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Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. It might be hard to intuit this is you spend most of your life in a city but the vast majority of land is

Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. It might be hard to intuit this is you spend most of your life in a city but the vast majority of land is unused, and a great deal of it is not terribly ecologically important. The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US. > The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff. I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do. Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves. And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> Open dirt is hardly valuable. We barely use any of it. We nearly use all of it. The large majority of land in the continental US is used for agriculture and forestry. The land which is actually unused is in places like Nevada (the desert) and Alaska (permafrost). But there isn't really anything like that within a thousand miles of New York City. What is within a thousand miles of New York City is about 80% of the population of the US. > The many multiples of cost that attaching solar to the vanishingly small percentage of land we use is absolutely without question not worth the tradeoff. I see a lot of houses with solar panels on the roof, so evidently plenty of people think you're wrong, and as far as I'm aware they're not generally losing money. Expecting property owners to not do something in their financial interest -- pay money for solar panels, but less than they'd pay to the power company in the alternative -- seems like a weird thing to expect people to do. Large-scale generators are going to have trouble competing with that because they not only have to pay for the land (which may be cheap but it isn't free), they also have to pass through the cost to cover the distribution grid, whereas the homeowner only has to cover the difference in the installation costs between installing them on a roof and installing them on the ground, and then consumes the power themselves. And since this is clearly not only going to happen but already is happening, it makes sense to optimize the cost by making them easier to install.