I agree that a a more general law would be better, but for the foreseeable future I don't see this law having detrimental side effects. Also this law can be addressed in the future when solar is a less compelling technology.
* Gives solar power industry a boost in a way that's hard to get rid of--they will lobby to keep this even if other industries are around and it'll probably never change
* No incentive to research new energy technology in the meantime
And decreases the energy bill by a very similar amount of what an increase in the mortgage would be if the cost was 100% passed on. Regardless, in much of California the price of homes has little to do with the cost of building them. So another possibility is buildable land gets a little cheaper because building is more expensive and homes are priced by what the market will bear, not by material cost.
I agree with you. I just finished installing a solar system that covers 1.5x my needs in my Southen California house. 5.4kw. My system cost installed was $2.61/watt - with $7000 being labor from a contractor and $6300 the hardware and panels. And my payback will be 4.2 years based on the past 29 months of usage.
Let us assume that there is simply a hardware expense because the builders already have roofers and electricians. It’s such a fraction of a mouse fart (as mentioned) that going solar will essentially pay for itself after 2 years.
I can see builders charging a premium for the "electric car package" or the "double your consumption" service but something like 3W of production for each square foot per month would be amazing.
> And decreases the energy bill by a very similar amount of what an increase in the mortgage would be
Sure, this is true iff a) the home has a nice south-facing roof, b) without trees in the way and c) under the current tariff design in most of California.
Some homes are built in wooded areas. Deciduous trees on the south side of the house (in the northern hemisphere) 1) shade in the summer, 2) allow the sun to warm in the winter are 3) are attractive.
Finally, regulated-monopoly utilities will continue to pass their costs to their customers. They will change the designs of their rates to continue to recoup their costs. So what might be saved in utilities costs today won't necessarily be saved over the life of the mortgage.
In a narrow sense; TCO, however, may be lower. (EDIT: TFA itself indicates +$9500 new home cost, -$19,000 30-year electricity cost as the average impact.)
> Gives solar power industry a boost in a way that's hard to get rid of--they will lobby to keep this even if other industries are around and it'll probably never change
Sure, the solar lobby will seek to preserve this as is as the landscape changes. Competing industries will seek either to remove or broaden it to accommodate other approaches to the same policy objective. The homebuilding industry lobbied against it, and it still was passed. “One industry will lobby to keep it” does not imply “it will never change”, or the past absence of the rule would never have changed.
> No incentive to research new energy technology in the meantime
Even with 100% residential solar deployment—not just on new construction—there’s a lot of energy demand that doesn't cover and plenty of incentive to find an efficient way of meeting that demand.
The cost of homes in 2018 is primarily driven by how much people can get for a mortgage, not by the materials that go into building them.
If homes had to be built to a better standard by legislature (Better insulation, or solar roofing, or whatever), it would, in the long term, drive down the price of land, but keep home prices similar.
Not to mention that you cannot retrofit solar panels on a home at the same interest rate as you can get on a mortgage. Forcing banks to lend money for these installations actually makes it cheaper for the homeowner.
If some other practical carbon-free home power generation tech emerges (fusion?) the code will probably be amended to say "... or a 5 kw basement fusion reactor". That's how the building code has mostly evolved, by adding specific alternatives rather than trying to be entirely general.
Being specific has disadvantages, but the big advantage is that most decisions can be made by contractors reading the code instead of requiring an (expensive) engineering calculation. Engineering can be 1/3 of the cost of a remodel as it is. Increasing the engineering cost gives a big advantage to tract home builders who can amortize the engineering across a subdivision, which results in suburban malaise.
For instance, current energy codes require a certain R-value of insulation in walls, so that any contractor can go to Home Depot and buy the insulation marked with that R value and expect it to pass inspection. If the code said "Homes may only lose X BTU/year through all surfaces" it'd require a lot of engineer time per house to work it all out.
It's great that solar has evolved from being so expensive that it could only be installed in the most carefully optimized system, to something where you can just slap a few panels on a roof and expect reasonable results.
To reduce transmission losses, among other reasons.
> California has vast desert areas to tile with solar panels at less expense.
Even if it would be less build/maintenance expense per unit of delivered energy, a lot of California's vast deserts are either federally protected, and so not available even if it was smart to use them otherwise or already being irrigated and used for agriculture. You can't really cover a farm with solar panels without killing it's function like you can a house.
It's true that they more frequently get modified, often repeatedly and radically, until little trace of the original remains.
But anyhow, this isn't a law it's a regulation, and regulations are somewhat more likely to be removed (sometimes, because removal or even modification of the law under which the regulation was adopted forces this, independent of what the regulator would choose without that constraint.)
In the near- to even medium-term future, adding another $10K to the cost of a new home in much of California is going to have a pretty negligible effect on demand. If you're expecting to pay over half a million for a home -- the median listing price for homes in CA right now is %515K, according to Zillow -- it's not much of an exaggeration to say that another $10K would be a rounding error.
This might be the case (I used ”rarely” as my weasel word of choice). Some times it’s good to break habit and tradition - and building is a lot about tradition and often not efficiency. Buildings are constructed like the last one, not in the most efficient, clever or economic way. Tradition can be pushed by laws like this.
Another example is the EU regulation on incandescent bulbs. Stops people buying what they always did and helps pushing prices down for alternatives.
This isn't exactly an either-or, but it seems like CA could have achieved the same results (for example) by incentivizing more density of construction. IIRC vertical housing costs less to heat & cool than horizontal housing. Mandating residential solar will make utility-scale solar/wind/etc. that much less attractive, even though it may be more effective long-term. Also, this limits construction to the availability of solar installers, which may not be in harmony today.
So it may be the case that the time and political capital spent on this path foreclosed other options and end up creating a rigid solution that prevents creativity in achieving the goals.
