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3.4M Solar Panels
- zahlman 6mo agoIt'd be nice if it described up front what kind of information is available per panel. For that matter, I'd be interested in details of how "a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS" (from the previous article) actually collected the data.
- testrun 6mo agoI would like to know more detail as well.
- throwaway219450 6mo agoYou can read the (open access) paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4 In the abstract: “We use these newly compiled and delineated solar arrays and panel-rows to harmonize and independently estimate value-added attributes to existing datasets including installation year, azimuth, mount technology, panel-row area and dimensions, inter-row spacing, ground cover ratio, tilt, and installed capacity.“
- ck2 6mo agolook how cheap now, it's crazy https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html I'm old enough to remember Carter putting them on WhiteHouse roof and they were thousands of dollars then (and less efficient)
- saidinesh5 6mo agoThe link isn't available here. Can you share the specs and price of that panel?
- cma 6mo ago$37.21 for a 100 watt panel with free shipping. I'm not sure if that is before or after 50% tariffs and/or the 10% "fentanyl" extra tariff that was announced a few days after Ross Ulbricht's pardon for running the world's largest opiates-by-mail operation.
- dhosek 6mo agoHeck even if that’s pre-tariff it’s cheap enough that it could be an impulse buy.
- horsawlarway 6mo agoYou can buy brand new in bulk in the US for roughly the same $/watt. I bought 30 375w Canadian Solar panels 2 years ago and paid $0.41/watt (~$4536 for the whole package) My mounting equipment actually cost more than the panels (~$4600). And the permitting process cost nearly as much as the panels (permit cost + architectural drawing + structural engineer stamp + electrician stamp). It's crazy how cheap solar panels themselves are getting. They're going to win on the energy front - period. Especially now that battery tech actually seems to be moving again. I vividly remember one of my robotics professors in undergrad ranting about how frustrated he was with battery tech in ~2007, but LFP and sodium batteries are both pretty huge steps forward.
- tribaal 6mo agoAnother data point: my entire system in Switzerland cost me 1.3CHF/Watt including a 20kWh battery and 5000 CHF of scaffolding costs (needed because of our local OSHA equivalent laws when installing panels on a tilted roof). It has become ridiculously cheap indeed.
- engineer_22 6mo agoWhat's the cost of power in Confoederatio Helvetica?
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- DonHopkins 6mo agoAnd Reagan taking them down. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/22/jiimmy-carter-solar-panel/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/22/jiimmy-ca... >It was pretty symbolic back in 1979, too. The symbolism depended on what you thought of Carter and his policies. For some, the panels were a much-needed acknowledgment that America had to wean itself from fossil fuel, explore alternative energy sources and help save the planet. For others, they were in the same category as Carter’s virtue-signaling cardigan. Of course, critics moaned, Carter would put solar panels on the White House. >The panels came down in 1986 when the White House roof was undergoing repairs. Ronald Reagan did not have them replaced. Of course, Reagan wouldn’t put solar panels on the White House. What is the story behind Reagan taking down the solar panels installed by Carter? Was it symbolic of a new, less enthusiastic approach to clean energy? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4w4ww/what_is_the_story_behind_reagan_taking_down_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4w4ww/what_... Solar power at the White House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House >On June 20, 1979, 32 solar water heating panels were placed on the roof of the West Wing. The panels were made by InterTechnology/Solar Corp. from Warrenton, Virginia and installed by Hector Guevara of Alternate Energy Industries Corp.[2] At the dedication ceremony for the panels, President Carter said, "In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy... A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people".[1] The whole installation cost $35,000 in 1979 (about $160,000 now). https://books.google.nl/books?id=e9dlzwL4Ck4C&dq=solar+white+house&pg=PA5&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.nl/books?id=e9dlzwL4Ck4C&dq=solar+white...
- atwrk 6mo agoThat's actually only cheap because of the free shipping - in Germany 450W panels are at about 55-60€ retail right now, for example. So a balcony set (2 panels for 1kW total, plus inverter) is about 150-200€, depending on the specific parts. Both exluding shipping, though. Prices fell dramatically in the last few years, if I understood things correctly the high prices in the US are mostly due to tariffs.
- cyberge99 6mo agoThat’s right. The current US president just reversed some of the previous administration’s Infrastructure Act which provided about 30% tax credit for installing solar.
- tmp10423288442 6mo agoThey were not photovoltaic solar panels, but solar water heating panels - i.e., running a ton of water pipes on the roof where they're perfectly placed to leak and potentially damage historically-significant artifacts. I'm not surprised they removed them when resurfacing the roof (not right when Reagan entered office, but in 1986). George W. Bush actually installed solar water heating once again, but on the roof of a maintenance facility, which I didn't know about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House
- mitthrowaway2 6mo agoYeah, you really don't want water getting on your roof.
- defrost 6mo agoKind of a shallow point that ignores glaring implication that it would have been the piping, in/out/relief et al passing through the roof that would have been the issue, causing water to enter and travel.
- ragebol 6mo agoWould be kinda interesting to see a histogram of the azimuths and/or tilt angles. In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos. Curious to see what it would be in this dataset.
- dhosek 6mo agoIt should be roughly correlated with latitude (the exceptions being panels on sloped roofs which will match the roof slope).
- ragebol 6mo agoTilt should correlate to latitude for panels with an azimuth due South. For panels with east/west azimuth, the tilt should correlate with where the sun is at 7-8AM and 17-18PM, at least in my area. ((I think you have your concept of azimuth and tilt mixed up; I know I have when I was originally typing a different parent comment)
- marklit 6mo agoI love that idea. I don't have time for anything elaborate today but I dropped two visualisations at the bottom of the post.
- Tade0 6mo agoThere's a helpful chart here, which happens to match your approximate latitude: https://ratedpower.com/blog/solar-panel-orientation/ https://ratedpower.com/blog/solar-panel-orientation/
- yogthos 6mo agoTo put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-100-solar-panels-a-second-as-total-pv-capacity-tops-1-terawatt/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- notTooFarGone 6mo agoWith how backwards US policy is - this will be the major factor in the future. Energy heavy use cases with little to no energy costs will lap western industries.
- yogthos 6mo agoIndeed, data centres for AI is a prime example of this where American grid is already starting to hit capacity.
- mekdoonggi 6mo agoTrue, though I think it's a little more nuanced. There's still capacity, but the AI boom is unearthing all the "cheap" power places in the grid and buying them up. In order to keep growing, the US power grid is going to need big, coordinated projects. Solar, wind, transmission lines, and batteries. I think with political interest from Dems who like renewables, and big business who need energy, there's will in the US to do it, but of course it's the US, so we'll do the right thing after every possible alternative has been exhausted.
- yogthos 6mo agoEven as it stands things are kinda grim. There's around 30% spare capacity, but you also need that for spikes like increased usage during events like heatwaves. You never want to saturate energy capacity completely. I agree that eventually there's going to be no choice but to start investing in renewables. That's going to be the only way to meet the demand, and renewables are already becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. But it is going to take time. Building stuff in the physical world takes years, and that requires sustained commitment at the political level.
- showerst 6mo agoPretty cool, although the heatmaps have a little of the "this is just a population density map" effect. https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/ It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.
- noduerme 6mo agoSomething's wrong with xkcd's data if Portland doesn't rate a red dot on the furry porn map.
- TheGRS 6mo agoI think the lack of concentration in some areas, particularly hubs in Texas and Florida, is actually pretty eye-opening. To me these areas should be very dense with panels from the cost/benefit alone.
- pixl97 6mo agoSo there are a couple of issues here. First, there are a lot of panels in the Austin/San Antonio area, and if you live around here you see a lot of them. Once you get outside of the larger cities panels, on houses in particular have nothing to do with costs, but instead a more deeply ingrained bias against them because the population is heavily propagandized to. I have friends that have things like solar deer feeders and cameras and all kinds of other stand alone solar devices that won't put solar on their house "because panels are too polluting"
- TheGRS 6mo agoExactly, the data backs up the cultural bias happening in these regions. Its not a matter of population density or cost/benefit, but a matter of virtue signaling (or lack of virtue signaling?). I think if people were making rational cost decisions installing these would be a no brainer, but they fear being ostracized from their groups.
- noduerme 6mo agoWhat's the big deal with having a whole liquid cooled workstation, and why is it important information for me to know what this dude's hardware is? And seriously, is there something about the rig that is necessary to chew through a dataset with a few million rows?
- biesnecker 6mo agoIt had a very 90s/early-2000s tech blog feel to it. Only thing missing was his custom Gentoo build.
- jmyeet 6mo agoI had the exact same thought, particularly when I read there were fewer than 4M records. I really have to wonder if people truly know how powerful any modern computer is. Like I just assume any modern PC with sufficient storage can handle a database with a billion rows of data. I think my phone probably could. Now if you were, say, analyzing commercial satellite imagery of the entire US and trying to find rooftop solar, matching it against the database and finding data that wasn't in the dataset, that's something where your computer power would be way more relevant. Come to think of it, you could probably use such imagery to construct a power generation network from power plants to transmission lines to utility poles. Of course some places have underground cables but there are other datasets for that. Another interesting project is mapping the growth of solar. This would require access to commercial satellite imagery over time. I'm sure some government agency already does it. Or used to at least. Snapshots years or even months apart are less interesting. Anyway, I guess the point is the author's computer is capable of way more than I suspect they think it is.
- himata4113 6mo agoFlorida and most dry / sunny states having little to no solar panels is pretty damn wild. I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy. I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage. The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.
- the_sleaze_ 6mo agoIn Alabama regulatory capture is such that installing solar panels attached to the grid incurs fees higher than just buying the electricity from Alabama Power.
- wing-_-nuts 6mo agoI'm interested to read a source on this if you have it
- the_sleaze_ 6mo agoSure. > Alabama Power, with approval from the Alabama PSC, charges residential solar customers a monthly fee of $5.41 per kilowatt based on the size of their solar system > Alabama Power's residential electricity rates generally range from approximately 11 to 13 cents per kWh, plus a $14.50 monthly base charge https://www.selc.org/press-release/court-allows-alabama-power-solar-fees-to-continue/ https://www.selc.org/press-release/court-allows-alabama-powe...
- wing-_-nuts 6mo agointeresting, ty for the follow up
- chung8123 6mo agoWhy not install and not attach to the grid? My understanding is if you have them attached to batteries and not feeding back it is considered off grid in some places.
- scblock 6mo agoThe odd looking circular example shown is not solar PV. It is the Ivanpah solar thermal generating station, and those are mirrors rather than solar panels, or modules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.
- vondur 6mo agoI think they are shutting it down. It had the nasty habit of frying birds that ventured too close to it. And that particular valley actually is far more cloudy then what you would expect for the desert near Las Vegas.
- marklit 6mo agoThanks for pointing that out. I'll update the post.
- downrightmike 6mo agoscheduled to shut down two of its three units in 2026
- ux266478 6mo ago> Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics. PV is cheap up front and maintains cost advantage in the time scale of a few decades, and obviously scale down much better than solar towers. PV also wins by being viable in more places, and not requiring local specialized labor. Once you extend the timescale to a hundred years or so, solar towers end up quite a bit cheaper (where they're actually viable). Batteries, inverters, and the propensity for solar fields to completely rebuild themselves long before the panels die really compounds running-costs. This isn't apparent until you expand the time scales, and only once we're looking at solar fields with parity to a solar tower (60+MW). We're talking hundreds of acres of panels, and a massive battery farm. Even though solar towers require more motors, more regular cleaning, and complex refurbishment, they also produce a very large amount of power relative to their size. Rebuilding a PV field costs a lot more than refurbishing a solar tower obviously. If solar plants ever get over rebuilding themselves from scratch every 20 years, or if battery tech ever gets better longevity, this might no longer hold.
- jnpnj 6mo agoApprently there are a lot of innovations hitting market, perovskites left the lab, and tandem cells are above 30%
- downrightmike 6mo agoAnd plugin solar is being roadblocked everywhere except Utah
- K0balt 6mo agoAn analysis of panels per capita vs regional IQ would be an interesting signal. Panels are cash positive in less tan 5 years of their 40 year lifespan. There is hardly a better investment up until you cover your own usage.
- jeffbee 6mo agoImagine believing in "regional IQ".
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- K0balt 6mo agoI see you’ve never been to (pick one of many places where the social conditions are such that anyone who makes it to an age of agency with their brain fully intact is almost guaranteed to leave because it’s intolerable for anyone who actually thinks much) unfortunately, until you’ve lived in one of those places, it’s easy to imagine that people are the same everywhere. They are not. Social conditions are an extremely strong force in the intellectual development of humans. To imagine that there are not regions that are comparatively intellectually impoverished is a comforting illusion, but unfortunately it is not reflective of the statistical reality nor the subjective experience of living in one of those places. Culture is very much regional, and cultural (social) factors (along with their physiological consequences) are by far the strongest factor in intellectual development.
- rootusrootus 6mo agoThat is pretty optimistic. The calculators I've used online estimate my payback at 18 years and my lifetime savings at about $18K, with $32K out of pocket up front for the install. But my roof is 50% through the lifespan and I was told they would not warranty it against leaks due to panel mounts unless I first replaced the roof. That's $25K. My next house will be my forever home, a little farther south than where I am now in the PNW, and on a big enough piece of land to use ground mount instead of roof mount. But right now, I cannot make the numbers work. I'd love having solar but I am not spending five digits of extra money just for the fun of it.
- Zenbit_UX 6mo agoDoes anyone else experience very strange styling behavior while scrolling through this article? The CSS styles seem to dynamically unload and reload while I’m reading it causing the margins to jump and the fonts change, I’ve never seen anything like this before. FWIW I’m on iOS using brave.
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoWe're off grid and have 7kw of panels, and 40kwh of 48v lithium batteries, with a generator for backup, which is rarely used since we are frugal with electricity and switch everything off when not in use. I set it all up myself, and while it is not trivial, it's not difficult either. Learning to put connectors on properly, size cables and put lugs on properly, learn about earthing and breakers...just one bit at a time. I'm about to set up another system on the roof of an outbuilding to supply power for a water pump and irrigation where we grow food. This will be much easier and simpler since it will have only one 48V lithium battery, but I'll still use Victron stuff and connect it to a Cerbo so it can be monitored. If I sold this place and bought somewhere on the grid, the first thing I'd do is cut the cord and set up my own system again.
- johsole 6mo agodo you have a blog or some links of walking through the process of getting everything setup?
- CrzyLngPwd 6mo agoI don't, but Will Prowse on YT is very good, and lots of other people are too. Victron has great documentation, and lots of system layouts as examples. The most challenging part was getting and victon stuff talking to the fogstar batteries, which was hampered by not reading the manuals and trusting chatgpt, but in the end it was trivial.
- MisterTea 6mo agoWhat inverter hardware did you use? I have an el cheapo 120 VAC 3600W import inverter with just two 100AH AGM batteries in series as it's a 24 VDC unit. Right now its all temporary and more experiment than practical. Inverter mounted to a portable frame I built from bolted slotted angle with two battery shelves for a total of 4 batteries (only 2 now.) The batteries have a 200A terminal fuse and run through a 200A disconnect to the inverter using #2 AWG cable. The inverter, AC input, AC output are all grounded to a single ground bar that is bonded to the metal frame. AC Input is fed from a 12 AWG cord with 15A plug. AC output runs two 15A MCCB's, each terminated to a single socket hanging off a short whip cord. A cheap two wire digital DC volt meter is wired in series with a push button so I can see the battery voltage at a glance when I have the inverter powered down. I temporarily setup the panels in my yard as an experiment but since I am in the city, I don't get good sun in my yard with all the obstructions. Honestly I ran it for two days, took the panels down before it rained, and didn't get a chance to measure anything. The panels really need to go on the roof and I have no intention of doing that any time soon. The system did come in handy as a backup for my boiler when a wind storm knocked the power out for an hour and a half this past winter. I have thought about setting it up as a UPS for my little IT setup at home but 3600W is super overkill.
- celpgoescheeew 6mo ago'My systems C drive' amd Ubuntu. Os directly a turnoff
- sciencesama 6mo agonow do china
- RyanShook 6mo agoDoes solar make sense without government subsidies yet?
- dogscatstrees 6mo agoBeautiful methods. Very nice.
- m8ven 6mo agoMaybe all towers in NYC should have a few on the roof
- lucy_hnatchuk 6mo agoEpic DuckDB dive on 3.4M solar panels, Mark! Heatmaps + Ivanpah spot-on. Beast mode analysis.
- mbfg 6mo agoAmazing how politicized panel use is obvious by these maps, as opposed to effectiveness.