Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sokoloff 1238 days ago
There are special subsidies for rooftop solar here in the US (Solar Investment Tax Credit). Are there not subsidies for solar where you live?

https://www.seia.org/initiatives/solar-investment-tax-credit...

> The solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is one of the most important federal policy mechanisms to support the growth of solar energy in the United States. Since the ITC was enacted in 2006, the U.S. solar industry has grown by more than 200x - creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and investing billions of dollars in the U.S. economy in the process.

3 comments

The same link says:

The Section 48 commercial credit can be applied to both customer-sited commercial solar systems and large-scale utility solar farms. The rate is effectively at 30% until Treasury issues guidance on new wage and apprenticeship standards. Two months later, the rate will be at 6%, with an additional 24% (for a total of 30%) available for meeting these new labor standards.

So utility-scale solar farms can get the same 30% credit as rooftop solar. They're both tax-advantaged compared to (e.g.) building a new gas plant, but the rooftop credit isn't any higher, at least not on the federal level. Self-consumption from rooftop solar may avoid other taxes, like sales tax, but in many states there is no sales tax on residential electricity to begin with.

The interesting question of there being a subsidy for rooftop solar is the difference in subsidy to me between my roof having solar panels or my roof not having solar panels, not between my subsidy for my roof having solar panels or someone else's for their field having solar panels on it.
Subsidies are a terrible way to run energy policy because they can change quickly with politics. Big players stay away from big commitments to subsidy based markets.
Subsidies of “do this this year and we’ll pay you $X” work and are relied upon. Subsidies like the CF that was the SREC market are indeed highly suspect and should not be relied upon, as generators of SRECs can attest.
Not any more, other than no sales tax on the panels.
??

It's part of the "Inflation Reduction Act of 2022" (and at a higher rate than before): https://www.solar.com/learn/inflation-reduction-act/

That's a foreign law applying to a foreign country