this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Is your area not undergoing a massive expansion? I'm in NW Florida, hardly a hotbed of environmentalism, and brother, business is booming.
I fully expect the 20-miles between the edge of town and my camp to be covered in the next decade. Any non-residential and non-commercial land is getting bought up and covered. I expect to see solar panels all they way in the space between the interstate and the state highway, already a few spots where you can see clear from one road to the other over the panels. Very exciting!
Where I live (Sweden) our grid has been essentially fossil-free since the early 90's, thus we haven't had the same need. Particularly since our electricity prices (excluding grid fees) already dip into the negatives in the summer, and solar is useless in the winter (<3hrs of light and snow cover).
Unfortunately though, recent politically motivated shutterings of nuclear plants during the 2010s combined with higher volatility in continental Europe has led to the volatility of our own electricity market skyrocketing, and more decentralized electricity production has led to huge increases in grid fees (state monopoly).
During a recent winter we had prices (when accounting for taxes and fees) in excess of 1$/kWh. This, in a country where almost all heating is electric, is disastrous. For context, we live in a small villa with a geothermal pump, and despite keeping indoor temps as low as 12°C at times we ended up with 1000s of USD equivalent in power bills for the winters 22/23 and 23/24.
Quite sad really.