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What's funny is that Australian-born Rupert Murdoch has been far more effective in the US than in Australia on this front. The propaganda is still going really

What's funny is that Australian-born Rupert Murdoch has been far more effective in the US than in Australia on this front. The propaganda is still going really strong in the US. Talk to the population and 1/3 to 1/2 will happily tell you that EVs have fully failed and are being abandoned and will never gain traction in the future. And solar? Lol. Even the people who are saving money with it tend to refuse to talk about it due to the cognitive dissonance.

wffurr 2mo ago
I thought it was the opposite; it's blindingly obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar. The only thing holding me back is the need to work with the condo association on a new roof first.
- jandrese 2mo ago
  In the US there are certainly cases where the install costs are just too high and the local utility too hostile to solar for the system to make sense.
- JuniperMesos 2mo ago
  This is a really important reason why it's not actually obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar - not everyone lives in a situation where they can make arbitrary capital improvements to their roof, or even owns their own roof to begin with (I personally live in a rented apartment in a building where the roof space is shared among many tenants). That doesn't mean rooftop solar panels are necessarily a bad idea for people who can do it - it's quite possibly a good idea. But solar panels ultimately require a lot of land area to generate power, and it's often better to use cheap land for this far outside urban areas, than it is to try to put solar panels on the limited sunlight-facing land available in urban areas.
  - stubish 2mo ago
    In Australia now, you don't actually want to install rooftop solar. You want to install batteries. No point getting solar when you can charge your battery for free. You just have to ensure it is sized for winter so you don't end up paying the much higher fees for power during non-free periods.

wffurr 2mo ago

I thought it was the opposite; it's blindingly obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar. The only thing holding me back is the need to work with the condo association on a new roof first.

jandrese 2mo ago
In the US there are certainly cases where the install costs are just too high and the local utility too hostile to solar for the system to make sense.
JuniperMesos 2mo ago
This is a really important reason why it's not actually obvious that everyone should be getting rooftop solar - not everyone lives in a situation where they can make arbitrary capital improvements to their roof, or even owns their own roof to begin with (I personally live in a rented apartment in a building where the roof space is shared among many tenants). That doesn't mean rooftop solar panels are necessarily a bad idea for people who can do it - it's quite possibly a good idea. But solar panels ultimately require a lot of land area to generate power, and it's often better to use cheap land for this far outside urban areas, than it is to try to put solar panels on the limited sunlight-facing land available in urban areas.
- stubish 2mo ago
  In Australia now, you don't actually want to install rooftop solar. You want to install batteries. No point getting solar when you can charge your battery for free. You just have to ensure it is sized for winter so you don't end up paying the much higher fees for power during non-free periods.