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There's a lot of assumptions there, wouldn't it be easier to put some panels on rooftop, car sized battery in the garage and see what happens?

• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  The article literally goes into pretty specific detail about how much energy rooftop solar could provide.
  • morsch 3y ago
    I was left wondering why only 8% of roofs quality for rooftop solar. I haven't checked the underlying paper, maybe it has an answer.
    • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      That's what I thought was so great about this article. Even if you quadrupled the estimate of total rooftop solar, it is still just a drop in the bucket compared to the total energy generation needed. It's almost not worth talking about because it's such a minor amount of capacity. I didn't read the paper, but from personal experience: 1. Rooftop solar depends on lots of individuals to make an investment to put solar on their houses. If you say "let the government subsidize it", that doesn't really make much sense because the government can get a much better return on each dollar spent by investing in more efficient technologies. 2. Many roofs are not suitable for solar. They are either facing the wrong way, at a bad angle, shaded, or, in my case, too "origami-like". Solar panels need to have minimum clearance fro ridge lines on a roof, which can drastically reduce the total coverable area.
      • Tams80 3y ago
        Exactly. It's a quadruple whammy: 1. Most residences not being suitable for significant generation. 2. The return on investment is decades long (yes, so is double glazing, but that is useful for far more households), not that most households can afford it at all. 3. The total generation capacity is piddle, especially for government investment. 4. The materials that go into making PV panels are horrible to extract. I'm not saying PV panels are useless, but they are not much of anything. Not something my lecturers at uni liked hearing/reading, but lo and behold pretty much nothing substantial has changed since. They're too busy blowing Sustainable Development smoke up their own arses though.
• s1artibartfast 3y ago
  rooftop power is basically the most costly and least efficient mode of generating power. It many places, it easily costs 10x for the same nameplate capacity, and because of suboptimal locations and angles, it only produces a fraction of that nameplate.
  • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    Consumer rooftop is about the same price range as nuclear. Commercial rooftop (warehouses, big box stores etc) is a bit cheaper than nuclear, with the most expensive being the same cost as an average nuclear plant, and the low end for new commercial rooftop solar being the same as the running costs of already built nuclear: https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
    • s1artibartfast 3y ago
      You link is broken, is this the same [1]?. https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april-2023.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april... It still shows rooftop clearly to clearly have the worst LCOE. I bet the assumptions for Rooftop dont include suboptimal builds, like builds in San Francisco, on a north facing roof, under a tree, with storage. Rooftop can be good in niches, but it is hardly a panacea.
      • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
        It's not clearly worst, since it shows that some rooftop solar is cheaper than the cheapest nuclear, there's mostly overlap in prices.
        • s1artibartfast 3y ago
          Im not sure why you are looking at the minimum solar costs instead of the average.
    • Tams80 3y ago