4 ms·
> There's way too much human labour involved in getting someone to drive to your house, climb onto your roof and bolt panels to it. In that time, that same work
by Kototama 5y ago
> There's way too much human labour involved in getting someone to drive to your house, climb onto your roof and bolt panels to it. In that time, that same worker could set up a dozen similarly-sized panels when building out a utility solar farm.
Where do you put the solar farm?
- peteradio 5y agoUnproductive farm fields.
- vkou 5y agoLiterally anywhere that's not prime real estate. There's three orders of magnitude more of that kind of surface area on this planet than there are single-family home roofs. [1] I think we can figure something out. [1] 2 billion 'single-family' homes, 800 square feet of roof/average [2], ~50,000 square miles of roof space. Total land area of the Earth is 57 million square miles. You can take your pick of which 50,000 of it can be used for utility solar... [2] This is a large over-estimate, reality is much smaller than that.
- Kototama 5y agoIf you take Europe as an example, every area that is not "prime real estate" is either agriculture or protected forests. Transport of electricity over very long distances is not easy, see https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/05/18/geopolitical-impact-of-long-distance-transport-of-electricity-and-hydrogen/ https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/05/18/geopolitical-impact-o... for a few of the challenges.