1. myths stick in people’s heads even if they see rebuttals (and especially if the rebuttals are more complex, ironically). and down the line, they often forget the “right answer” and remember the myths as true.

2. articles with a “negative atmosphere” in the comments section leave people with a negative feeling of the topic of the article (no matter what the actual content of the article or comments is).

interesting stuff.

and, bottom line –> it’s a thin line between what to leave and refute vs what to simply mark as the spam that it is.

i think we’ve given these people their 15 minutes of fame. (i can’t even say i’m certain they’re people — i know that bots are programmed to do what they do, and these commenters don’t really engage in discussion)

Plus it give the more open feeling to the forum and allows people to ask questions without worrying about getting labeled as a troll. While these were almost assuredly trolls there are other ways to deal with it.

Just my opinion though. =-)

Yes, anytime we mention solar & Australia we get trolls dumping the same wild claims and links. Extensive comments that refute them don’t sway these people (if they are indeed people) at all, and they come back with the myths again in the next post about solar & Australia.

Hopefully they won’t be coming here again with their nonsense, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

That article is not blaming the rooftop solar alone, it’s blaming:
“network costs, the solar scheme and the carbon tax for the hike.”

Of these, rooftop solar power is not a problem – but the “scheme” which they are using to encourage it could be (although this is unlikely). Let’s look at the problem.

A major increase in cost of electricity is the carbon tax. When Australia levied a tax on carbon they made an entirely “new cost” for an entire sector of their power grid. This caused part of the supply to become more expensive, and because of merit-order pricing, the entire grid became more expensive.(actually, the cost was not new – it was just new to apply it to the power providers) This is the most significant portion of this rise and can be explained in greater detail if necessary – just ask and I’d be happy to continue.

The solar “scheme” could be argued to contribute to the cost, but if the person doing the analysis understands all of the parameters, it would have to be a fairly poor policy to add a significant portion to the cost of electricity. To my knowledge, it is not possible for the Australian policy to fall into this category as they did a feed-in tariff sponsored by tax payer money. Now I could make the argument that the country as a whole saves money from this, but that’s irrelevant here because this affects taxes, not the cost of grid electricity, so that is not impacting the cost.

Finally, networks costs. These are always going to raise the price of electricity and are inherent in our grid as we need a way to build and maintain networks, but the funny thing here is that roof solar actually decreases these costs when used in moderation! (and by moderation I mean less PV power production than power use – I have yet to see a case that exceeded this on a significant enough scale to be worth mentioning.) This happens because as more power is generated where it is used, the grid simply sees a reduce in demand. Less demand means less extra infrastructure needs to be built to distribute the power, hence less costs.

I wrote this relatively rapidly, so just comment if there are any questions. But the main point is no – the writes are overlooking many things in their assessment of PV power.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/treasurer-wont-rule-out-seeking-mandate-to-sell-electricity-assets-20130222-2ev24.html

Hiding the true cost of electricity from the end user just incurs more inefficiencies and causes the average price to rise!