Requiem for a Solar Plant
65 comments
·June 21, 2025stego-tech
This is a good story that taps into a lot of the systemic failings in America that hinder progress. Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. Failure of utility companies to maintain their infrastructure to modern standards. Failure of governments to produce consistent and predictable business environments. Failure of bureaucracy to prepare creators and visionaries for success.
All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
cavisne
Its a good read but are his intentions unambiguously good? He had a windfall from crypto (ie contributing nothing to society). Then he was desperate to avoid paying the tax he owed on that windfall.
Is there any actual need for this Solar Farm in the middle of nowhere (that was only built there because of a tax scheme)? Are Texas ratepayers meant to cover the cost of the interconnect in their $/Kwh instead of him?
Better to just pay his taxes and move on, and leave the subsidies for an actual useful solar project.
EDIT: Oh and mineral rights are basically the original cryptocurrency/memecoin, so its somewhat funny that they came into play
Calwestjobs
yes, but... if youre manufacturing plant with expected electricity usage, then build solar plant next / close to your manufacturing facility. or municipality or water treatment plant or .... build solar plant because you need electricity, do not build solar plant because you need money. same as with agriculture, it is nonprofit endevour, you are not getting rich from corn, you are rich from corn sirup, from tortillas... ( unless you are bill gates and divert tax breaks / subsidies away from agriculture and put them into your wallet instead, worsening situation forr every person inside of US borders )
solo solar plant are very weird edge case which was viable only because people with 20 years of schooling could not understand why is solar important, (after multiple oil crises ) so govs invested in this nonsense to speed up adoption. not because it was sensical thing. to open eyes to people that solar is working.
build solar as part of your corps supply chain. dollars are not goal, dollars are means for better life, stronger communities, better republic.
"Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. "
where is battery ? so no this is not about energy self sufficiency, this is just pure only money endeavor. soft power here is not sane. also with battery you can get order of magnitude higher profit AND higher UTILITY, so there are multiple bad things in that endeavor.
jay_kyburz
The same goes for household solar. You don't put it on the roof because you think you'll make money from feed in tariffs, you do it to reduce your electricity bill.
People here in Australia expect feed in tariff to drop to nothing in the next few years, but electric prices are still climbing.
Our new government has promised battery subsidies as well, so I expect batteries to take off. There is a lot of money to be saved by time shifting all that sun that is wasted during the day until the evening when you get home.
Calwestjobs
or let me say it differently, my house needs as much energy to make it luxuriously comfortable in coldest of days, as my neighbors house loses just thru chimney, when there is no fire burning... ( he needs 50times more energy then me, but he is not comfortable, he wakes up into cold house )
there is insanely huge gap in peoples perception of reality, schooling failed many.
less energy i need, less energy we need to capture (new word for generate), transmit, curtail, store,.... my heat pump is smaller then heat pump in costcos meat refrigerator, so smaller device is easier, quicker to manufacture, less people, cars , cubic feet to store, transport,.... and all this effect from on freaking house.
or hurricane, tornado, flood disables grid in my area, my house will stay livable for 3 days until i have to put on sweater... or today, there is heat wave predicted, at least 10 people will die today,... why?
Spivak
I'm so confused by the chimney thing, a nice wood stove which I assume your neighbor is using because it's not practical or possible to heat your house with a fireplace can get you 70-80% efficiency and run overnight. They burn clean enough that I can't tell when my neighbors (presumably always) use theirs and they're directly across the street. The whole neighborhood knows when I use my fireplace.
My neighbors who heat their houses with wood (in an area where you absolutely don't have to—we have gas and electric at extremely reasonable prices), both have the nice high efficiency stoves to take advantage of the Biden tax credit and it seems to work just fine for them. Cords of wood around here aren't free but damn close to it.
Source: I'm considering a wood stove for my garage for working in the winter and they both talked my ear off about their experiences.
jeffbee
[flagged]
stevenzzzzzzz
Many people even working in power/energy don't realize how much interconnection costs are a hinderance. Example: see study group DISIS-2021-001 in SPP (a grid region similar to ERCOT/Texas), a good 25 % of the planned capacity was hit with an interconnection cost approx > $300k/MW (which is similar to the cost of the OP).
Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process
kragen
This is a much better read than I expected. Normally I'd insert a diatribe here about the US's anti-renewable-energy regulatory regime, but the author tells the story far more persuasively and compellingly than I could ever hope to.
nick238
So with mineral rights in Texas, could you just buy/lease them out from under one of your rivals/enemies and just bulldoze their buildings for the lulz? "Sorry, I just really needed that teaspoon of dirt from under your multimillion dollar factory". I guess that's the whole idea of the insurance/waivers, so do you need 50% of the owners of the rights to agree?
Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
jeffbee
This is not only Texas. It is everywhere. It is why "real estate" is a descriptive term that exists.
wglb
This is an excellent writeup. This rhymes with the complexities noted in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran....
Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
hackernudes
Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth it.
nine_k
The missing flavor: Texas mineral rights are very bizarre (they dominate surface land rights, and there's no state registry of them), the detailed power grid analysis completely contradicted the preliminary analysis, and the costs of upgrading less than 2 miles of wiring to carry 3 MW is nearly $800k.
I'm used to think that California is an overpriced legal quagmire if you want to build something. I didn't expect Texas to fare not much better.
bri3k
Don't forget in the middle he states that this is a tax dodge on capital gains from said crypto money.
giblfiz
I'm the original author. I'm not sure why you got down-voted for this, this was absolutely a "tax dodge". The polite term is "tax mitigation strategy", I'm also not sure why this is seen as an openly negative thing? The government wants a type of thing done, they say "hey, we won't pay people directly to do it, but we will subsidize it thru tax incentives"
I was like "yeah, I like that thing (solar) and think it's good for the world, I will do it in return for tax incentives"
Why exactly is that bad?
Dylan16807
In the same way that any business expansion is a tax dodge, sure.
bri3k
He started out to find ways to lower his tax burden. Found something with solar infrastructure in a different state. Went ahead with it in spite of having no experience with the local laws or infrastructure projects and wondered why it failed?
nine_k
Not "a tax dodge", but "following the tax incentives".
travisgriggs
Every time I learn something new about Texas, I like Texas less.
At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
spauldo
Try driving in Texas sometime. Roads are decent, speed limits are high, but the other drivers will make you borderline homicidal.
joeblubaugh
It’s too bad that Texas’ joke of an electrical grid defeated the project, but I think private profit on energy generation is really unlikely and produces a lot of bad incentives for plant operators.
In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
ur-whale
If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?
giblfiz
Hey, I'm the original author here.
I didn't want to do BTC for two reasons: 1) I'm already WAY over exposed on crypto in my portfolio 2) I consider energy burn on mining to be part of a "zero sum helps no one" situation. I was trying to actually do something net positive for the world so didn't want to just drop more into that bucket.
AtlasBarfed
Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas
I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
giblfiz
Original author here, If you look a little more carefully the thing that killed us was an actual physical infrastructure problem. Mineral rights were a nightmare, but we were humping our way thru it bit by bit.
Interconnection was limited because the wires they thought were in the ground were not what was actually there. (well, had degraded)
This was more of a "atoms are hard" kind of issue.
dhosek
If you give them the money after they do the favor, it’s legal, the supreme court said so. Plus, apparently trump feels that bribing foreign officials is essential to American competitiveness so FCPA is going unenforced. Welcome to the future.
Calwestjobs
capital in capitalism.
buckle8017
Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
hwillis
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Absolutely untrue. Solar and wind can always just be disconnected at any moment. Wind resources are also a huge inertia source- windmill blades are massive grid stabilizers.
Renewable tech does not have a big coal fire they need to keep at a constant temperature. How about instead of requiring batteries with solar, we require coal plants to have sufficient bypass cooling that they don't need the load of a grid connection to stay cool.
Renewables are a boogeyman. The reality is simply that they are always able to undercut any fossil plant and they don't like that. It has fuck all to do with grid stability.
giblfiz
Hey, original author here.
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
The project was intentionally limited in scale as to be a "learning project" for me and the whole team. I'm also sort of ok with the idea that it failed, though super frustrated with the entire underlying incentive structure changing so much that we can't use anything we learned to try a second time.
Batteries were intentionally excluded because of the additional complexity overhead they added, and because the way the interconnection rules are written it would have put us into a different MW class which would have dramatically increased a number of other bureaucracy issues.
You are ABSOLUTELY INCORRECT that we would have had a net negative value to the Texas grid without batteries. Batteries are valuable, and increasingly so, but so is raw power (even at mid sun). This is reflected nicely in the hourly price charts, which at this point I'm super familiar with.
Dylan16807
> Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
It's a significantly bad thing if something as straightforward as buying and plugging in solar panels requires special knowledge to not get screwed over.
> His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
Oh come on.
kragen
Electrical generation is a competitive market. It's the expected and even desirable outcome that only the most efficient producers will remain profitable. You're not just plugging in solar panels; you're competing with other companies to see who can plug in the solar panels more cheaply.
And it's even plausible that ERCOT currently can't handle additional PV in whatever area the Roby parcel was in without adding BESS, although the person you're responding to has no idea if that's true or not, since neither they nor I knows where that is.
The conclusion in the post:
> Run five projects through the process simultaneously. Most will fail for reasons you cannot predict. With five, one might succeed. And switching to batteries instead of solar. Or at least solar plus storage.
Dylan16807
I didn't even say profitable. He can't get the ability to just hook up all the panels.
baking
> Oh come on.
He was doing it for the tax credits. Without the tax credits, this project wouldn't have come close to making sense.
Dylan16807
The tax credits aren't coming out of the grid somewhere else. The project is a negative to tax revenue, positive to the grid, and positive to CO2 levels.
I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs.
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
[2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/