No, I don't have specific references - you got me! :-) I live not far from "NZ's largest grid-connected solar power plant" (2.1 MW nameplate: feeble), and also

No, I don't have specific references - you got me! :-) I live not far from "NZ's largest grid-connected solar power plant" (2.1 MW nameplate: feeble), and also not far from one of the larger wind farms. The solar plant is on valuable dairy land, that's true. I wish Todd would publish some figures for it, although it hasn't been operating for long.* When I wrote "higher-value", I had just been thinking about NZ's trade problem: it exports dried milk, red meat and a few other low-value-add bio-materials in order to buy everything else. Land is valuable to the country as a whole for its export revenue. I had also been re-reading Vaclav Smil's Energy in Nature and Society, in which he says the areal (per square meter) power intensity of PV production is approximately the same as the areal power consumption of cities, so we need the same order of magnitude of land that cities take up if we use PV primarily. And it can't be too erosion-prone. That (value/national interest) is also an issue (and this is specifically what I had been thinking about) for carbon farming conversions of hill country sheep and beef stations into Radiata monoculture plantations. Privately profitable, but probably against the national interest, and due to policy. > Private markets can’t make long term investments if the cost of utility scale infrastructure is dropping too fast. Design, legal, permitting, interconnect, civil, structural and electrical balance of system, and present value of O&M collectively dominate now,* and they are not subject to the same rate of cost decline as panels and inverters (and batteries), so overall, the cost isn't dropping super fast any more. (The PV version of Amdahl's law, perhaps.) * Total installed capacity of wind power seems to be at least two, possibly three orders or magnitude higher than that of PV solar in NZ. Maybe this is due to the "social licence to operate" / nimby factor, but maybe not. It does suggest that rooftop solar is a tiny niche in the ecosystem, so maybe the market structure isn't all that bad? * In NZ finance costs a lot too, because policy privileges residential real estate investment so greatly.