Because it relies on someone overpaying you for the electricity produced, which is added onto someone elses' bill.
In a democracy, that's not sustainable. Sooner or later, someone will get voted in that promises the remove the subsidy.
Indeed this is happening all over the world.
It also leads to resource misallocation whereby time + money + manpower is spent farming subsidies over other productive activities.
If your example is for an unsubsidised installation, then it's a good ROI. Otherwise, it's a bad idea as well as morally questionable. The poorer members of society shouldn't pay more for basic energy to make richer members get excessive returns.
You assume specific aspects regarding the regulatory environment for the parent. Are you sure that they're talking about a full-NEM style arrangement like found in California, or is it something akin to Australia (or Wisconsin) where you're credited at avoided cost for exports to the grid?
I strongly agree that subsidies distort markets (usually to the detriment of society). However, with energy, emerging technologies are competing with incumbent technologies with a host of direct and indirect subsidies.
Regardless, for the parent -- solar isn't always a good investment. You need sunny areas with high electricity prices. While this is found frequently, it is not ubiquitous.
Most of Australia has had what are called 'FiT' or 'Feed in Tariff'. This was a price above and beyond the retail price of electricity that was paid for solar panel owners.
It varies state to state, but was up to 44c kwh.
However, because of the fact that these schemes blew out in cost (original estimates in NSW were about $1.6b in total, but ended up something like $6b per year) - principally because of the same analysis as the parent comment - 'hey ! free money!' - the schemes are being wound back agressively and closed to new entrants. In most cases, they have been trimmed back to pay the wholesale cost of electricity if your house is a net producer.
The perverse incentives meant that many people would turn everything off during the day, and then switch it all on again as soon as the solar panels stopped producing power. So daytime usage would end up exporting maximum power to the grid, while nighttime usage would climb as homeowners used power-hungry appliances like clothes dryers after dark.
The end result is that a lot of small businesses that started up will now close in a classic boom-bust cycle that could have been prevented.
In case it's not clear, I have a very real moral problem with subsidised solar power. Nobody would float the idea of a law that meant bus prices were increased to pay rebates to owners of a Mercedes, but effectively that is what solar FIT regimes do. They increase the cost of energy for people who cannot afford a solar panel install (those in rented accomodation, or in multi-unit dwellings) to benefit those who have their own house and the spare capital to spend on solar panels.
The issue is that coal is quoted at 10c/kWhr, solar at a higher rate, but that neglects subsidies and negative externalities like climate change. Once you balance the subsidies and introduce a carbon price, coal starts to look a lot worse.
anthonyb - the article is not clear on what the subsidies were. It also doesn't factor in the royalties that developed fields will produce. So I can't really determine that.
However, in nearly every case where I see 'x industry gets y billion' in subsidies, the numbers are usually things like tax rebates on R&D, which apply to every industry, including software, and, in Australia particularly, the off-road diesel fuel excise rebate, which is not a subsidy but merely a refunded tax because diesel excise is for investing in the road network. Again, many industries receive a diesel excise exemption, including fishing and agriculture.
Whereas most 'renewable' industry subsidies are direct payments.
It is a bit light on detail, but still there are significant subsidies which are paid to the oil, coal and gas industries. There are some fairly detailed numbers released by the Greens: http://nonewcoal.greens.org.au/coal/speeches The basic gist is that solar gets ~1/20th of the subsidy that coal does.
All of that overlooks the built in subsidies though, namely that fossil fuel power plants can dump pretty much whatever they want into the atmosphere. The health impacts of that alone are immense, and there's no other industry which gets away with that.
[I got this from the do the math blog: http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/a-solar-powered-...] "Comparing annual insolation for 239 U.S. cities over 30 years leads to the startling conclusion that the best place in the continental U.S. (Mojave Desert) outperforms the worst place (Olympic Peninsula) by only a factor of two!" Obviously that doesn't mean these variations don't matter or that seasonal variations also aren't an issue, but it is still very interesting.
All electricity installations are subsidised, one way or another. What we need to ask is what the subsidy is for and if it is likely to help. As far as I see it the question comes down to how much investment it would take so that solar is cheaper than other forms of energy production. If we are in the situation where that is about to happen soon and where a major factor in keeping prices high is economies of scale, then the subsidy is sane and is likely to result in economic benefits that massively outweigh the cost of the subsidy. Otherwise it isn't.
In a democracy, that's not sustainable. Sooner or later, someone will get voted in that promises the remove the subsidy.
Indeed this is happening all over the world.
It also leads to resource misallocation whereby time + money + manpower is spent farming subsidies over other productive activities.
If your example is for an unsubsidised installation, then it's a good ROI. Otherwise, it's a bad idea as well as morally questionable. The poorer members of society shouldn't pay more for basic energy to make richer members get excessive returns.