It's most efficient to put the panels in a centralized location with high amounts of sunlight on mounts that track the sun. You get significantly higher yield because of the tracking and the location, and maintenance is cheaper because it's centralized.
The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "empowerment" fantasy.
Empowerment isn’t really a fantasy if there are rolling blackouts but your own power is still on. Sadly, not a hypothetical in California.
Im thinking just from a national security/redundancy/risk reduction standpoint it makes sense to move more generation closer to demand. There are lots of single points of failure in our power grid currently.
Edit: this is assuming the solar setup is designed to enable use when power is out; I assume homeowners who care about empowerment would make that investment, but you know what they say about assuming.
> Empowerment isn’t really a fantasy if there are rolling blackouts but your own power is still on. Sadly, not a hypothetical in California.
Seems easier to get a generator or a Power Wall, but either ends up being pretty expensive for handling the 2 hours of rolling blackouts for the first time in 20 years. There are also longer-term outages, maybe several hours every few years? And this is for people in population centers. Living in the mountains is a different story.
> Im thinking just from a national security/redundancy/risk reduction standpoint it makes sense to move more generation closer to demand
I'd rather put the money towards removing those single points of failure.
> Seems easier to get a generator or a Power Wall, but either ends up being pretty expensive for handling the 2 hours of rolling blackouts for the first time in 20 years.
The price of electricity changes over the day along with demand. I don't know by how much, but maybe if the Power Wall could be used in the high-cost hours and charged in the low-cost hours, it would make a difference?
They increase efficiency a lot (up to 40% for dual-axis trackers) but they also decrease ground a lot coverage, they increase cost of installation and cost of ownership, and they decrease availability.
The fact that you see far more home installations than farms means farms aren't economically viable, neither is home PV without subsidies, but people buy into the "empowerment" fantasy.