this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Yeah what MIT is actually saying here is that because solar creation is too efficient it is actually creating an economic situation in which switching to solar costs more than the profit that would be made from it.
That wouldn't be an issue if they just allowed Chinese solar panels but without Chinese production it's an economic issue with capitalism.
Not only that, but it reduces the profitability of other forms of generation too.
The major issue is of course capitalism, because everything has to make a profit. But what they really want is to socialize the losses encurred by solar onto us so they can continue to profit.
Our options are to either subsidize, or behead all the private energy company execs and subsidize it without profit.
There are a ton of non-private energy cooperatives around the US that do actually invest heavily in solar because of this though, so maybe as time goes on the "third position" is that power co-ops win out in the marketplace because they don't have a profit motive/burden
Addendum: It's insane that systems like MISO and ERCOT exist. Both of those systems but the reliability of the grids of 60% or more of Americans in the hands of a closed "free market" of energy trading to help stabilize the grid. It's absolutely amazing that it has continued to function at all, and that system is the exact issue that prevents wide adoption of solar due to the negative prices causing the whole market to start collapsing in on itself until they get bailed out by a State or Federal entity.
If power coops can generate more than they need then they could aggressively expand by swallowing up whole neighbourhoods on the basis of being able to provide power at a lower cost than the grid.
If you can work out a model for it you could even take on new clients and offload the infrastructure cost to banks via loans to buy more panels for each participant. The coop essentially providing all the panels to a new participant on the guarantee of them staying in the coop for x amount of time. This isn't even a loss if things go wrongly because the coop still owns all the panels even if a participant runs off or breaks contract or something.
Where are they getting the power grid from? These Co-ops going to raise and spend literal trillions of dollars making the infrastructure?
You know why it hasn’t been done? Because there isn’t a plan where it works. The maths doesn’t math.
Here in the UK if I had £8000 in panels and batteries I would replace 100% of my electricity usage for a household that has VERY high usage and 6 people in it. Excess can be sold back to the national grid, but if I was doing a coop then it would be many houses operating together to share load and further drive up the efficiency of that.
I don't know why you think "it hasn't been done". Individual households have been doing it for years and groups can do it more efficiently.
These costs are made back in savings within a decade.
I know you're probably not British but you might want to see a calculator just out of curiosity: https://www.spiritenergy.co.uk/solar-pv-calculator
To do this in a coop fashion you'd just be taking the debt burden of installation into the coop, locking people into a contract within the coop for payments at cost for x number of years and then running the installation, panel and battery costs through loans with the bank. You could start with your own house, then link up with your neighbour, then add their neighbours, and so on and so forth. The "grid" is you wiring up between neighbours among yourselves. There is nothing stopping you from running a cable between houses over fence boundaries if both neighbours agree to it. All you're doing is linking up the battery network. The advantage here is that households that already have full batteries would still be producing power that's filling up the batteries of other households. The larger the surface area of your solar network the more efficient you can make it so the more households added, the better.
Oh and if I could order Chinese panels at their prices (I can't) the cost of this would go down by 70%. The biggest barrier to going solar is tariffs that exist for energy industry protectionism.
When the maths do math