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Gas imports or solar panels?
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Climate
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What do the lobbyists get out of the solar panels? How do the solar panels generate constant fees?
You see, people need to pay for electricity. Generally speaking, they don't get it for free. Thus the owner of the solar panels makes money.
The issue with solar is, that the owner can be a simple home owner putting the panels on their roof. When you add batteries to that, it is entirly possible that they never need to buy electricity from the grid ever again. However we are still talking about some middle class person here, who is not going to be able to afford a lobbyist.
There are other ways well below lobbyist level as well, such a solar and wind cooperatives or some farmer setting up a few installations on his property. They do have more money, but still probably are well below lobbyist levels of money.
Considering that US congressmen can evidently be bought with like ten to twenty thousand bucks, or tickets to some resort, I don't understand how USians still don't have crowdfunded lobbying.
Because it would make it way too obvious that their representative are not really representing voters but only the biggest wallet around. Second is a crowdfunded lobbying would be a one shot thing, while corporate lobbying can provide a more stable "support".
Right, so before we see solar take hold, it needs to be illegal for a property owner to own the panels, and the power company has the right to put them anywhere they like.
In sweden its set up so that the owners of household solar cannot ever make money, only save on cost
what the fuck?
Gotta pay for grid maintenance somehow
Same in most countries. In the U.S. many states penalize people for putting in solar through forced monthly payments to the power companies even if they use zero KWh.
This is what happens in the area I was looking to move to.. at that point I’d just have myself removed from the grid entirely. Fuck that nonsense.
Right. There's not as much money in renewables, so there's less lobbying.
I mean... Isn't there though? You do a one time investment, and then you earn money for 20 years with negligible operating costs.
Shouldn't every capitalist get a priapism from this idea?
Capitalism is about hierarchy more than it is about profit. Capitalists spent billions to put someone who bankrupted a casino in charge of largest economy in the world to stop the woke left. Capitalists pay for golden parachutes for nepo baby CEOs who shit the company bed. Capitalists sack departments with mission-critical institutional knowledge because that institutional knowledge gives the workers power.
In an ideal free market, the company that ends up with the largest market share is not the company that optimized for profit, but the company that optimized for murdering all the other companies so it's the largest by default. In real life, the rich and powerful let this mechanism roam free when it helps them oppress the working class, while regulating the market when it makes the game unfun for the rich, and while insulating each other from the consequences that were not guarded against by regulation.
I think the main problem is a lot of them are already entrenched in the fossil fuel market and most of the people holding the money aren't the entrepreneurial types because all the wealth is inherited so they'd rather just hold onto their existing property and fight to keep it relevant than start again somewhere else. It's dumb though because yeah it's free money printing. Am I assessing this right?