I'm not sure which subsidies he means. The raw price of a solar panel now is in many cases under a dollar per watt, with no tax rebate applied, just like you went to amazon and ordered a solar panel, and it shows up to your house. The manufacturer potentially could be subsidized in some ways, I'm not sure, like low interest loans or whatever. Anyway a sunny place like florida, texas, or southern california, you can generate about 1.5 kwh per day from a 200 watt solar panel that costs $180. This is about 18 cents of electricity per day, so 1000 days, about 3 years, to offset it's cost. Most panels have 20-30 years warranties.
A gallon of gasoline produces in the mid 30's kwh of power, except ICE engines only harness about 40% of that. If your commute to work is 20 miles, you need about 9 of those panels to harvest enough electricity for that task per day, say 10 to be safe. A 40 mile round trip at average passenger vehicle mpg is 1.6 gallons of gas per day, with holidays and vacation, lets say 50 weeks a year, 5 days per week, that's 400 gallons of gas per year. At current average prices that is $1028 per year, so the panels take less than 2 years to save you money in that scenario.
The real cost savings are in DIY, you can buy panels from wholesalers as low as $0.60 per wat rating that i've seen, and make your own lithium iron battery packs, do the install yourself, it can for sure be cost effective. If you go for a commercial install, you get into more sketchy territory.
The main reason I like solar is the independence, if an idiot like biden takes office and starts jacking up prices of energy with a few strokes of their pen, you are independent and unaffected, at least directly. I think individual independence is nearly as important as national independence, when it comes to things like energy, or the nation's food and medical supplies, we shouldn't be dependent on nations like china or middle eastern dictators literally for our survival, and on an individual level I think most people should have gardens, maybe a few chickens, a tilapia pool, and some solar panels, plus emergency supplies for reasonable natural disasters. Then you still have the grid as a backup and mostly industry is powered by the grid so more energy available for businesses to utilize. As far as that goes, nuclear and solar go hand in hand, solar produces the most power during the day, which is when demand is highest, unlike wind which produces whenever it feels like, often at night, when demand is lowest(if you have batteries it's okay but grid scale batteries are way too expensive). Nuclear creates steady power output so you have to build excess capacity to meet peak needs, but not if you combine with solar.
I'm not sure which subsidies he means. The raw price of a solar panel now is in many cases under a dollar per watt, with no tax rebate applied, just like you went to amazon and ordered a solar panel, and it shows up to your house. The manufacturer potentially could be subsidized in some ways, I'm not sure, like low interest loans or whatever. Anyway a sunny place like florida, texas, or southern california, you can generate about 1.5 kwh per day from a 200 watt solar panel that costs $180. This is about 18 cents of electricity per day, so 1000 days, about 3 years, to offset it's cost. Most panels have 20-30 years warranties.
A gallon of gasoline produces in the mid 30's kwh of power, except ICE engines only harness about 40% of that. If your commute to work is 20 miles, you need about 9 of those panels to harvest enough electricity for that task per day, say 10 to be safe. A 40 mile round trip at average passenger vehicle mpg is 1.6 gallons of gas per day, with holidays and vacation, lets say 50 weeks a year, 5 days per week, that's 400 gallons of gas per year. At current average prices that is $1028 per year, so the panels take less than 2 years to save you money in that scenario.
The real cost savings are in DIY, you can buy panels from wholesalers as low as $0.60 per wat rating that i've seen, and make your own lithium iron battery packs, do the install yourself, it can for sure be cost effective. If you go for a commercial install, you get into more sketchy territory.
The main reason I like solar is the independence, if an idiot like biden takes office and starts jacking up prices of energy with a few strokes of their pen, you are independent and unaffected, at least directly. I think individual independence is nearly as important as national independence, when it comes to things like energy, or the nation's food and medical supplies, we shouldn't be dependent on nations like china or middle eastern dictators literally for our survival, and on an individual level I think most people should have gardens, maybe a few chickens, a tilapia pool, and some solar panels, plus emergency supplies for reasonable natural disasters. Then you still have the grid as a backup and mostly industry is powered by the grid so more energy available for businesses to utilize. As far as that goes, nuclear and solar go hand in hand, solar produces the most power during the day, which is when demand is highest, unlike wind which produces whenever it feels like, often at night, when demand is lowest(if you have batteries it's okay but grid scale batteries are way too expensive). Nuclear creates steady power output so you have to build excess capacity to meet peak needs, but not if you combine with solar.