One of the salutatory effects of pervasive solar is that it becomes less and less plausible that the electric infrastructure could totally collapse, because eve

One of the salutatory effects of pervasive solar is that it becomes less and less plausible that the electric infrastructure could totally collapse, because every house with solar on it is its own independent power station that has enough juice to use electronics. We still have the problem of decay, but it still gives a window of many years to potentially recover. I'm a big fan of house solar for that reason. In the short term, there's every reason to prefer big solar installations run by power companies interested in every last percentage of efficiency and willing and able to maintain it well, but for disaster prep it's great to have as many independent islands that can run to some degree in an isolated mode as possible. (Although I'd be a lot happier if house solar was more conveniently integrated into the house system. Then again, if the grid was down in the long term there's a lot of people who could tweak the solar installation to be the primary house power in not too much time or effort. Even in their current form it's a lot better than nothing. The difference between one powered outlet and zero powered outlets is pretty big.)