TFA claims that it is idiotic to put solar panels on residential roofs, but them somewhere where installation cost are low instead, like on the ground or maybe factory roofs.
That makes no sense to me. Roof space is unused (essentially free), and the panels shade the house making it more livable and efficient. Land you can use that is near your house is your yard- extremely valuable and expensive. Putting it elsewhere requires buying the electricity from someone else, all of the costs and losses of a power grid, and unreliability of a power grid.
Installing a solar panel on a roof is not exactly expensive, complex, or difficult. Virtually every house in my neighborhood has them.
As someone with plenty of solar on my roof, it is anything but idiotic. With government incentives it pays for itself in ten years and has a realistic life span of 25.
It might comparatively more efficient/cheaper per watt to build solar on the ground or on large commercial structures, but that doesn't change the economics for individual home owners, which in many parts of the world are already positive.
Money is fungible and not unlimited. A dollar given to you by your neighbors in their taxes to subsidize you would have gone much, much further if the money would have been spent to build solar by your power utility.
That might be the case but the fact is that these incentives exist and eligible home owners that don’t use them are in effect throwing money away.
Also, it can be politically and technically expedient to provide incentives, even if it is not the theoretically most efficient use of that money. For example if it increases acceptance for renewables in the broader population or jump starts an industry (as it has in Germany).
You don't need to use tentative phrases like "That might be the case", or "even if it is not theoretically most efficient use of that money". As the page on statista.com states:
>Rooftop solar photovoltaic installations on residential buildings and nuclear power have the highest unsubsidized levelized costs of energy generation in the United States. If not for federal and state subsidies, rooftop solar PV would come with a price tag between 117 and 282 U.S. dollars per megawatt hour. …
It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone a lot further if spent on other solar projects) - don't you think that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels? This sort of reverse Robin Hood policy hurts everyone in the long run.
Places outside the U.S. exist, you know? PV would be cost effective here in Germany for residential buildings even without incentives, though most owners would probably build smaller installations. And there are plenty of countries without government incentives where people still build PV.
As for the renters: many of them currently have decided to buy small plug in PV sets, since their installation has been allowed under German law recently. No incentives for those, either.
And I’ll repeat myself: incentives can have valuable political goals that have nothing to do with cost effective buildout of solar. In Germany, these incentives have contributed massively to improving popular sentiment towards PV and acceptance of government subsidies for renewables generally.
>...PV would be cost effective here in Germany for residential buildings even without incentives, though most owners would probably build smaller installations.
I suspect the cost differences between ground based solar installed by a utility and consumer rooftop solar aren't really that different in Germany. Most of the cost of rooftop solar are the soft costs, with the bulk often being the labor costs for the work on the roof. The costs for the actual panels is very low these days.
>...In Germany, these incentives have contributed massively to improving popular sentiment towards PV and acceptance of government subsidies for renewables generally.
>...The share of
positive citizens varies across countries from 45% to 80%. Croatia and Denmark are the most
positive, while the Czech Republic, Germany and Estonia are the most negative.
Money spent is money earned. Many countries realized solar is creating a lot of local wealth generation rather than losing money for the local economy by buying fossils from abroad. Subsidies for such make sense because they just come back in additional taxes.
The thing I like about rooftop residential solar is that the substations and the feeder lines don't need to get upgraded. During the hot sunny part of the day, the locally produced energy can go right into AC.
When grid scale batteries drop in price, the substations can also store energy. Then the feeder lines only ever need to support the base load power draw.
Solar is so cheap, that even in off grid installations, the battery bank can be a fraction of what it previously would have been sized for. Modern batteries can be charged much faster and workloads can be shifted to the sunny part of the day.
