8 ms·

Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system. This is in contrast to

Scale is the really important thing here. It's really easy and really cheap to build a small-business, or home scale generation system. This is in contrast to nuclear, coal, gas turbine etc where you really need large plants to work efficiently. Small portable diesel generators exist, but they are expensive to run, need regular maintenance and refueling. Once you can cost effectively generate real electricity for very little effort, and very low cost, then people do it. And when you distribute generation like this very large effects happen very qickly.

michaelteter 2y ago
In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local. Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us. And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?
- ddulaney 2y ago
  Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    That's a fair point, but let's frame that in a resiliency context, where the choice becomes: * Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally * More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
  - anticorporate 2y ago
    > Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason. It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
    - idunnoman1222 2y ago
      That’s nice, but if we all did that, the price would be 100 times
      - anticorporate 2y ago
        That's nice, but that's not how economics or farming work. There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc. Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
        idunnoman1222 2y ago
        Right the way economics works is I’m going to get my cabbage from a totally different part of the world depending on what time of year I buy it. And yes, when it’s in season, it’s nice to go to the local market. If cabbage was $150 a pop your neighbors biggest concerned would probably be the dead bodies in the streets
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    The questions actually are, what happens when we deplete the Ogallala aquifer? What happens when climate change, conflict or natural disaster impacts the Colorado watershed, the Central Valley, and/or the go to market infrastructure for that produce? We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
  - floatrock 2y ago
    Are we talking about risk-adjusted cost doubling? Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  People tend to align their thoughts with what pays the mortgage. Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
- dfxm12 2y ago
  Define "reasonably local" though, because Texas running on its own grid has been bad for almost all Texans (I'm sure a select few are benefiting greatly from it). Most places have reasonably locally resourced schools, but then again, the schools that cover people in the lower socio-economic classes just happen to be worse off. This tends to be the case for many locally distributed resources. Now, going even more local, at an individual house level, I wouldn't want to rely on a local handyman to fix my solar issues or have to do it myself. Home ownership is complex & expensive enough, and when there's an issue, a handyman is sometimes tough to get. It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
  - bmicraft 2y ago
    Texas running it's own grid isn't that bad because Texas is too small, it's mostly just bad because it's criminally underfunded and underregulated.
    - dfxm12 2y ago
      Texas can get away with this because only Texas has control. I addressed this. If they were hooked up through other states, there would be more external pressure to address these issues.
boshomi 2y ago
Competition is even more important than size. Only when there are a large number of suppliers at all processing stages will there be a boom in innovation. In China, this applies to both the PV industry and the wind industry. In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.
epistasis 2y ago
>scale This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand. Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days. Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns. If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.
  - epistasis 2y ago
    > If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned. Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels. > If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864 This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year. So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.
AnotherGoodName 2y ago
On the flip side the biggest power plants in the world are the new massive solar installations, eg. Gonghe Talatan Solar Park. It's fun to view these large solar plants on satellite view. Absolutely massive. https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2%B034'41.0%22E https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2... and with the nearby pumped hydro that is itself in the gigawatt range and growing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam ) removes the concerns of "how do you store the power!". I'm not convinced small scale solar is the future when large integrated hydro+solar like this has such huge advantages.
- floatrock 2y ago
  it's almost like zooming in on a fractal
- abhinavk 2y ago
  I drove through a solar cluster in India this year. https://earth.google.com/web/@27.45264286,72.06288954,225.16349782a,52589.33658315d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=CgRCAggBOgMKATBCAggASg0I____________ARAA https://earth.google.com/web/@27.45264286,72.06288954,225.16... I couldn't fathom the scale when I looked at it later in Google Earth. It's a good use of the arid land where few things grow.
- marssaxman 2y ago
  That's amazing - my first thought, after clicking your link, was that the satellite view was out of date, from before construction began: but no, I just needed to zoom out. And out. And out - still not all of it! - five clicks later, you can finally see that this solar park takes up as much space as a small city.
SoftTalker 2y ago
The diesel generator will provide power at night however. Or for a week of cloudy winter days (assuming you have that much fuel).
- interactivecode 2y ago
  perhaps we need to shift some of our habits to high sun hours where possible. Like run the washing machine and dishwasher at mid day. So you need less battery storage for the nights. And perhaps build houses that store thermal heat better so you can run the heater less aggressively in the evening.
  - myself248 2y ago
    Exactly. This is what the whole "iot" and "smart grid" were supposed to get us -- appliances and EVSEs that can be readied to start, and will then start themselves when the energy price is favorable. We apparently have that for some EVSEs, but still not for my stupid dishwasher. (It uses electric heat to boost the water temperature, no matter how much I prime the hot water plumbing, and it's quite a pig energy-wise.) Real energy has curves, and the sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be. Worse, my energy provider put me on a time-of-day rate that's _most_ expensive during peak sun hours, which seems backwards if they're supposed to be introducing more PV to the mix. I guess it's time to negotiate with the landlord and get some panels on the roof so I can start offsetting my own consumption at their so-called "peak" times.
  - floatrock 2y ago
    In a lot of places, your local electric utility is nudging you towards Time-of-Use rates to encourage exactly this.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    so we can save daylight? some sort of time where we save the light of day? Possibly by shift our clocks? I wonder what we'd call such an arrangement.
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
vivzkestrel 2y ago
what about pocket nuclear reactors? when are we getting them?
Veserv 2y ago
Except that is the opposite of reality in the USA. The fraction of energy generated from small scale PV generation in the USA has decreased as total PV generation has increased [1]. 10 years ago, in 2014, utility scale PV generation was 57%. Over those 10 years, utility scale PV generation increased by ~10x, where as small scale PV generation only increased by ~6.5x. In spite of absolutely massive incentives, small scale PV generation has grown slower in absolute and percentage terms in nearly every single year of the last decade. Scale is the really important thing here. It is really easy and really cheap to use economies of scale to purchase square kilometers of panels and plop them down in bulk over vast swathes of regular land in a assembly line fashion. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html
- glial 2y ago
  > absolutely massive incentives At least where I live, solar is still roughly break even cost-wise with not installing solar over 20 years -- but it increases your home's complexity and makes updating your roof more complicated and expensive.
  - bruce511 2y ago
    The math varies a lot by location. In the US the costs of gear and install are typically higher (twice as high as here.) It'll also obviously be a factor of electricity cost, sunny days, your residential consumption and so on. Personally I get 17.5% return on capital spent (and ways to improve that further) so the math works out well. Ymmv.
  - dzhiurgis 2y ago
    Same here. I live where there’s ton of sun, but power is cheap and install is expensive and not subsidised. Dad lives in northern europe, power is 2x more and install is 2x and subsidised. In december he generates like 20kwh per month from 8kw array. Still already paid itself after few years.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Let's face it: electricity is dirt cheap in the US compared to other developed countries. If you have grid access you don't really benefit significantly from solar. That both explains why it was adopted relatively early for private use cases as well as why it doesn't grow as much as commercial installations as equipment gets cheaper.

michaelteter 2y ago

In general we need to get smart and get good at bringing critical resources (energy, food/water production) reasonably local. Climate, political, and economic disasters seem more frequent each decade, and it would be a shame to starve or melt/freeze ourselves just because our delivery systems failed us. And as a Texan, it blows my mind that so many people reject local solar options. When the grid is having rolling blackouts, wouldn’t it be nice to still have power?

ddulaney 2y ago
Agreed in general, but the question is what we give up in going to a more-resilient system. In particular, lots of things are the way they are because of cost. Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? I don’t think I would.
- itishappy 2y ago
  That's a fair point, but let's frame that in a resiliency context, where the choice becomes: * Cheap food most of the time, no food occasionally * More expensive food most of the time, imported food occasionally That decision is not one I'm particularly equipped to comment on.
- anticorporate 2y ago
  > Would you be OK with your food costs doubling or tripling because it’s local? Just pointing out that many people, including myself, intentionally buy groceries from farmers' markets and local food co-ops very specifically because we want our food to be local. Others will spend even more time and labor on vegetable gardens for the same reason. It is unfortunate that the way we offer food production subsidies in many countries primarily benefit large, multinational conglomerates instead of funding healthier, more resilient, and more environmentally friendly local options. It is terrible that only those with means can afford to purchase local foods in many markets, but yes, plenty of us who are able to do so choose to.
  - idunnoman1222 2y ago
    That’s nice, but if we all did that, the price would be 100 times
    - anticorporate 2y ago
      That's nice, but that's not how economics or farming work. There are a lot of factors limiting local farms' ability to deliver at a cheaper price point, like corporate consolidation, land being converted into suburban sprawl, a lack of local value add and processing infrastructure, huge subsidies (and water resources) being wasted on commodity growers, an aging farmer population, etc. Do you really think that if a head of cabbage was fetching $150 a pop at my grocery store that Earl who owns the farm across the street from me is going to stubbornly continue to grow commodity tobacco at a profit of $2000 an ACRE? (About 35 cents a plant.)
      - idunnoman1222 2y ago
        Right the way economics works is I’m going to get my cabbage from a totally different part of the world depending on what time of year I buy it. And yes, when it’s in season, it’s nice to go to the local market. If cabbage was $150 a pop your neighbors biggest concerned would probably be the dead bodies in the streets
- Spooky23 2y ago
  The questions actually are, what happens when we deplete the Ogallala aquifer? What happens when climate change, conflict or natural disaster impacts the Colorado watershed, the Central Valley, and/or the go to market infrastructure for that produce? We’ve created a system where investments and massive subsidy made to turn the desert into a garden destroyed agriculture nationally. It’s a predictable black swan scenario that has impactful and broad implications.
- floatrock 2y ago
  Are we talking about risk-adjusted cost doubling? Most humans think in "next paycheck" terms not "risk-adjusted" terms, but at the same time, the Covid supply chain issues whacked people in the head with "this is a black swan" and "fragility" sticks.
Spooky23 2y ago
People tend to align their thoughts with what pays the mortgage. Texas has a dominant ruling structure dominated by religious fanatics and resource extraction for now. Alot of the extremist nonsense is driven by the sense that demographics will drive power shifts, so cashing in is key. At some point, the “freedom” argument will flip — what is more in alignment with the cowboy myth than self-reliance where your rooftop or land provides?
dfxm12 2y ago
Define "reasonably local" though, because Texas running on its own grid has been bad for almost all Texans (I'm sure a select few are benefiting greatly from it). Most places have reasonably locally resourced schools, but then again, the schools that cover people in the lower socio-economic classes just happen to be worse off. This tends to be the case for many locally distributed resources. Now, going even more local, at an individual house level, I wouldn't want to rely on a local handyman to fix my solar issues or have to do it myself. Home ownership is complex & expensive enough, and when there's an issue, a handyman is sometimes tough to get. It's perfectly reasonable to think local in terms of redundancy, but the primary way of delivering power should be concern of as many people as possible. It's like having an insurance plan with a lot of members. Distributing the costs and risks across as many people as possible helps keep things cheaper and mitigates risk. No one is going to care if only your power is out, but when there are a lot more stakeholders, when the grid extends across city, county, state, even country lines, if there are issues, there's more pressure to get them fixed.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  Texas running it's own grid isn't that bad because Texas is too small, it's mostly just bad because it's criminally underfunded and underregulated.
  - dfxm12 2y ago
    Texas can get away with this because only Texas has control. I addressed this. If they were hooked up through other states, there would be more external pressure to address these issues.

boshomi 2y ago

Competition is even more important than size. Only when there are a large number of suppliers at all processing stages will there be a boom in innovation. In China, this applies to both the PV industry and the wind industry. In the case of PV, a large proportion of the primary products are traded via commodity exchanges. In the case of wind power, 12 manufacturers now offer systems larger than 16 MW.

epistasis 2y ago

>scale This is so funny to see, and great to see said, because for decades I ran into nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change (Edit: forgot a crucial clause: because "only" nuclear could scale). I would counter that nuclear does not scale in that it can't get small, and it takes forever to build or expand. Whereas solar can go small, go big, go medium, and the same with storage these days. Many in the nuclear world are currently hoping to scale to "modular" size, because it's become clear that with 1GW scale, in advanced economies, construction is too expensive (IMHO due to the high cost of labor compared to less advanced economies). So shifting to a more "factory" model like airplanes is the investment pitch: scale smaller and make each reactor like factory parts so that it gets cheap to build. We will see! It's got enough hype that even non-small non-modular designs are calling themselves SMRs in order to try to garner interest. And there is some interest in new nuclear these days, despite the extremely high cost, and its going towards the more expensive SMRs rather than 1GW scale reactors, because the risk of failure is on a smaller overall quantity of money.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> nuclear proponents (not engineers or workers, just people into the politics) that said that nuclear was the "only" way to combat climate change You’re seeing the same nonsense with armchair solar + battery advocates today. The mistake is in assuming marginal advantages persist across scale, i.e. in ignoring the law of diminishing returns. If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. Most markets optimise heterogenously because that’s what makes sense.
- epistasis 2y ago
  > If we could have deployed nuclear immediately and infinitely when those folks were talking, they would have been right. We could t. If we are talking about the US, the reason we couldn't deploy nuclear was that we vastly over-ordered the amount of reactors we needed, going into the 1980s, causing a glut then a drought. And then too many of them were financially disastrous construction projects. Some people say that we had too many different reactor designs, but I would point to France where they used the same reactor design but also did not see falling prices, and did not build nearly as many reactors as they had planned. Certainly France has been much better off in terms of carbon emissions from electricity since the 1980s than most places in the world, but they were also going nuclear due to lack of cheap fossil fuels. > If we could solar and batteries immediately and infinitely (without increasing prices), going all in on it would be right. We can’t. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying we aren't going all in on solar and storage, but I would argue that we are. Nearly all new generation capacity getting installed is solar, storage, and wind. THere's a few legacy projects for other technologies, but those natural gas plants will see little use, unless solar/storage/batteries are blocked from being deployed in the same area. EIA: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62864 This is happening in China too. They build coal plants, but they barely use them as they are just backups. Last I heard they are on track for 160GW of solar deployed this year alone, and it goes up every year. So maybe put me into the bucket of people spouting nonsense about solar + batteries today, I could be wrong, but I really think it's the only tech stack that can and will make a big change in energy over the next 10 years.

AnotherGoodName 2y ago

On the flip side the biggest power plants in the world are the new massive solar installations, eg. Gonghe Talatan Solar Park. It's fun to view these large solar plants on satellite view. Absolutely massive. https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2%B034'41.0%22E https://www.google.com/maps/place/36%C2%B010'54.0%22N+100%C2... and with the nearby pumped hydro that is itself in the gigawatt range and growing ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longyangxia_Dam ) removes the concerns of "how do you store the power!". I'm not convinced small scale solar is the future when large integrated hydro+solar like this has such huge advantages.

floatrock 2y ago
it's almost like zooming in on a fractal
abhinavk 2y ago
I drove through a solar cluster in India this year. https://earth.google.com/web/@27.45264286,72.06288954,225.16349782a,52589.33658315d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=CgRCAggBOgMKATBCAggASg0I____________ARAA https://earth.google.com/web/@27.45264286,72.06288954,225.16... I couldn't fathom the scale when I looked at it later in Google Earth. It's a good use of the arid land where few things grow.
marssaxman 2y ago
That's amazing - my first thought, after clicking your link, was that the satellite view was out of date, from before construction began: but no, I just needed to zoom out. And out. And out - still not all of it! - five clicks later, you can finally see that this solar park takes up as much space as a small city.

SoftTalker 2y ago

The diesel generator will provide power at night however. Or for a week of cloudy winter days (assuming you have that much fuel).

interactivecode 2y ago
perhaps we need to shift some of our habits to high sun hours where possible. Like run the washing machine and dishwasher at mid day. So you need less battery storage for the nights. And perhaps build houses that store thermal heat better so you can run the heater less aggressively in the evening.
- myself248 2y ago
  Exactly. This is what the whole "iot" and "smart grid" were supposed to get us -- appliances and EVSEs that can be readied to start, and will then start themselves when the energy price is favorable. We apparently have that for some EVSEs, but still not for my stupid dishwasher. (It uses electric heat to boost the water temperature, no matter how much I prime the hot water plumbing, and it's quite a pig energy-wise.) Real energy has curves, and the sooner we embrace that, the better off we'll be. Worse, my energy provider put me on a time-of-day rate that's _most_ expensive during peak sun hours, which seems backwards if they're supposed to be introducing more PV to the mix. I guess it's time to negotiate with the landlord and get some panels on the roof so I can start offsetting my own consumption at their so-called "peak" times.
- floatrock 2y ago
  In a lot of places, your local electric utility is nudging you towards Time-of-Use rates to encourage exactly this.
- fragmede 2y ago
  so we can save daylight? some sort of time where we save the light of day? Possibly by shift our clocks? I wonder what we'd call such an arrangement.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago

vivzkestrel 2y ago

what about pocket nuclear reactors? when are we getting them?

Veserv 2y ago

Except that is the opposite of reality in the USA. The fraction of energy generated from small scale PV generation in the USA has decreased as total PV generation has increased [1]. 10 years ago, in 2014, utility scale PV generation was 57%. Over those 10 years, utility scale PV generation increased by ~10x, where as small scale PV generation only increased by ~6.5x. In spite of absolutely massive incentives, small scale PV generation has grown slower in absolute and percentage terms in nearly every single year of the last decade. Scale is the really important thing here. It is really easy and really cheap to use economies of scale to purchase square kilometers of panels and plop them down in bulk over vast swathes of regular land in a assembly line fashion. [1] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html https://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_03_01_b.html

glial 2y ago
> absolutely massive incentives At least where I live, solar is still roughly break even cost-wise with not installing solar over 20 years -- but it increases your home's complexity and makes updating your roof more complicated and expensive.
- bruce511 2y ago
  The math varies a lot by location. In the US the costs of gear and install are typically higher (twice as high as here.) It'll also obviously be a factor of electricity cost, sunny days, your residential consumption and so on. Personally I get 17.5% return on capital spent (and ways to improve that further) so the math works out well. Ymmv.
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  Same here. I live where there’s ton of sun, but power is cheap and install is expensive and not subsidised. Dad lives in northern europe, power is 2x more and install is 2x and subsidised. In december he generates like 20kwh per month from 8kw array. Still already paid itself after few years.
bmicraft 2y ago
Let's face it: electricity is dirt cheap in the US compared to other developed countries. If you have grid access you don't really benefit significantly from solar. That both explains why it was adopted relatively early for private use cases as well as why it doesn't grow as much as commercial installations as equipment gets cheaper.