Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Is solar power becoming untenable for the average household due to costs? I believe it is. Here is an edited AI (Google) assisted answer
“A typical South East Queensland home with air conditioning needs a 6.6kW solar system, an inverter and potentially with a 10kWh battery for backup, costing around $26,512 fully installed. For higher energy consumption or future needs like electric vehicles, an 8-10kW system might be more suitable.
Average Daily Usage:
A standard Australian home uses between 15 and 25 kWh of electricity per day, according to Solar Choice. Air conditioning significantly increases energy consumption, especially during peak summer months.
System Size:
A 6.6kW system with 16-18 panels is often sufficient for average homes with air conditioning.
Battery Storage:
Battery storage is beneficial for maximizing self-consumption of solar energy and providing backup power during grid outages.
Inverters:
Inverters convert the DC power from solar panels to AC power for household use. (My added note: a high quality multimode inverter will be needed for efficient operation and power availability during grid blackouts.)
Future Needs:
Consider future energy needs, such as electric vehicles, when determining system size.”
My further notes – The $26,512 fully installed price is not inconsiderable, is no doubt rapidly inflating IMHO. The price could likely go much higher soon. Can the average householder in Australia afford this? I can or we can (my wife and I) but I doubt that the median wealth and income householder could do so without very significant government subsidies.
Will this investment really pay off? I am beginning to have some doubts. Good solar panels can be expected to have a service life of 25 years excluding incidents like storm and hail damage which may be insurable. Batteries are claimed to have a service life of 10 years and good inverters 15 years. These latter two are not good enough for the current prices IMHO.
Then there is the danger of shonky vendors and installers which is now very high, well over 50% chance in my recent experience of the various trades and businesses. I may write more on this. Long story short this is disaster in the making. A lot of people will be swindled with dangerous, shoddy and non-compliant installations. Many products will likely not live up to their warranties which are poor to begin with. This will be another pink batts fiasco going forward. Australia’s and individuals’ energy security will not be net improved; rather the contrary in fact. That is my prediction.
Ikonoclast, as the ambient outdoor temperatures rise, the currently available domestic air conditioning systems will struggle more with the rising heat.
For example, looking at the technical specs for the Daikin Cora series split system air conditioners, the “Outdoor Operating Range” for cooling is “-10 to 46 °CDB“.
https://www.daikin.com.au/our-product-range/split-system-air-conditioning/cora
Are there any air conditioner systems that can cope with significantly higher ambient temperatures? How much higher? Anyone know? Are there any that can cope with into the 50+ °C range?
Meanwhile, Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf have produced a pre-print paper titled Global Warming has Accelerated Significantly, currently in peer-review, available at Research Square. Leon Simons has extrapolated presented warming rates linearly after +1.5 °C to show additional estimated year cross points:
Data _ _ _ value _ _ rate _ +1.5 °C _ +2.0 °C _ +2.5 °C _ +3.0 °C _ +3.5 °C _ +4.0 °C
NASA _ _ 1.45 _ _ _ 0.42 _ _ 2026 _ _ 2037 _ _ 2049 _ _ 2061 _ _ 2073 _ _ 2085
NOAA _ _ 1.45 _ _ _0.42 _ _ 2026 _ _ 2037 _ _ 2049 _ _ 2061 _ _ 2073 _ _ 2085
HadCRU _1.42 _ _ _0.39 _ _ 2026 _ _ 2037 _ _ 2052 _ _ 2065 _ _ 2077 _ _ 2090
Berkeley _ 1.45 _ _ 0.43 _ _ 2026 _ _ 2039 _ _ 2048 _ _ 2060 _ _ 2072 _ _ 2083
ERA5 _ _ _ 1.54 _ _ 0.48 _ _ 2024 _ _ 2034 _ _ 2044 _ _ 2054 _ _ 2065 _ _ 2075
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Average _ 1.46 _ _ 0.43 _ _ 2026 _ _ 2037 _ _ 2048 _ _ 2060 _ _ 2072 _ _ 2084
Ending value in °C; rate in °C/decade
Paul Beckwith discussed this paper in his YouTube video at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYVKW04ukiY
In the Briefing Paper published by Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration titled DEGREES OF RISK: Can the banking system survive climate warming of 3˚C? by David Spratt & Ian Dunlop, included on page 10:
Even if there are air conditioners that would cope with ambient air temperatures in the 50+ °C range, they would also require a reliable electricity supply. No electricity = unlivable heat.
But what about our food supplies? Do we air-condition the fields where our food crops are grown? Hardly!
And livestock (e.g. cattle, pigs, chickens, etc.) are thermo-regulating organisms, which live within certain livable temperature ranges. Do we air-condition their habitats too to safeguard our food supplies?
Food for your thoughts…
Geoff Miell,
For sure. In the long run we are all dead and the human race is extinct. All of this is baked in already. You don’t have to convince me. What I can’t be convinced of anymore is that there is any hope at all. We are beyond the point of no return. In the meantime people perforce try to survive and improvise one day at a time.
but, but, how will we have intelligence artificially and cyber-mined untaxed money without unlimited power and water?
I agree with Iko that too much financial risk is being placed on individuals in the solar market. In California, we even have the government making life harder for solar owners, supposedly because it shifts costs to the non-solar. Unfortunately as a one-party state, we don’t generally have access to competent legislators.
Yet, let’s not give up. There are a range of other interventions that we can pursue, as we get off carbon fuels. Up to and including geoengineering.
Even from a cynical view, our big corps are going to want to keep us alive, so we can keep overpaying for their products.
As ever, to me the greatest risks come from our inability to manage conflict. We need to work on that too.
As shown in the above comments, we are in a complete dilemma. We have not done enough to address climate change. The system is now on the cusp, or over it, of a runaway to a new dangerous climate state which will be highly inimical to civilizational survival and very likely even human species survival. Individually and collectively, we are all part of the “megamachine”. We face personal as well as social dilemmas. It seems like if we personally would make all the sacrifices that might save the planet, few others would do the same. Part of the reason for failure to act is attributable to human ignorance, greed and selfishness. The other part of the reason for failure to act is attributable to human entrapment in the megamachine, which we standardly call global civilization.
“The term “megamachine” (from Lewis Mumford) refers to a powerful, complex system, often a social or political structure, that functions like a gigantic, impersonal machine. It describes a system where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, who utilize technology to maintain their control while simultaneously shaping society to serve their purposes. This system often prioritizes efficiency and production over individual well-being and can create a sense of inevitability and dependence on the system itself.” – Google AI.
I don’t know about each of you but I feel trapped. And I do assess that I could in theory make myself very miserable and die much sooner and alone by trying to survive without all or even some of the modern mod cons. This would be the level of renunciations necessary to save the planet if multiplied by billions. On that path I would die sooner and everyone close (a relative few) would forsake me and say essentially “we are not going to suffer and die with you if you are going follow that path of madness.”
We are all trapped in the megamachine and trapped inside our own nature. Who among us is free from ecological sin? There is not one. We in the West have all used far too many resources in our entire lives. Many in the East and third world are now following in this path. The megamachine, especially the megamachine of late stage neoliberal capitalism, lays out the path all must follow, to their doom.
“… the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.” – “Burnt Norton”, T.S. Eliot.
“Appetency” is apt. It refers to longings, desires, natural tendencies and affinities. To our appetencies we have added the megamachine with its mega and meta programming tendencies. We run now not just on metal rails but on electric and electronic rails; programmed, automated rails. That with which we would attempt to save ourselves becomes that with which we will programmatically ensure our doom. I refer here specifically to the electrical and electronic economy. Non-biological mechanistic logic is less flexible than biological quasi-logic. We make less human and less humane decisions the more we mechanise and electronically mechanise (program) our megamachine or we simply make it more inhumanly “efficient”: an efficiency at odds with biological life.
The fully electric, electronic and renewable/sustainable economy beckoned as a hope. And it was a kind of hope. But the neoliberal capitalist system, with its particular tendencies, was always going to cruel this hope. It was always going to subvert and sabotage this hope. We see it by the completely scrambled and ruined progress towards renewable energy. You don’t believe this hope is now scrambled and ruined? Well that is another post. But nobody wants the real, really bad news. And that in itself is another problem. People prefer to live in illusions until the end.
Even from a cynical view, our big corps are going to want to keep us alive, so we can keep overpaying for their products.
Unfortunately the Financial crisis proved that big corps are immune from self preservation. As Alan Greenspan noted: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity—myself especially—are in a state of shocked disbelief.”
Roger_f,
Too much power concentrated in too few hands. Too many nations are dictatorships or near autocracies. Too many corporations and companies are at or close to autocracies inside. These autocrats are not “wise fools” in the standard literary sense, meaning apparent fools from whom surprising wisdom comes, but rather they are the locally clever yet globally foolish who fancy themselves all-wise.
They attained success by luck or by luck plus some competence, even brilliance, in a strictly limited domain or metier. Their abilities often feature sociopathic levels of greed, cruelty, deceit, cunning, fraud and an ever-ready and great facility for telling whopping lies to uneducated and credulous people.
Our system, late stage neoliberal capitalism, rewards extremely excessively some of these people (the very worst usually who have lots of luck along the way) with influence, power and money, which all continuously reinforce each other in our system and can be converted and multiplied into each other.
These sociopathic, near-lunatics are in charge of important nations and important corporations and companies. The masses are too craven, credulous and compliant to do anything about it, often until it is too late to prevent a great disaster or catastrophe. It has been ever thus since civilization arose. The fault is in our genes. We evolved to live in hunter gatherer bands. While our evolution certainly has not stopped, we have not evolved enough biologically to deal with the sociopaths and psychopaths we would likely have dealt with more effectively at tribal level.
“A prophet has little honour in his hometown, among his relatives, on the streets he played in as a child.” A sociopath has little honour in his tribe. He (often he) is known for what he was and is from childhood to early manhood. He can fool no-one locally. But in a society of great numbers and mobility, people leave their hometown and find new villages, towns, cities, milieus and “tribes” of the credulous everywhere. Rubes are everywhere, city and country, and even if the clever sociopath is unmasked he can often move on with experience gained to hone his act and better fool people in the next town, city or nation.
I’m definitely not going to travel to the US
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/how-my-reporting-on-the-columbia-protests-led-to-my-deportation
Can we have abundant energy?
And if it’s possible, is it likely? I wrote earlier offering an operational definition of abundance and scarcity in goods and services: https://johnquiggin.com/2025/07/07/monday-message-board-689/#comment-265939 . To apply this to energy, I’m afraid we need a bit more abundance theory. Numbers next time.
My definitions only apply to final demand. For intermediate goods and services like steel, cement, marine insurance and thousands more, there is next to no direct demand from consumers and the concept of satiated wants does not apply. The actors on both sides of the relevant markets are capitalists with a plausibly insatiable desire for profit, deploying technologies that allow considerable room for substitution. Conventional supply and demand curves are probably the norm. However, intermediate goods and services are means to meeting final demand, which ultimately determines the supply of everything.
Most goods and services fall clearly into either the final or intermediate boxes. How does this map onto my abundant/scarce dichotomy? Take bananas as a typical abundant good. Satiety fixes the volume of total demand, which filters back through all the intermediate supply chain to fertilisers, shipping and so on. Technology and markets determine what the price is and the distribution between suppliers. Leontief’s input-output matrix with fixed coefficients will generate a feasible vector of primary production for a given vector of demand for all abundant final consumption. We can make it more sexy and market-friendly by allowing innovation and competition to make the coefficients flexible.
What about a fundamentally scarce good? The deep-rooted limits may arise on the demand side (travel to Venice) or the supply side (beachfront houses, Romanée-Conti wine, Taylor Swift concert tickets, diamonds). Wherever the constraint arises, it spreads to the whole supply chain. The volume of insurance on diamonds is not constrained on the insurance side but from the limited stock of large diamonds.
Energy, a pivotal input to all economic life, is unusual in that it is required both for abundant and for scarce goods and services. Households, the final consumers, need energy for getting around, storing and cooking food, and for running houses and flats. Firms – intermediaries by definition – need energy for making and growing stuff, getting it to customers, and running their offices. Both sectors call on a mixture of scarce and abundant goods and services. Our distinction between them does not then apply directly to energy. We can say by extension is that energy is secondarily abundant if it does not contribute to the scarcity of any of the other products in which it is embodied. Or we could make the definition relative: energy can be abundant w.r.t. commuting and scarce w.r.t. travel to the Moon. In this precise sense, abundance in energy is logically possible.
In the future. can energy actually become abundant in this secondary sense? See my next and final post.
BTW, I am not suggesting that abundance theory can replace any of the toolkit of green economics, from Pigou’s externalities, Raworth’s doughnuts, natural capital, or material intensity. It looks to me like a useful addition, at the cheap-and-cheerful end of the market. Sometimes that’s all you need.
Iko, supra: “Good solar panels can be expected to have a service life of 25 years excluding incidents like storm and hail damage which may be insurable.” This is too pessimistic. Solar panels come with performance guarantees (say 80% of initial rated output) of at least 25 years My latest additions had 30 years. It is overwhelmingly probable that new panels today will still be perfectly usable for a good few years after the guarantee expires. Eventually of course the encapsulation fails and it becomes worthwhile to replace them: closer to 40 years than 25. There are working panels in Switzerland installed in 1982, 43 years ago. Exploring the depths of Europe’s oldest grid-connected PV system – pv magazine International
I dream of a solar future. Well, that is, one that includes me and mine. I anticipate feeling a lot better about things, then.
Roger_f – thanks for that link – what an awful experience. We really should be treating people better than that – whether we let them in or not. (And, I don’t get how this will work with the Olympics and World Cup – this can’t be good for business.)
Now I am reading his past articles. I haven’t read the one on Past Lives yet, but I so loved that movie. So I already have something in common with him.
Couldn’t the Great Recession have just been a massive f*ckup? I mean, those happen too. And is it possible that we’ve learned anything? Well, I mean you guys. Obvs we didn’t.
James Wimberley,
That it is good news. However, there is many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip. Our solar panels which were installed 13 years ago were, unbeknownst to us, installed too close to roof edges and ridges at less than 20cms clearance. The vendor obviously did this against manufacturer’s recommendations which were the only mandated regulations at the time. These regulations have since been officially amended and firmed up now. Still not firm enough but that’s another story.
When our original inverter failed after 13 years, which is not a long enough service life, IMHO, it set off a chain reaction of unfortunate events. A new inverter was installed by an incompetent and dishonest electrician. I won’t go into that. It is almost impossible to get any competent and honest tradesman in Australia now, for anything. I kid you not. The trades shortage is bad and cowboys and fly-by-nighters abound. Australia’s tradies and regulatory and compliance system for same is an inoperative mess.
Long story short, this event and also the process of getting our 27 year old roof re-screwed then led to further problems. This re-screwing with severe storm and even mid-category cyclone resistant screws (a necessary precaution as climate change intensifies weather events) was very necessary in our view. The solar panels had to come down for the full re-screwing. The roofing contractor’s contracted electrician would then not re-certify our panels to go back up as they were in his words “noncompliant”. He was technically correct.
So these panels became almost useless to us. Our slightly unusual roof (unfortunately) meant an adequate number of panels for the solar production we needed (to avoid big power bills) could not go back up. We now need more modern and efficient panels for the space to get enough power from the useable area available. I gave our old panels, which are still good, to my neighbour who has another property out in the sticks off-grid. Trying to sell them would have been a waste of time.
All this is to show that stuff is supposed to last x years but storms, fires and many other events and mishaps can reduce the expected use. They will last 30 years rah, rah, rah. Yeah maybe, if a hundred things don’t go wrong or change in 30 years.
Also, inverters are usually only warrantied for 10 years. Factor in a replacement every 10 to 15 years. Solar batteries are only warrantied for 5 to 10 years depending on make. They are waaaay too expensive for the returns they will give. They will barely pay for themselves. I have done some numbers. Batteries are still not reliable or safe enough. They break down too often and they catch fire too often. The technology is not there yet and I have serious doubts now that it will ever be there. Then every time you need work, Australia’s highly-overpriced, price-gouging tradies will be into you for buckets of money. It is almost meaningless that whoopy-do the panels are relatively cheap. The tradies still charge shed-loads of money to put them on the roof and you can scarcely trust anyone to do a proper job.
The domestic solar power dream is turning into a nightmare in super dishonest, incompetent, price-gouging, poorly regulated Australia. It’s a financial mess and even accident-prone mess coming home to bite a lot of people.
That’s the thing. Technological promise is misused, rushed in, jerry-rigged, mis-regulated, maladministered and so on. It’s an absolute nightmare trying to navigate through all this. Maybe Australia is worse than other countries. It certainly is turning into a total mess here for ordinary householders here, IMHO as I say.
My wife and I can still navigate this but we don’t enjoy it. I doubt the poorest 50% or even poorest 66% have any chance, if they even own a residence, which of course many don’t. Australia is turning into a basket case with mounting economic, production and social problems. It looks bad and getting worse to me. I dread what the future holds.
I had better clarify my comment above. My clear anger and sarcasm is not directed at James Wimberley. It is not even directed mainly at bad tradespeople, though a portion is and deservedly so. It is mainly directed at our business and political elites who have wrecked the promise of the renewable economy and its implementation: who oversold it, over-rushed it and used it mainly for wealth transfer to the elites and not to save the environment or create more equity and equality for average and poor people.
It’s another broken promise like a hundred others.
James W.,
I remain entirely sceptical about “abundance theory” or ‘abundance liberalism”. I assume you are basing your posts on some ideas in the book “Abundance” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
However, abundance liberalism is simply repackaged neoliberalism. Same product in the same can. Just a new label stuck on it.
The problem is that the oligarchs of capitalism, especially of neoliberal capitalism, love scarcity and they deliberately create it. They sabotage any attempts to create public goods and always promote privatisation. Privatisation of essential services (power, water, waste services, communications, transport, health, welfare, education and even public banking like the old Federal Government-owned Commonwealth Bank of Australia) leads to ever greater inequality and rising poverty of the lower classes, meaning the unemployed, pensioners, disadvantaged communities and working poor. These are the plain outcomes of neoliberalism to date: ever greater inequality and rising poverty of the lower classes.
The “Lauderdale Paradox” explains this:
“The ecological (and political economy) contradictions of the prevailing economic ideology are best explained in terms of what is known in the history of economics as the “Lauderdale Paradox.” James Maitland, the eighth Earl of Lauderdale (1759-1839), was the author of An Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth and into the Means and Causes of its Increase (1804). In the paradox with which his name came to be associated, Lauderdale argued that there was an inverse correlation between public wealth and private riches such that an increase in the latter often served to diminish the former. “Public wealth,” he wrote, “may be accurately defined, — to consist of all that man desires, as useful or delightful to him.” Such goods have use value and thus constitute wealth. But private riches, as opposed to wealth, required something additional (i.e., had an added limitation), consisting “of all that man desires as useful or delightful to him; which exists in a degree of scarcity.”
Scarcity, in other words, is a necessary requirement for something to have value in exchange, and to augment private riches. But this is not the case for public wealth, which encompasses all value in use, and thus includes not only what is scarce but also what is abundant. This paradox led Lauderdale to argue that increases in scarcity in such formerly abundant but necessary elements of life as air, water, and food would, if exchange values were then attached to them, enhance individual private riches, and indeed the riches of the country — conceived of as “the sum-total of individual riches” — but only at the expense of the common wealth. For example, if one could monopolize water that had previously been freely available by placing a fee on wells, the measured riches of the nation would be increased at the expense of the growing thirst of the population.
“The common sense of mankind,” Lauderdale contended, “would revolt” at any proposal to augment private riches “by creating a scarcity of any commodity generally useful and necessary to man.” Nevertheless, he was aware that the bourgeois (capitalist) society in which he lived was already, in many ways, doing something of the very sort. He explained that, in particularly fertile periods, Dutch colonialists burned “spiceries” or paid natives to “collect the young blossoms or green leaves of the nutmeg trees” to kill them off; and that in plentiful years “the tobacco-planters in Virginia,” by legal enactment, burned “a certain proportion of tobacco” for every slave working their fields. Such practices were designed to increase scarcity, augmenting private riches (and the wealth of a few) by destroying what constituted public wealth — in this case, the produce of the earth. “So truly is this principle understood by those whose interest leads them to take advantage of it,” Lauderdale wrote, “that nothing but the impossibility of general combination protects the public wealth against the rapacity of private avarice.” –
The Paradox of Wealth: Capitalism and Ecological Destruction,
by John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark.
We can only overcome the sabotage of natural abundance and sabotage of technologically generated abundance by the recreation of public common wealth (renationalisation) and the diminution of private riches (wealth taxes and private wealth limiting laws).
The neoliberal agenda and the neoliberal agenda in drag (abundance liberalism) will lead to further mass poverty and further concentrations of obscene wealth in the top 1% and even worse up to the top 0.0001% and above.
I’m sorry you had so many problems with your solar roof. The only issue I’ve had with mine is that the management software has stopped talking to my wifi, but this does not affect the output and exports to the grid, so I can live without the reports. I think my experience is more typical. A randomly picked British survey reported 87% of solar households satisfied with their purchase, in a country with lower insolation and installation rate than Australia. https://worldofrenewables.com/solar-panel-satisfaction-ratings-through-the-roof-new-study-reveals/
A paleoliberal economist like JQ’s sparring partner Hazlitt, viewing the trends from 30,000 feet, would say that it’s just the market doing its job and generating a nice but normal learning curve. Your incompetent installer either learnt how to get it right or quit the business. My good experience was bought by the trials of pioneers like you, so I owe you thanks. We are both lucky in that there is not much IP rent in the sector for incumbent producers, as the key inventions were made long ago by university researchers paid by the American and Japanese governments. In addition, the Chinese CCP seems to be more committed to the virtues of Darwinian competition than the governments of most OECD countries.
Thanks too for the Lauderdale tip. Digging into it would I think be a better use of my limited remaining time and energy than the Klein-Thompson book, which from reports looks as I said like a repackaging of standard Third Way neoliberalism. I have not read it.
JW,
I have to admit that we got 13 years of energy production out of our solar panels and inverter. Due to a generous government solar power feed-in tariff (a subsidy in other words) we made an overall profit on the deal, even in 13 years.
What bugs me are the inefficiencies, inconsistencies, inequities and inequalities of overall government and corporate policies. They are “in cahoots” essentially. You had to own a residence (house, flat etc.) to take advantage of this subsidy, as an owner-resident or a landlord. You own some wealth, you got more wealth. Also, not enough resources were allocated to firming up the grid and creating energy storage to take the solar power when residences could not use it directly.
That is to say, the grid could not accept, use and/or store solar power in the sunniest parts of the days. Prosumers’ systems were then were forced to spill energy (as waste heat I presume) as their legacy non-smart inverters completely shut down due to grid over-voltage and would not even “feed” spare power to the affected house when it was using power. That power came from the grid during inverter shutdown.
The privatised energy corporations used prosumers as (subsidised) patsies, so the ultimate losers were the non-subsidized citizens as government net revenue took the hit, as it were. At the same time, a significant proportion of potential power (50% on sunny days (my rough estimate) was wasted once the suburb, locality or region was over-saturated with solar panels. This means 50% of the capital investment in such systems is being wasted on sunny days.
Like electrical power, markets don’t work either if their circuits (and logic gates) are not set up correctly. Efficient, effective and equitable markets are not self-creating. We cannot in any assume that just markets and sustainable markets are self-creating and self-regulating systems. This is probably a long argument unsuitable to a blog.