports, 2) understand the rules and
| regulations, 3) synchronize different projects for a better
| complementarity.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| If you analyze the effects of doubling solar generation once in
| the United States on natural gas demand, then analyze the effect
| of another doubling, then it becomes clear why there isn't the
| kind of nationwide infrastructure, tax and regulatory support for
| expanding solar across the USA that exists in countries that have
| to import natural gas, eg China, Japan, Germany etc.
|
| Natural gas just has more resources to buy politicians in the USA
| than solar does, that's the nature of the problem. Maybe the
| investor in this story should have spent have his crypto fortune
| on buying Texas politicians before even beginning this project -
| but buying off a lot of politicians is expensive, it's more the
| province of billionaires than of millionaires.
| codingbot3000 wrote:
| I am always wondering why the US scores so well on these "ease of
| doing business" rankings??? Even taking into account that this
| was a risky business idea, relying on subsidies etc., both
| property and interconnection to me seem like areas where the
| legislation could be clear and predictable. Adding in the ever-
| present risk of litigation in the US, I wonder if my stock
| portfolio is maybe a bit too reliant on this market.
| holowoodman wrote:
| Well, let me tell you (from some experience) how this would
| have gone in good old Germany:
|
| No mineral rights like Texas, except for the occasional lignite
| open-pit mining, but that is very limited to certain regions.
| And even then, you'd be reimbursed handsomely for your troubles
| and the torn down equipment and land.
|
| Grid connection would have been easier, because the electricity
| company is required to provide timely and cheap connections to
| the next sufficient connection point. However, there are
| exceptions, if they can prove that they cannot get contractors,
| so you have to wait some time, usually two to three years after
| you sign the contract for the connection.
|
| Before connection contract signing, you need to enter an
| auction for the price of the power you will be providing. Fixed
| for 20 years. However, those 20 years start at signature, so
| the first 2 to 3 are wasted because of no connection. And you
| are competing with tons of other solar installations, so you
| can't really predict your profits when planning. Btw. they can
| even fail to connect you after you already built your plant for
| the same reason, so you may either wait or risk it...
|
| Then you have to get approval from the local planning bureau.
| For that you need a number of assessments: You need to prove
| that there is no environmental impact, e.g. on rare species of
| vermin and weeds, no impact on nearby population e.g. through
| noise, reflection, or other annoyances. Then you have to get
| approval for the land-use change, because usually you are
| building on land zoned agrarian use, that has to be changed
| (and usually can never be changed back, so the land is
| worthless afterwards even if you don't actually build). You
| have to get approval from various environmental protection
| agencies that certify you are not in any kind of protected
| zone, or if you are (half of Germany is), then you are not
| affecting anything important (which is a 50/50 chance). Then
| your plans have to be submitted for public review, where local
| groups of busybodies, can enter their objections. If there are
| objections, the approval can be delayed or denied. You can of
| course "bribe" the public with a few well-placed donations to
| local groups, or by declaring your enterprise to be open to
| local investment for which you then sell shares and hand our
| corresponding parts of your profits. This of course
| necessitates a change in legal form, which of course needs
| another few rounds with lawyers, tax advisors, the tax office
| and a whole lot of due diligence because you are now handing
| out shares to small investors, which is kind of protected and
| therefore complicated...
|
| Believe me, the OP's story is very harmless compared to what
| this would take here, even though the above is the simplified
| process after a few rounds of laws that were intended to
| accelerate building green energy.
|
| P.S.: You need a fence and cameras. First because no insurance
| will allow it without the fence, some idiot kid could climb a
| panel and fall. Second because there are professional solar
| panel thieves around here, stealing them at night by the
| truckload.
| abetusk wrote:
| Aside from all the turbulence of trying to get a project off the
| ground, the deciding factor was that the electrical transport
| infrastructure (aka wires) couldn't support the desired load of
| 4.5MW-10MW and was slashed to 3MW, making the project inviable?
|
| To me, the "obvious" solution is to create solar plants closer to
| their use and lay down new infrastructure. From my understanding,
| one of the major reasons to have power plants so far away from
| urban centers is because they were dirty or location locked
| (waterfalls, etc.). With solar, this need essentially goes away
| with the ability now to put solar plants essentially in the
| middle, or directly adjacent, to urban centers.
|
| Could someone enlighten me as to why this is not feasible or if
| someone is already discussing this idea?
| nasmorn wrote:
| Urban land is expensive.
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