Alberta (Canada) slaps punitive tax on solar panels

> it’s a $14 fee per solar panel

Note that usually you mount many solar panels, not just one, so this will stack relatively quickly.

First you introduce the tax, then you increase it. Minimum public anger. They messed up because it's a recycling tax that I presume does not apply to... everything? So it feels punitive. Also it's big. I pay way less recycling tax on bigger and harder to recycle items.

The $14 is what ARMA claims in their press relesaes but they haven't broken down where they came at that number. Many analysts seem to think it could be much higher.

The net effect along with other regulatory moves the AB gov't has taken (they banned all renewables projects outright for some months a couple years ag) is to discourage investment in what was formerly a growing sector.

It will only make sense if the per cost panel is less than certain number (if my math is correct it should be $175), but if the panel cost is over $175 then even with more sales taxes in other provinces the total will be cheaper. That is of course on capital cost not operational, also, not counting the “forced recycling” mentioned.

Cleanup costs should be applied to all coal mines, but we didn’t bother with that either.

Has always seemed like a policy failure to not just charge those fees at the point of sale and then fund a robust waste disposal program for the community.

I will believe that's the goal when I see the tax going directly to aid in disposal.

100% we should charge for long term environmental impacts.

Start with gasoline and diesel first.

Implicit in all the "we'll bring Canada to heel" and "we don't need anything from Canada" talk is an Alberta/Sask exception. They don't mean AB/SK. They mean the rest of Canada, which leans further to the left politically and has more of a manufacturing sector or agricultural / forestry focus.

Also notably there are US states like Texas which are also extremely focused on fossil fuel production which aren't taking this aggressive anti-renewables stance. Alberta is actually further on this axis than any other regime in North America -- taking on a very explicit anti-renewables stance. Even effectively (through regulation) banning their use in large scale datacentre rollouts.

The local elites there are extremely threatened by any renewable talk; they run an active disinformation campaign, and formerly the province had one of the fastest growing renewable sectors in the world. (Alberta gets a lot of solar hours and has high winds, too)

Aside, I was coming back from Edmonton a couple days ago and in the airport there's a wine/liquor store with a sandwich board out front proudly proclaiming that they "have US wine & liquor for sale!" -- completely thumbing nose at the rest of the country as a business opportunity.

Right, I submitted because in addition to being from Alberta (originally, not there now) and having my whole family out there I think there's actually a useful analysis where Alberta's right wing forces have been for sometime a "vanguard" the further side of conservative ideology in North America ... and have had enormous "success" in not just fighting climate change initiatives but breaking apart a lot of the Canadian social contract. They're successful in enacting policy that even their own domestic population is wildly opposed to. Over and over again. E.g. they have extremely little support within their own urban centres, but still run the province however they want.

So actually, it's a place that needs to be watched as a barometer of the future, really. And an example of why "technology will save us from climate change" is a bad take: these people (petroleum sector) will fight tooth and nail to hold onto what they have and they will take us all down with them.

Lol Alberta absolutely mogs Canada in nearly every objective measurement.

Highest per capita GDP, most affordable housing for places you'd actually want to live (Calgary twice as affordable as Toronto or Vancouver), most private sector jobs, lowest taxes, etc...

It's why Alberta absolutely dominates inter-provincial migration. Thinking Alberta isn't the best province or that there's something wrong with the government has no basis in objective reality.

You should move to another Canadian province for a year, just to see.

I mistakingly moved to BC because my wife was sick of the cold and it's basically 3rd world compared to Alberta (apart from a small slice of Vancouver which is nice I guess).

AER charges all active O&G companies operating in Alberta a levy that's meant to fund closing orphaned wells should a company go bankrupt and fail to close their wells. However, you can argue that the levy isn't high enough or that there are too many loopholes that let companies sell off, merge, etc. without closing down wells first.

Entrenched interests want to take us all down with them, unfortunately. They will burn the field and salt the earth rather than yield control and lose their parasitical source of wealth.

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$1000 panel? I’m pretty sure 600 watt panels are coming in at <$100 on the global market. Prices have come down a lot in the past decade.

I'm cool with cleanup costs up front...

Can Alberta apply it to oil and gas companies too?

Provide sources for your $1000+ panel.

https://solarpowerdepot.ca/canadian-solar-450w-mono-bifacial...

https://solarshoppingmall.com/products/renesola-450w-mono-so...

Those numbers point more towards 5-10% cost per panel.

I think your “$1,000+ panel” is conflating the hardware with its share of the entire installation. I don't know how else to explain it.

Also the "$14" number was put out by AMRA (the government's body) without any explanation of how they arrived at that number.

TFA is biased, yes, but its bias is frankly justifiable in the current context. While your "take" seems profoundly dishonest.

Spare me. Even if the tax itself is whatever, saying that UCP didn't mean this at the very least as empty propaganda is purposefully glib.

Also the "notoriously poisonous" part is just... not true.

There's bad faith outrage grifters and climate denialists who promote that idea, but the most common solar panel designs do not contain lead or cadmium.

And even the ones that do, solar panels are 100% recyclable. They shouldn't be going to landfill anyway, every single component in them except the glue that holds it together can be remanufactured into more solar panels.

Edit: To answer the inevitable followup question: "where are all the recyclers then?"

Solar panel recycling isn't a big business yet because the things are so damn resilient, with expected lifespans of 25-50 years or more.

The first generation of modern solar panels aren't even halfway through their service lives yet. Today the only dead panels are ones that suffered accidental damage, the supply of EOL panels that could be recycled is zero and will be for a while. We shouldn't expect to see recycling start to happen on a commercial scale until the 2040s or 2050s.

My understanding is that it’s the thin film variant that’s “famously poisonous”, the Cadmium Telluride ones. But that’s not the type that almost any field full of solar is made up of.

I think that's because it's adding to the cost of solar, effectively making it an barrier to entry; when other provinces or states have financial incentives to install solar panels instead.

This measure sounds a bit disingenuous since Alberta has such a large petroleum industry and this type of measure targets in particular renewables, it looks like a punitive tax. If the problem really is recycling costs, make them payable on recycling (like, again, many products such as used drywall or oil)

Nobody is opposed to a recycling fee. If you actually read the article you will see it's 2.5x to 100x the recycling fees imposed anywhere else in the world. And accompanied by a disinformation campaign from the government.

Notably the same province has a massive abandoned oil & gas well problem that they have failed to deal with for decades at this point.

The same government also effectively banned the use of renewables to power datacentre projects in Alberta, forcing them to use natural gas only.

Just because you don’t like people doesn’t make them stupid.

She (Danielle Smith) is one of the shrewdest politicians in North America right now, actually.

Not, like good shrewd, but very tactically smart and with a very capable public relations ability capable of keeping a notoriously hard-to-tame right wing activist base in line behind her gov't.

Best not to underestimate her.