|
|
|
|
|
|
by tsjackson
848 days ago
|
|
|
I work in the industry. While this is theoretically true, in practice it is not. First, bonds for decommissioning solar sites are required by many programs now. These usually cost 3-5% of total initial investment. Not insurmountable by any means. In reality, these bonds are unlikely to ever be utilized. Most sites will never be decommissioned unless the owner wants to redevelop the land for something more profitable. The interconnection rights alone are worth way more than the cost of decommissioning. Recently, repowering solar sites has become a hugely profitable endeavor. Most projects have a 20-30 year power purchase agreement, often at a fixed price per MWh. That initial price was set very high based on the massively more expensive cost of deployment (equipment and install cost about twice as much 10 years ago). Squeezing 20% more capacity out of these projects by repowering these sites with more efficient modules and new inverters, is often a windfall, given the falling costs involved. That's not to say there are zero issues like the ones described. Like most early stage technology-heavy industries, early solar projects often utilized a lot of "innovative" technological strategies that dead-ended and are therefore much harder to maintain. But overall this is just not much of an issue in practice. |
|
|
the op link though is about solar installations approaching their lifetime, which means contracts from 10-20 years ago. i'd like to point out that you started with a very strong statement ("in practice not true"), which was then variously hedged. more importantly the fact that in practice the mitigations have manifested ("repowering is a windfall") doesn't after the fact negate that the initial contracts were exploitative. in my experience simply verbalizing and pricing various hidden factors (i used Shannon L. Ferrell's "understanding solar energy agreements" as starting point), decomissioning being one of them but other points in ferrell also played a role, or even just developing a rudimentary payments schedule, ended up strongly discouraging land owners (and smh als the solar representatives). i'm glad that we're having this dialogue though, because i'm sure there was no malicious intent behind those omittions, and solar industry has become significantly more transparent since.