Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Wind and solar projects, even residential solar, is very easy to finance. Even batteries can be financed. Upfront cost is not an issue. Sunrun (the biggest residential solar installer) has a deal right now where new customers will only $1 / mo for their first 6 months. They package those systems with batteries, now, too.

Battery costs still have room to go down (and they will), but they've already fallen substantially.

More importantly, other energy storage technologies are emerging. It's not just batteries. This is important, of course. There is a lot of pumped hydro, already, that will continue to be used, but there aren't many opportunities to develop new projects like that.

That said, the intermittency of wind and solar can be managed to a large extent by curtailment, even at high penetration levels of 50% and above, even if without much storage because gas generation is very flexible and is what keeps the grid balanced.

I admit I have no expertise on the various financing options for solar. It's something I'll need to look into when I own a house again.

If all this is now so easy in reality, it should be happening in droves, right?  I mean, it's apparently cheap and money saving and easy.

Who wouldn't want that?

Problem seolved.

If all this is now so easy in reality, it should be happening in droves, right?  I mean, it's apparently cheap and money saving and easy.

Who wouldn't want that?

Problem seolved.

Well, the biggest problem is that the problem itself is an externality. There's no price associated with burning carbon. So the societal impact isn't factored into the economics. 

So how about this... Let's completely eliminate the payroll tax with a revenue-neutral carbon tax. 

Generally taxes make things more expensive, in which case you'd get less of it relative to a non-tax scenario. So right now we're taxing employment--which we want, and not taxing carbon dioxide--which we don't want. 

Reverse that and suddenly the externality of spewing CO2 has a cost... Whether it's an adequate cost to cover the true impact of the externality or not is debatable, but at least there's a cost. 

How much would the carbon tax have to be to replace the payroll tax?

nice plan

what's the chance of this being implemented?

in the next ten years?

I should point out the past response as a little flippant. 

One of the biggest political issues with a carbon tax is that it's pretty deeply regressive. That's one of the complaints about the payroll tax as well, but the carbon tax is possibly even more so. 

If you're relatively poor, to pay $2K/year in payroll taxes means you only need to earn something like $26K/year. So if you're a one-income household with two cars and your fuel costs go up $2k/year? While at the same time your electric and heating costs go up (assuming your electrical provider is using coal or NG and/or your house is heated with gas)? Especially if you're a poorer family with much older (and less fuel efficient) cars that use more gas? 

It would hurt more down at the bottom of the income spectrum. Whereas the rich people driving Teslas and who can afford to put solar panels on their house are rewarded, and the other rich people who don't do that, but are paying huge amounts into their payroll taxes, still come out ahead.