As long as fossil fuels remain one of the cheapest easiest to scale ways to make power, there’s a similar incentive to cheat. If everyone else cuts emissions and you don’t, your margins are higher and you can undercut them. Global reductions require an all-cooperate scenario.
Developing nations have the strongest incentive to cheat since they need those margins to catch up.
Which is why I think little progress will be made until other sources are actually cheaper. Until then it’s beyond us politically. We can’t get all nations across the world to simultaneously cooperate at that scale.
IMO economics always wins. You're never going to see an all-cooperate scenario.
You will see an all-compete scenario, so constantly reducing costs for alternatives is key but you also have to find a way to ensure that the producers can win economically too. This is the conundrum.
If solar panels get cheap enough to create high demand, then that demand has to carry through the process of manufacturing, installing and maintenance. Every time I read that solar has gotten even cheaper, I start calling for quotes to install them at my house and the prices are borderline obscene. Same for geothermal last time I needed to update my HVAC.
I want solar and geothermal to work but the economics are a challenge.
All this to say, you calling a local company and getting quotes captures your price but that’s not quite the same as the global price.
https://esgnews.com/us-imposes-solar-tariffs-up-to-123-on-im...
EDIT: I was wrong - tariffs on eg Chinese made solar panels are more like 65% right now - there’s multiple tariffs. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/02/04/u-s-raises-solar-poly...
Point being the US government is making them expensive for US consumers but that’s not true for global markets where they want to have energy independence. Solar is in fact very cheap these days.
The equipment is nearly free compared to the labor to install it. At least the last time I checked. I could do my own DIY system for about 1/4th the cost of one "professionally" installed - and I use the scare quotes for good reason. Most of the installation companies for residential solar exist to sell financing, the solar bit is just an unfortunate tertiary (behind grifting on the green energy credits/tax rebates) concern for most of them.
Panels costing an extra 65% is a rounding error for me. I'd need a whole lot more real estate to put them on for it to become a significant fraction of the total system cost.
And that might even STILL be okay if the quality of engineering and workmanship was decent and available. I'd pay the going rate tomorrow if I could find a highly competent electrician/company to do the over-engineered setup I want today. I'm not interested in saving money - I could care less if it ever pencils out. I'm interested in having a system that can survive a lengthy grid outage situation that is fully redundant and properly engineered to industrial level standards. This is effectively impossible in the US, but friends in other areas of the world have had similar setups installed for years.
A plug in solar panel and microinverter at the local supermarket is about €1k/kW. 9kW of solar for €9k/£8k/$10.5k to power an average US car and an average US house.
Avearge US car does 13,000 miles a year needs about 4,500kWh, so €4500
An average US home uses 11kWh a day, or 4,000 kWh a year, that would be another €4000
US electric price is an average 17c per kWh. That's a 15% ROI.
I suspect the costs your quoting are mainly things like scaffolding and labour, and that's not going to get cheaper.
The panels themselves - ignoring inverter, install, etc, are $100 for a 400W panel [0]. To generate a whopping 16,000kWh a year -- 70% more than the average -- you'd need to spend $4k on panels. Even if panels were free, your quotes would still be obscene because tradesmen charge obscene amounts (or rather roofing work is just expensive)
[0] https://www.solartradesales.co.uk/aiko-neostar-2s-460w-n-typ...
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
Typo, 1000kWh from 1kW of solar panel.
I got my 4x 455W panels for 70€ each from BayWa (random vendor in Germany), plus delivery. Microinverter ~200€. Aluminium etc for installation ~400€ or so. I installed them together with a friend. Total cost ~900€ or so. At 30ct/kWh in Germany, break even is in 3 years. Would be earlier if I had a better roof to put them on, mine has some shadow.
This isn't really how it works, since greenhouse gas output is pretty much corellated to income level, and even that's an understatement, since people in rich countries buy stuff made in poor countries, and manufacturing causes emissions.
The real problem is carbon credits - rich countries can both pollute, and absolve themselves of moral responsibility by buying carbon credits - and said carbon credits are fungible, so countries' compete for the lowest selling price.
So what ends up happening is poor countries sell carbon credits by offering programs and promises, but can't/won't bear the cost, as that would mean they'd have to raise credit prices, and buyers would go elsewhere.
It's a system designed to encourage cheating while absolving moral responsibility.
Furthermore, it also reduces the drain on the (often very fragile, for thirld world countries) foreign reserves, especially relevant when the oil prices fluctuate wildly.
If your solar panels are old and you don't have money to replace them, you get slightly less electricity. If you are out of gasoline/diesel and you have no money to buy it, you have a big, big, problem.
Unless there is some hidden cybersecurity risk of them shutting off panels remotely?
And corruption is one of those annoying problems that dont go away easy
It's political will not economics that keeps us addicted to fossil fuels. Nobody gets rich from solar panels. You build them. They produce power. Oil wells like any mine are huge wealth concentrators. That's the real problem.
If anything, a bunch of countries (particularly those who are net oil importers) are re-evaluting their energy dependence given that the compact that the US will guarantee maritime transport has essentially been broken.
[1]: https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-el...
In March 2020 at the start of the pandemic, it looked like the world economy would come to a standstill. Oil futures went into extreme contango, briefly going negative as nobody was taking delivery. So in April 2020 the Trump administration went and browbeat all the OPEC+ members to massively slash production [1][2][3]. Art of the deal. This culminated in a 2 year deal to cut production by initially 9.7Mbpd (million barrels per day) and then reducing over the 2 year period [4]. This was a disaster.
For context, OPEC does this sort of thing by themselves without any kind of prompting when necessary. They meet every 3 months and project demand and then set production targets to maintain a floor and ceiling for oil prices. Individual members can and do cheat, producing more than their allocation and lying about production cuts but all in all the system mostly works.
Trump loses the election. Biden comes in and demand rockets back in 2021 and crude oil prices skyrocket, as do gas prices as a result. The Biden admin quietly went to MBS to ask him to end the deal. He refused. You can overlay this 2 year deal with global inflation and it pretty much matches up exactly.
So Republicans blamed inflation on Biden even though it was a Trump deal. The Democrats didn't abandon US foreign policy and publicly hang out an ally to dry so instead just blamed greedy oil companies for price gouging. And nobody at all mentioned the 2020 OPEC deal. Not in mainstream politics anyway.
That was a 10% cut in global supply and look what it did to inflation. Closing the Strait cuts global supply by 20%. In 1973 with the Arab oil embargo, the major recessionary effects took 6 months to really hit. This is a ticking time bomb that will likely explode leading into the midterms.
Anyway, the point is OPEC+ did that.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/business/opec-russia-approve...
[3]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/opec-would-miss-frie...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil-saudi-cuts-idU...
[4]:
There are a number of elements that go into gas prices like additives, refining margin (called the "crack spread") and distribution but crude oil prices are a huge part of that. Also, like anything demand plays a huge role and that means the market's expectation for future supply.
So if the other side overpumped by x1 amount then you pump an extra x1 the next turn / year (maybe multiplied some reference production factor as they don't all have the same absolute limits).
The real world is much more complex. OPEC is a multi-party game, for starters. For another thing, there are cascades of social/political problems that get in the way of optimal strategy at the level of nations. I.e. that only works if politicians are more interested in solving problems than controlling narratives or maintaining power. Unfortunately, an ineffective leader can be sustained by controlling the narrative, while an effective leader can be destroyed by lack of control over the narrative. And one of the best ways to control a narrative (especially if you aren't a very good leader to begin with) is to create so much chaos that it distracts from your shortcomings, and blame the chaos on enemies.