As someone who has researched DSM availability across the globe, Google's Solar API is a top contender. Other option is government LiDAR surveys but the coverage, file formats, projections, etc are all fragmented. I think it would be great for the mapping community to create a world wide DSM map tile dataset similar to the ground elevation tile dataset that contour lines and 3D terrain views are generated from. Maybe someone is already working on this?
In the article they show areas where their approach can generate DSM although this is just the potential areas and not the areas where data is already available. :(
Yes. There are planet wide DEM (Digital Elevation Model) datasets which record ground level elevations but no planet wide set for DSM which includes built structures and vegetation.
This is a very impressive refinement of their existing tool, but is this type of advanced calculation of roof-pitch (etc.) still relevant?
Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it? More complicated and expensive to permit and install, less efficient operation, difficult to repair, difficult to insure, difficult to upgrade, inefficient to integrate into grid, etc.
As someone who recently lost power and water for weeks post Helene, do not discount the power of distributed grids. Distributed core infrastructure will make for much better climate resilience. Don't miss this in your efficiency calculations.
Sure, but that's why my emphasis was on distributed grids. Interlinking local capacity / having one or two neighbors with fully fledged systems is way better than going weeks charging stuff in your car. When you're without power for weeks, you'll probably have enough sun for more than enough days to get yourself sorted. Hurricanes also tend to sweep up any other systems in the region, so once they disperse, it's pretty clear skies. Anecdotally, we didn't get any rain for months after Helene dissipated.
Also, diesel and gas were pretty much inaccessible for the first 5 days of the disaster, so unless you have a stockpile that's been treated for longevity, you might not even be able to run your whole home generator for long.
They have to. Feeding your own home needs some setup but is fine. But electricity companies require you to disconnect generating capacity from the grid when the grid is down to make it easier to effect repairs.
But that's more a policy decision than a technical restriction. We could change it so power can flow on both sides of a fault instead of only the "upstream" grid side.
With battery systems getting so cheap maybe community batteries will become a thing where a neighborhood exports it's solar too and is it's own small grid.
a) government mandates that turn over existing grid infrastructure to such a project, because the existing grid infrastructure is almost all privately owned
OR
b) building new infrastructure to create an isolatable local grid
I mean it isn't though: it's defense in depth - policy is you must disconnect. Line workers will drive a ground stake in on both sides anyway, but if you don't disconnect then they'll just short your inverter to ground.
There's a program involving F150 lighting trucks out in CA that pay you to grid tie them, that way a couple of them in your neighborhood can power the neighborhood for a day or so if wildfires take out the local grid
Anything grid tied is generally required to have phenomenally reliable shutdown if the grid goes down OR proven (and very expensive) automated switching that disconnects it from the grid if the grid goes down.
This is so those F150s are not backfeeding the wires while a repair crew is trying to fix it.
Ergo, if the local grid is "taken out", those F150s cannot be "on the local grid".
Article says "customers will allow their EVs to feed energy back to the grid – helping to balance it during peak demand". It doesn't say anything about what happens when the grid goes down during disasters
>> Grid connected solar goes down when the grid is out though. You need specific inverters to retain power.
Yes, and sort of.
Inverters will prevent power flowing to the grid if the grid is off. However most inverters will continue to supply power into the house while the grid is off.
There are various factors in play here, and you need to do proper homework, but certainly a fraction of the house can be powered, if not all of it.
I'm not sure if this is "special" inverter or not. Every one I researched had the same functionality.
One advantage of distributed solar is that it can at least come online right away and when installed with a battery, can get a home pretty close to being fully self-sufficient (depending on the climate/heating system), whereas the generally much more efficient solar pv power facilities have to contend with backlogs in connecting to the grid, insufficient grid capacity, etc.
But yes, distributed solar will not be the general solution to decarbonizing our energy systems as a whole. Does serve a meaningful role though and there is no reason to not do both.
Australia manages to install rooftop solar at well under half the cost the USA does (most of that is soft costs) and integrate large amounts of it into the grid.
As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar (and another ~10% was utility-scale solar).
Rooftop solar works just fine if utilities don’t actively try and obstruct its use.
That's a great achievement, but could be stated in a more clear way.
Not 'As of lunchtime' but 'At precisely lunch time'. An hour later it wasn't 50% anymore, and it won't be 50% except at noon for a long time yet. As of the moment I am posting this, solar is 0% and coal is 80%. If Australia cares about global warming they should build nuclear plants and stop generating 70% of their overall power from coal.
It's still remarkable how much solar is growing and I hope it's 100% 24/7 soon!
Sorry. The point of my post was to respond to the claim that you can't effectively integrate meaningful amounts of rooftop solar into an electricity grid in a cost-effective manner when the evidence from Australia is that you can and we have.
If I'd looked the example when South Australia's interconnector with the rest of the NEM went out, they had periods with the instantaneous penetration of rooftop solar was over 90%. AEMO, the body that manages the Australian electricity grid, are aiming to be able to support a 100% instantaneous renewable mix on the NEM within the next year or two.
As for Australia's overall electricity mix, that is rapidly changing (and the numbers get a bit distorted by the amount of self-consumption of rooftop solar). We're at 40% renewables overall now, and while it may not hit the government's 82% target by 2030 we will almost certainly reach 70% or so by 2030 and I'd think 90% by 2035 is very doable. The last 10% is harder, but there are enough options (gas with CCS, green hydrogen, biofuels, long-term energy storage of other kinds) that I reckon we can get there. We are in the fortunate position of not having solar completely go away for months in the winter.
As for nuclear, it's never, ever going to happen in Australia (despite the claims of the conservative side of Australian politics). Even if Australia could build nuclear power as efficiently as South Korea - an extremely big ask, given we have the same challenges at building large infrastructure as the rest of the English-speaking world - it still doesn't make economic sense.
>...Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it?
The data shows that you are correct. Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
As the statista.com report says:
>...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.
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc. don't.)
Yes it's relevant and no we didn't all agree it was a bad idea.
It generates power at roughly the cost of nuclear. It's distributed and resilient. It works around sluggish government and/or corporate monopolies. It reduces transmission requirements. It enables and encourages electrification and time-shifting of load. Adding it at build time can be cheaper than tiling.
It’s generally a good thing and we'll see even more if it as the tech progresses and gets cheaper.
[Given your comment history, as you surely already know...]
Yes and:
With the rise of "virtual power plants" (VPPs), "all the above" (PV, batteries, EVs, water heaters, HVAC, residential geothermal) will be stitched together to create decentralized, more resilient power grids, capable of peer-to-peer power sharing.
Analogy:
Remember the term 90s "convergence" (turrible term)? Describing how the computer (digitization) was becoming the everything tool? VPPs (turrible term) is just the electification of "all the things", unifying all energy (heat, electricity) stuff (source, sink, storage).
It's a good way to anticipate this interation of "convergence". eg VPPs' analog to "traffic shaping" is "load shaping". eg Just like internet is a network of networks, the "intergrid" will be a network of grids. Etc.
It's really easy to see the rough outlines (age of renewable energy) once a person learns of the 100s (1000s?) of puzzle peices currently being assembled. Just reflect on the internet and superimpose those notions onto energy.
Or to put it another way: available with a rate of return that makes it sensible for average middle class home owners to say yes to, to the point dirty power sources are having to shut down in some markets (or fiercely lobby through the political system to be propped up).
I should have made it clear: I’m referring to people who are adamantly opposed to large solar installations, apparently because it’s a threat to agriculture? It’s very odd, but I see yard signs and bumper stickers everywhere in rural Indiana.
Do you think some farms in rural Indiana will make more money by converting to a solar power park? I could imagine it, and I could imagine that some people would feel threatened by this change.
It all hinges on how much your infrastructure costs. At the moment something like 1/3rd of your retail cost if delivery. At some point it's 15x cheaper to have 1kW home feed in + battery vs 15kW feed in.
Sounds like a rare case of America's ubiquitous suburbs working out for the environment. Everyone has a "roof" that gets sunlight most of the day, so rooftop solar, while being less efficient, is still a viable candidate.
(Although, if you factor out all the extra driving needed for the suburban life, it would likely still come out negative compared to a proper city.)
Yeah, don’t over look the fact that the thermal demand from space conditioning homes is way higher on a per capita basis in a suburban context compared to an urban context with multi-family housing/apartments etc. There’s just way more air volume to condition per person, generally more inefficient systems, etc.
Even for the same amount of living space, apartments are way more efficient. A typical apartment unit is surrounded by other units up/down/left/right, so only two sides are exposed to outside air. A single house is exposed on five sides.
Yeah we refer to this as the heat loss form factor of the building, which is determined largely by the surface area to volume ratio (so you have a square-cube relationship at work) as well as the the number of floors in conjunction with the roof area. With more floors, the heat transfer through the roof (which can be substantial, as mentioned by a sibling comment) is less significant for the same roof area (after normalizing for the gross floor area).
Same goes for the slab/foundations (which can also have substantial thermal transfer in many contexts).
There are enough panels available to do both and there is no overlap in financing for both. So just do every installation that is economically viable, they don't compete for money or panels.
The majority of the cost of electricity in most jurisdictions is distribution, not generation. Grid-solar still requires distribution, so it is always going to have significant cost even if the cost of generation is insignificant.
If it can remove the need for a grid-tie, then rooftop solar can be significantly cheaper and more efficient. Can be, but isn't yet, because enough overcapacity and storage to eliminate the need for a grid tie is still too expensive.
This is exactly the challenge. Here in California wholesale solar plant sell power for 0.03-0.04 kwh. Cost at the meter is 0.45/kwh.
Rooftop is competitive with the meter price, but unless you can cut the cord entirely, connection fees and rates will just keep increasing proportionally
>> Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it?
It really depends on what you mean by 'worst'. In terms of land-usage it's the best. In terms of speed-of-deployment it's the best. In terms of distributing capital spend its the best.
In terms of capital return, that will vary from one house to the next because it depends on location, energy consumed (and when), elec prices in your region, grid stability, and so on.
what do you mean by "distributing capital spend"? as in the money to pay for the installations is not concentrated to large utilities? why is that desirable?
With rooftop solar there's a path towards mass deployment that other alternative electricity generation solutions currently lack. Rooftop solar for residential houses doesn't require permits or planning, and can be done by individuals within a reasonable budget, unlike solar farms or rooftop nuclear.
> Rooftop solar for residential houses doesn't require permits or planning
Either you're assuming residential battery storage systems replacing the grid, or your ignoring the connecting rooftop solar to the grid requires permits and planning (the grid may not be able to handle it).
Depends on your cost of electricity. In most places, a solar setup pays for itself long before the warranty runs out max 5-10 years typically (depending on a lot of factors). Even in the US which has a lot of extra cost related to people making things needlessly complicated and costly, lots of people are installing solar and earning their money back.
I can actually get balcony solar here in Germany for about 240 euros. Here's how that works:
- I buy a kit on Amazon. I found several nice ones. This one is rated for 850w and includes cables, inverters and other bits and bobs needed.
- I zip tie the panels to my balcony
- And I plug in the equipment and connect it to a wall socket
The idea is that this would offload some of the power used by e.g. my fridge. Not the same as a rooftop setup obviously and in my case quite pointless since I don't have a lot of sun on my balcony.
But I might actually qualify for a rebate if I do this and get all or most my money back. The government is sponsoring this and landlords can't stop you from doing this. Nor do you need their permission, a permit, or special insurance.
The point is that this stuff is cheap, easy, and pretty much plug and play. Roofs aren't a whole lot more complicated than this from a technical point of view. You need more panels and more expensive equipment and you probably need some professional electricians and installers to do the work.
The rest is just nonsense that relates more to your local government and legislation than anything being inherently expensive or difficult. I'd suggest reminding your local politicians of their responsibilities during the next elections and maybe voting for the ones that aren't being jerks on this front.
Otherwise, solar panels are pretty reliable and generally covered by long warranties. Repairing them is mostly not a thing, somebody would come and simply replace them. I doubt that a lot of solar panel companies and installers are suffering a lot under the enormous burden of this happening all the time for the simple reason that it this isn't a thing.
Balcony solar sounds brilliant and probably has clear ROI. Rooftop solar is an awkward middle between grid-scale solar and balcony solar. Rooftop solar might only make sense in developed countries through subsidies.
Actually, there's a lot of unsubsidized solar popping up in a lot of developing countries all over the middle east, Africa, etc. Anything from villas to shanty towns. Reason: local grids are unreliable and solar is affordable enough. Add some batteries and you are pretty much energy independent. Most of that solar goes on people's roofs.
The reason that's affordable there and requires subsidies in wealthier nations is all the nonsense the nanny states we live in come up with to over complicate things. You need certified this and that. Only people in possession of a special license can plug component A into component B, or strip some wires. And then there is the local grid monopoly that throws up all sorts of obstacles.
There's a way around this. Just buy some panels and batteries on amazon and wire up your shed, boat, cabin in the woods, etc. It's all plug and play. You don't need any permits, special skills, etc. And you end up with a system that can provide a couple of KW of power. Not that hard. There's nothing special about a rooftop. You might need a ladder to get there and you might want to take some safety precautions to avoid dropping off.
Yes, but one back-of-the-envelope calculation (it was a Python program someone wrote up as part of a comment on Slashdot as I recall) demonstrated that if all of New York's roofs were covered in solar panels there would be enough energy to run the city....
Good point. It feels right that the calculation ignored losses --- but if I recall, it did include panel efficiency and that has gotten much better, so maybe it would work now?
I thought we may have concluded that shareholder efficient centralized single point of failure systems are the least robust providers of basic human needs in the face of natural levels of uncertainty.
Grids are pretty much the best solution available because any kind of good/service that can be transported at close to light-speed benefits tremendously from ubiquitous connectivity.
Smarter grids are an even better solution; batteries backing local high-variance demand combined with rapidly negotiated requests for transmission power to meet expected future demand (and then stored in the batteries) reduces (electrical) inefficiency to a minimum.
Residential power demands are highest in the morning and in the evening. That's when people shower, cook, and are generally around using power. Solar peaks at noon.
Maybe when battery prices come down even more. But the cost of grid-level storage are also falling, and wind pretty much only works at grid scale. Grids have to change but won't become obsolete anytime soon.
That usage pattern will be quite different in places with cold winters when most people there are using electric-powered heat pumps (which is "the plan").
This is really incredible. If they could plug in local utility prices and come up with estimate for dollars saved per year, that would be an incredible conversation starter for homeowners who might not have considered taking on a home solar project otherwise.
Considering "Customer aquisition" as a cost is really funny (and that seems to be the "soft cost" discussed).
In Minnesota the "deal" for solar if you cannot DIY / off-grid is just meh.
They do not allow use of battery backups or cutover, they cut out when the power goes out, and they "credit" you to reduce your overall bill. You can make money if you produce more power in sunny warm times than you use year around (at least while you are the only one!), but the dream of energy independence at a local scale just isn't there yet.
What I want is something that offsets my grid use (potentially to zero but not negative), so that I can use grid or solar to charge my EV and a whole-home battery bank with three days reserve. I don't care about becoming part of the overall grid solution, but in city limits, it appears I must, and that necessitates extra equipment and rules out my backup use case.
And yet, I get constant calls and fliers about it - all "soft costs" - no matter how much I say no.
By "Northen" I assume you mean Europe, and (most of) USA?
I live near the 33rd parallel South. Since installing solar my annual grid requirements are around 30% of before solar [1] ‐ even as my actual consumption has risen [2].
As far as "Northern" goes countries in my latitude north (or better) include India, Mexica, all of Africa, most of China, and so on. So for most people living in the north it is compelling [4].
[1] a very large fraction of my grid usage is really cold, wet conditions for 6 weeks in winter. A combination of low generation and high usage for heating.
[2] cooling in summer is free, so we run the aircon a lot more. Plus things like slow-cooking etc are free as well.
[4] my return on investment (grid cost of generated electricity over capital invested) is 16.7%. Projected lifespan is 10 years for battery and inverter, 25 years on panels, 50 years on wiring.
> By "Northen" I assume you mean Europe, and (most of) USA?
People wrongly assume that you can put Europe and the US in the same basket (because temperature-wise climate is comparable), but half of Europe is further north than Montreal, and almost all of it is beyond Philadelphia, so no you can't really say “Europe and most of the US”.
I am sceptical about putting PV on roofs, seems a lot of hassle and waymore expensive then using just flatground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park
Any additional money spent on it, could have helped to install more PV or batteries.
In general yes but due to both taxes/regulations and real issues with the grid it is "easier" to just consume what your produce vs producing and selling to the grid. And since space is limited on most peoples property if you live an urban setting then roof might be the only place to put it. If you got plenty of space though roof is a worse place than the ground from almost every point of view.
The image processing described is very cool, but I have questions about the application. Google started doing these solar potential estimates about 10 years ago, so let's imagine that they have been developing the capability since about 2010 or so. In that time the cost of PV has fallen by an order of magnitude. Hasn't that settled the question of where PV should be installed? I thought the answer is now "yes" everywhere.
Even assuming 100% solar rooftop coverage is the goal, given limited capacity of raw materials, labor, infrastructure would still necessitate prioritization of when to allocate those things to which places.
But the audience isn't an omnipotent controller of PV panel allocation, it's emergent market participants. Presumably, the market emerges more plentifully in those sunnier places. It's hard to imagine the place where this data is useful to local construction firms who were previously not well-informed (potentially by just walking around with their eyes open).
Maybe it's useful when trying to justify solar adoption. If you have control over some level of panel allocation, you could use something like this to explore where you'd want to put panels first -- answering the question of where are you going to make the best economic case for solar panels.
Then, once the top places are addressed, you can move onto the second tier of locations, then the third, etc...
This could be helpful if you're in gov't and have some control over a pilot neighborhood project. Or a developer that wants to include solar on some homes/businesses and wants to know where it makes the most sense.
You're right that this probably isn't too much better than qualitative reasoning about how sunny certain places are, but this is quantitative, so you can have a little more confidence in your qualitative assessment.
There are several allocation opportunities I could think of. You’re a local government considering some subsidies for rooftop solar initiatives. How much bang for your buck will you get? You’re a regional grid operator and have some estimates for rooftop solar adoption. How do you translate that into plans for future grid capacity needs? You’re a rooftop solar installation company. What neighborhoods do you send your mailers to?
Perhaps those three different groups should just coordinate together, rather than individually using this data, and arriving at three different and possibly interfering conclusions.
Aside from that grid operators buy power from producers. They don't plan future capacity more than 72 hours in advance. If you're a producer with expensive power you won't sell much. If you're a producer with cheap power you will sell a lot. It's already a functioning market. Solar is a very small part of it.
A lot of new homes are still constructed without solar. Either market participants are sleeping on easy money or the answer isn't a simple "yes, everywhere".
The cost of panels has fallen a lot, but the cost of mounting hardware and installation is still pretty high in the US.
How are you calculating that? Solar installations are around $2.50-$3.50 per watt, so $20k would get you 6-8kW. Assuming actual output is 10% of capacity, that's 14-19kWh/day or 5,000-7,000kWh per year. Current residential electricity prices in SF are 38.9 cents per kWh[1], so that's $2,000-2,700 per year in savings, or $40-54k over 20 years. The actual amount saved depends on how much electricity you're consuming during peak times, but I doubt that number is off by a factor of 10.
Ahh, ok the tool sucks it doesn’t seem to calculate based on your current cost per kWh or the local cost per kWh.
It’s ignoring inflation on those calculations, acting like your electric bill will be the same in 20 years. It’s also ignoring residual value in the system after 20 years they typically last 25-30, and you don’t pay taxes on savings.
There install estimates where also really high for my area, but I don’t know if that’s a general issue.
Your electric bill 20 years from now is just as likely to go down as it is to go up.
In two decades, we could see advancements like mobile generators offering free power, ultra-affordable battery packs delivered to homes to meet energy needs, or even the widespread adoption of low-cost fusion energy.
The key takeaway is that predicting the future cost of electricity is as challenging as it was to predict today’s solar energy costs—now far lower than anyone expected.
None of what you just said is even vaguely realistic. Prices can’t drop below zero but they can easily more than double, so even if you assume equal odds in either direction it doesn’t cancel out. Worse, any physical device is going to have a cost to produce it which requires charging people to use it thus they can’t even drop to 0.
Beyond that none of their prices or timelines are accurate, even ignoring the issues with inflation.
With solar technology, powering a home with a mobile generator is possible. Yes, the generator and batteries will have associated costs, but the long-term benefits make it worthwhile. This assumes uninterrupted access to sunlight over the next 20 years without new restrictions.
Key Considerations:
Energy Need: The average home uses 30 kWh/day, requiring 6 kW/hour over 5 peak sunlight hours.
Multijunction Panels: Lab efficiencies are already at 47% (2023), and with 20 years of progress, 60% efficiency is probable.
Efficiency Impact: At 60% efficiency, panels generate 600 W/m², requiring 10 m² (e.g., 2 m × 5 m) to meet energy needs.
This size fits on most home roofs or could be mounted on a pole or hung through an apartment window.
System Components:
High-efficiency solar panels.
30 kWh battery storage for nighttime or cloudy days.
An inverter to convert solar DC power to home AC power.
Outcome:
A mobile solar generator with advanced panels and efficient storage provides a sustainable and portable solution for powering homes.
So you’re assuming the big competition for home solar is… home solar but ignoring what makes home solar expensive (permits, electricians, tariffs etc panels are already shockingly cheap). Installing solar in 15 years also means you’ve lost 15 years of cheap solar power and are buying panels after inflation, waiting just hasn’t seen instillation costs drop for a while.
But you’re also wildly mistaken about the rest, it’s not actually 47% or now 47.1% efficient when placed outside. Panels get more efficient as extreme levels of light so people going after records create wildly irrelevant numbers as a dick measuring contest.
Further the day someone invents 60% efficient panels isn’t the day we put those suckers into mass production we hit 40% in 2006, but they are nowhere near commercially viable for home installations. We might see widespread use of 60% efficient panels long after we’re dead, but that’s not exactly relevant for these calculations.
It seems like we're talking past each other. My main point, as stated in the parent response, is that there is a plausible future where energy prices, adjusted for inflation, could decline rather than continually increase.
Many here are relying on inductive reasoning, arguing that since this hasn't happened historically, it can't happen in the future. I'm presenting a counterpoint: with current technology and 20 years of advancement, this outcome is entirely possible.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that mobile generators and solar panels would be free. Rather, the energy they generate could become effectively free. The current challenge is that centralized grids are often necessary because we can't store enough solar energy in batteries. However, with advancements in battery technology over the next 20 years, it could become possible to go completely grid-less. If that happens, we could see significantly lower energy prices—something we should remain as open to as the possibility of higher prices, all on an inflation-adjusted basis.
Specifically in terms of batteries, you can also add batteries to an existing solar installation.
Rather than competition what you’re describing is a way to increase the value of installing solar today.
> adjusted for inflation
I brought up inflation because buying a hedge that keeps up with inflation and selling it in the future results in paying taxes on that nominal increase in value but saving money doesn’t have that penalty. You also lose out on the lost productivity from a solar while waiting for prices to drop so it takes a lot more than just moderate inflation adjusted savings to make waiting advantageous.
Now you're sounding all pie in the sky. The cold hard reality is that hedge funds and billionaires control most power utilities and lobby governments to keep the cash flowing.
We know for certain that pricing is going to get really bad in CA due to a 2022 law that permits PG&E and other utilities to charge large connection fees based on your income (will probably hit in 2026).
I would gladly be the counterparty to any wager that 20 years from now electricity is going to be cheaper.
I find this argument short sighted time and again based on personal life experiences as a former electrician given the life impacting results I have witnessed from power losses.
My electrical experiences are regional to my area in the NorthEast US where long duration events have caused many thousands of US dollars in lost food, tens of thousands of dollars in losses from flooded basements, and when temperatures in Winter often drop below freezing and the power goes out pipes begin to freeze causing even more damage structure wide. In time we will see insurance companies reducing rates for those with local energy storage as the corporate insurance machine catches up to understand the benefits of having such power storage locally. I laugh when people make this exact financial reasoning argument because so few people look at the big picture and fail to comprehend the impacts to their life when that switch on the wall leaves one in the dark. Then again I have designed and architected many successful software systems for high availability and my foundational starting point with any system is always energy. Most of those in society assume that switch will always turn on that light and when it does not then those impacted begin to realize what a "centralized grid" truly means.
Decentralizing the grid is already happening as CA very recently announced any new residences built as of 2026 and beyond must be constructed with PV and storage. Individuals can act in ignorance on the energy problems for now however in time everyone will be forced to participate as the issues continue to compound.
Proactive versus reactive, because by the time it matters it will already be too late.
i've heard of some business models that install these and have you pay what would be the difference to your electric bill to the company until they pay themselves off, not sure if the panels last long enough to make that work though
Yes. In Germany they are selling a lot of models, but none, I mean, really, none asked about the rentability. So I went to a neighbour who just installed his 25kW and was very proud and happy, and asked him, in how many years is the return of investment. Siderated, he could not answer and then a few days later, with a very stern face: 25 years or more because if more people install these, the price that the city is paying for the pumped energy goes down.
So no. 20kw is not the answer. I showed my setup: 3.5kw + big battery. Pays the bill approx 60 70% of the daily usage. Investment payback : 5years.
What if he added previous generation crypto miner (so it's cheap) and use the excess electricity instead of selling it to the grid? This could also save some money on heating in winter unless he has a heat pump priced in already.
prev gen crypto mining is phenomenally inefficient in terms of energy that ends up being converted to heat, but it is absolutely not what you would use to take electricity and create heat given any other choices.
What are other choices? Heat pump is obviously the best but any other thing is just electric heater with 100% efficiently of heat generation. Pushing some bits around doesn't change that. I guess for some applications you might prefer higher temperatures but for residential heating crypto mining is as good as anything else, right?
25kW? That is crazy huge! How many panels? What does this guys house (mansion!?) look like? Google tells me that average installation size is about 7-8kW.
This exactly the case when a battery would make an immense difference.
(9 USD / kWh sounds terrifying. Not only an electric kettle begins to cost you; probably playing computer games at high quality / resolution comes with a noticeable price tag in electricity that the GPU would eat.)
An interesting use for satellite in future will be accurate estimation of solar power output in the very near future e.g. in the next hour period such that grid operators can adjust storage and demand to get a balanced grid. At the moment we can't do these predictions as we don't know where solar panels are in relation to any passing clouds.
I'm sure you could get that data from public permitting filings. And failing that, train an AI model on scraped Google Maps imagery. I would be surprised if people aren't doing it already.
This is fine and all, but each individual having a solar panel introduces a lot of issues.
Your energy bill is about 1/4 or 1/3rd distribution. As you take less power from the grid because of the solar on your roof, that proportion grows larger and larger.
At the same time, the power company makes less money off of you, because you are using less power. Therefore, they have less money to invest in distribution, which means they must increase distribution fees further to stay a going concern. This is to say nothing of the ballooning costs of distribution in general (nimbyism, permitting fees, can't build jack shit in this country for no good reason etc.).
Therefore: in the hypothetical where everyone has solar rooftops, we all effectively pay the grid operator only for dirty/offpeak power. This makes the grid operators look bad to everyone (they're using dirty power, aren't we trying to fight climate change!? Why is my electricity bill astronomical, even though I only use a tiny bit of power!?) and puts them in an impossible situation -- they're stuck between capped profits, creating expensive clean power at off-peak hours, and limited cash in general, since their expensive power plants are dormant half the time. Yet they still must deliver power to their customers, 24/7.
People have to have 24/7 electricity, even though the solar on their house does not cover them 24/7. It's illegal to sell a house that is not connected to the grid in most areas. Therefore, consumers must pay for the option of using electricity in off-peak hours. Everyone will be upset. The grid operator, who is constantly thrashed by politicians who insist on their using clean power, their customers who are enraged at them for the seemingly exorbitant electric bills (which are mostly distribution).
The upside is that the grid is more resilient, but as others have mentioned, only if significant investments in local distribution are made (i.e. the ability to very dynamically/granularly pump power back up, from house to grid). Which is a big capital investment that the grid operators will not be able to afford.
All this is downstream of the fact that it is hugely inefficient to put a ton of tiny solar panels all over the place, where they cannot be installed, cleaned, maintained, replaced cheaply. It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network.
Everyone will pay for that resilience, in their electric bill, one way or another.
> "It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network."
If that were true people wouldn't be buying solar panels for their homes because grid electricity would be "way less expensive" and it wouldn't be worth it. Which means either it isn't true, or the grid companies are too busy profiteering and it's not "putting the grid operators in an impossible position where everyone unfairly hates them" it's "grid operators putting themselves into an impossible position where everyone deservedly hates them".
No. People put solar panels on their homes, but crucially, they still receive power from the grid when their solar panels are not producing electricity.
People who don't have solar panels pay for electricity at 11:00AM. That's lucrative for the grid operator between 11:00-3:00 only -- when the duck curve is low. When demand peaks at 5-6pm, the grid operator pays boatloads of money to import power from elsewhere, burn expensive fossil fuels to service the demand.
Crucially, the grid operator is limited on pricing: they cannot "gouge" consumers at 5pm -- they must keep prices below a cap. Utility pricing is extremely regulated, it's set essentially by the state.
What you're doing when you set up solar panels on your home is actually freeloading. Your electric bill is less than it should be: you take power (at an artificially low rate) when it's super expensive, and don't take it when it's super cheap. This is very very bad business for the grid operator. They're also mandated by law (!) to keep your house hooked up to the grid and run distribution lines all over the place. Just in case you want to plug your car or run your AC at 5pm. Try getting a permit to build a new transmission line anywhere and see whether that's good business. If you have solar panels on your house, you are being subsidized by them -- not the other way round!
Timing is everything here. The United states has on the order of minutes of energy storage across the electric grid.
Valid points. Is there a known solution to this, even if it's too expensive today?
Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?
What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.
I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?
The real solution is the dynamization of electricity prices. This needs some adjusting from your average consumer but not a lot if done right. In Germany there are startups like 1.5C, Enpal etc which will sell you a heat pump, solar, ev charger pack with some "smarts", switch you over to a dynamic pricing electricity contract and then claim to optimize the overall cost (i have no direct experience of my own). If you are willing to take a small amount of temperature swing your house is a big thermal battery (even more so if you have a heat pump to water with a big, well insulated reservoir), your ev is a battery with vehicle to grid. With this you can shift your main loads a good amount. Washing machines and dryer as well as cooking/baking might be slightly more problematic/harder to shift, though the car battery should be more than enough for average evening cooking and i have seen washing machines/dryers which can take an external signal as to run when the price is low/there is excess electricity...
The most sensible solution in the short term is to keep the distribution that we have in place and aggressively invest in large solar plants coupled with very large battery systems to ease the duck curve.
Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.
Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.
Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.
Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.
Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable.
You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.
You are probably right about LLM because barely anybody tries to use distributed compute (like folding at home was using).
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
Querying overhead nadir satellite imagery - captured at a vertical angle relative to its spatial position - and feeding it into Geo Deepmind's ML program gives us roof-segmentation data. Ostensibly, annual flux prediction imagery in the global south, after being ran in Google's Solar API gives us some enhanced DSM-RGB imagery.
Nice to see, I hope it helps people get more cheap energy.
All I have are nits to pick:
> 10.7k TWh globally
This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".
Also, and this is not a criticism of Google, the IEA link on that text looks suspiciously like the IEA is still forecasting linear deployment of PV between 2025 and 2035, despite at least a decade of people pointing at it being historically exponential and asking why they don't assume the exponent will continue — I'm expecting about double their number for PV by 2035, if trends continue.
Ah so the complaint is of moving the last order of magnitude onto the quantity rather than the unit. I can't imagine this affects readability that much (although I can understand why you'd want to enforce consistency in an academic context).
Sometimes it's useful to distinguish these, though. And after many do have the inexplicable "MM" suffix (ie s thousand-thousand) to suffer through which seems much worse.
Both linear and using the current exponent are likely to be wildly off.
If you assume it’s ~26% annual growth now, and drops by 2% per year so 24% next year then in 10 years you’ll see 4.25x last years installs and the cumulative initiation over the next decade is 2.8x a linear estimate.
IMO that’s probably a reasonable ballpark, though capacity factors are an open question as they could fall dramatically or maintain fairly steady depending on how much grid storage shows up.
Agree I hate this, but at the same time I don't know if I would have groked it correctly on first read if it had listed "10.7Pwh globally". We simply aren't exposed to numbers at that scale on a regular basis.
Call the unit "Kilogram-Joules", abbreviate as KgJ and it works pretty damn well and unambiguously.
The problem is we don't live in a society powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactions, or black evaporation so it's not really useful - unlike say, the electron-volt which at least serves physicists nicely.
I was reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units and a few related the other day for fun and pleasing moment, and one thing I retained from that is that "The kilogram is the only coherent SI unit whose name and symbol include a prefix." Also that the standard explicitly forbid redundant use of prefixes like kilo-kilo-.
I guess that if you want to stick to TWh you can use
SI prefix words are just kind of silly. We should just use the exponent as a number instead of having a different word for every 3 zeros. 10.7 E15 Wh or something similar.
Scales to everything, you do not need to know any mapping, and directly supports mathematical manipulation.
We should also do the same for large number words in general. No thousand, million, billion, etc. E3, E6, E9, etc. Now you can count and represent any meaningful number without needing to memorize a dictionary of words and they would precisely match the unit scale “words”.
We should be. Why? Because reasonable estimates of the amount of extra energy contained within the atmosphere due to anthropogenic effects are in the single digit petawatt range. It's a number everyone should be carrying in their heads.
Put a different way: the total annual harvestable solar yield is within an order of magnitude of the energy we've caused to accumulate inside the atmospheric boundary. Think about that, for a second or two.
Well, given that the intent is to communicate, using GWh is probably ideal. 10.7 million GWh is probably the easiest to understand and compare, given that GWh is probably the most commonly used unit for this purpose.
EIA Electricity Monthly gives data in certain tables in terms of either million kWh or "thousand megawatthours" which isn't even English. Let's just use J.
There’s not always a lot of freedom to control roof angles like that - it might eg be directly determined by the orientation of the street - and even if there is, it might come into conflict with other thermal considerations. For instance, perhaps orienting the building such that the roof midline is E/W and the surface is due south results in more windows pointed due south, which in turn drives much more solar gain on the interior and greater cooling loads as a result - maybe the increased solar output outweighs those gains, maybe it doesn’t. You have to run some thermal sims to check. On the other hand, you will have more solar gains in the winter, which will decrease your heating demand.
So it’s not universally applicable - but it is absolutely true that it will increase solar output!
> more windows pointed due south, which in turn drives much more solar gain on the interior and greater cooling loads as a result
C'mon ... people figured this out in 70s ... and centuries before that in various parts of the world.
You put a shade above the window the excludes direct summer sun, but allows direct winter sun to enter the window. The angle and extent of the shade depends on where you are in the world.
On my old adobe in New Mexico, a roof at about 30 degrees with about an 18" overhang prevents all direct summer sun from entering our south facing windows, but provides 6-10F of additional ambient temperature during the winter from direct sunlight.
Oh I’m totally with you! There is a long and storied history of passive design strategies, and exterior shading is one of the oldest ones out there!
But what I stated is plainly true, and many people simply don’t want exterior shades (or just don’t think about it).
The point I was trying to make was just that there are thermal implications to the orientation, and you should think those through (using thermal simulations can help detect these issues) and come up with appropriate strategies (thermal simulations can help validate them). Maybe you don’t want shades, but you would be okay with emissivity coatings for your windows. Or maybe you just want to position windows on both sides of the home with continuous air volumes connecting them to promote natural ventilation. Maybe you can take advantage of thermal mass. The list goes on…
Overhangs are considered exterior shading in the industry/practice/academia. Any obstruction that prevents solar gains by blocking radiation from entering the window falls within the general category of external shading, whether that’s a fancy high tech actuated shading system, a grille, a simple awning, a structural overhang, vertical fins, etc.
That's terrible advice unless it's tied to local energy storage.
When every roof and every solar panel is angled the same way, a sudden cloud (or a sudden lack of clouds) can cause huge fluctuations in power output. Diversity is protective.
Unless there is something I'm missing, the sun still shines from the same direction regardless of the cloud coverage so I'm not sure how having panels pointing in other directions could improve the matter. Perhaps there is a case for optimizing panel area for different times of day but since panels are so relatively cheap it seems the advice is just to get more panels than spend much time worrying about such things.
Are you signing up to point your panels north and take a 30% efficiency hit? Or east/west for a 15% penalty? People point them south because it's the most efficient fixed orientation north of the equator. A more efficient solution is to use a tracker which keeps them pointing directly at the sun as it traverses the sky.
Not every roof allows for perfect southward angling (obviously).
And I'm obviously not saying that you should point panels north either. I'm disputing the parent commenter's claim that it would be beneficial to have all panels aimed directly due south. Because that way you get one strong peak at noon, which is the time of day when solar energy is most abundant but also least used.
The potential for mechanical failures in trackers makes them quite unpopular now (unlike in the 70s when they first started to appear, and seemed like an obvious win).
You're better off just adding however many extra fixed panels you need to make up for the lack of tracking (and its normally not very many).
It might be that south gives you the most electricity (I’m southern hemisphere so north for me), but if you’re after power for yourself, early am and late PM energy generation is very helpful.
A battery helps negate this issue but not entirely.
Pointing west is a reasonable option in California. Pointing west reduces production, but also shifts it later in the day, and addresses some of the duck curve.
This is a very neat exercise but I don’t think it’s going to create change. These models already exist and I’ve never met anyone who said their reason for not investing in solar is because they felt the accuracy of existing models is not good enough. I say this as someone who lives on a part of the world where a large % of the inhabitants could have solar but do not - and I find it sad, frustrating and puzzling.
Biggest blockers for solar are (total conjecture) :
1- Inertia - flat out.
2- Long-term ROI is not totally clear - How long till I need to replace, roof damage, ability to hold up in storm.
3- Cost - You need to invest sig $ to see your electric bill decrease meaningfully. Gov subsidies are nowhere near where they should be.
I am praying for a major breakthrough in cell efficiency to make it a no brainer. Does anyone have any insight on that?
I think it has to do with the assurance of the warranty. The ROI is loooong; solar contractors can go out of business leaving the parts on the roof lacking in the promised energy savings. Who wants to litigate against a bankrupt company?
Seems like qcells are on the road to a ~28% solution with silicon-perovskite tandem cells. When I researched for my own home install, it seems most of the cost is actually install labor, markup, electricians rates for hookup, etc. The plain BOM is close to $1-1.50 per watt for cells plus inverters and mounting hardware, but people still charge $3+ for systems.
Do you get the depreciated value added on to the house price if you sell? This was always a big problem for solar hot water systems. If the payback period is seven years but the average house turnover is five years, then there is little incentive.
Gov subsidies are the government giving the tax money of poor people who cannot afford houses to rich people who have houses. Highly regressive. Your PV system should stand on its own merits without holding out your hand to other taxpayers to fund you.
I have low confidence in the whole industry. High prices, holes in my roof, and many reports of systems being installed poorly with warranties not being honored.
I used an early version of the PV roof tool in 2020 for my own PV roof design. The front of my rectangle shaped home faces exactly North and therefore all sides are respective to exactly E/W/S. Given my professional experiences and knowledge awareness of photons I therefore opted to cover my entire roof in PV collecting technology and not just what faces direct sunlight, if one can see outside during daylight hours then the PV is functioning. Case in point, right now it is currently very cloudy and rainy here in the NE,USA and the roof is still generating 700 watts while my home's base load demand of 400 watts has the overage of 300 watts going to batteries. I have had this system for 3 years now and my choice to have such a system proved itself in our first outage when everyone else was panicking in the dark for hours. I sat relaxed and watched others in great stress and anxiety planning on how to preserve their refrig/freezers while visually panicking over their sump pumps not running in their basements. PV with a battery is a quality of life choice that directly impacts one's health and what price do you put on your health? I will also share with such sites that the energy and cost saving estimates are very much often wrong since the energy data is generalized for everyone and energy use per person significantly varies, some estimates are laughable to only me since I have my families own real world data for the last decade. I have also tracked our entire resource consumption at home for nearly a decade now, yes I am a data nerd to the extremes, and not only does such a solution save one GREAT stress and anxiety when it matters most but it also greatly reduces variable financial expenses and can also make one revenue.
Proactive versus reactive : The data doesn't lie, people do.
> sat relaxed and watched others in great stress and anxiety planning on how to preserve their refrig/freezers while visually panicking over their sump pumps not running in their basements.
Electricity is not free and when one reallyneedssomething money talks right?
Given the distance from my home to others some people I cannot help because the voltage drop would be to great over the needed corded run. Those within proximity to me that would not suffer voltage drop and undue strain on my own storage system I would gladly help but my own storage is finite and if I help just one person then...
My proactive planning and execution for my decentralized energy generation and storage system was done for my own families quality of life continuity based on my life's experiences. Everyone's life experiences are different and therefore your mileage will vary.
Thanks for confirming that I'm glad not to be your neighbor.
Last time we flooded, they came over and helped us bail water. When power was out, we helped them power their fridge with a spare generator. We generally help each other when we can, and enjoy doing so.
Nobody enjoys relaxing while watching others stress out and panic.
marginally relevant. space based dawn dusk LEO solar infra is the answer. vastly more power than we'll ever get on the surface of this rock and then onto Sol.
And they're worse than belching smokestacks, somehow? Criticisms like calling wind power turbines "bird shredders" are either crocodile tears from the Drill Baby Drill conservatives (who curiously never cared much about birds until now - except for shooting them with shotguns, that is) or from Quixotic enviros who can't accept any tradeoffs, no matter how dire our circumstances get.
As someone who has researched DSM availability across the globe, Google's Solar API is a top contender. Other option is government LiDAR surveys but the coverage, file formats, projections, etc are all fragmented. I think it would be great for the mapping community to create a world wide DSM map tile dataset similar to the ground elevation tile dataset that contour lines and 3D terrain views are generated from. Maybe someone is already working on this?
In the article they show areas where their approach can generate DSM although this is just the potential areas and not the areas where data is already available. :(
Does DSM stand for Digital Surface Model?
Thos exact abbreviation is so overloaded that it doesn't hurt to list the words once.
Yes. There are planet wide DEM (Digital Elevation Model) datasets which record ground level elevations but no planet wide set for DSM which includes built structures and vegetation.
This is a very impressive refinement of their existing tool, but is this type of advanced calculation of roof-pitch (etc.) still relevant?
Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it? More complicated and expensive to permit and install, less efficient operation, difficult to repair, difficult to insure, difficult to upgrade, inefficient to integrate into grid, etc.
As someone who recently lost power and water for weeks post Helene, do not discount the power of distributed grids. Distributed core infrastructure will make for much better climate resilience. Don't miss this in your efficiency calculations.
Grid connected solar goes down when the grid is out though. You need specific inverters to retain power.
You also just have issues like the low chance of having clear skies after a hurricane or a bushfire.
For disaster situation power, a diesel generator is still the cheapest and most reliable option.
Sure, but that's why my emphasis was on distributed grids. Interlinking local capacity / having one or two neighbors with fully fledged systems is way better than going weeks charging stuff in your car. When you're without power for weeks, you'll probably have enough sun for more than enough days to get yourself sorted. Hurricanes also tend to sweep up any other systems in the region, so once they disperse, it's pretty clear skies. Anecdotally, we didn't get any rain for months after Helene dissipated.
Also, diesel and gas were pretty much inaccessible for the first 5 days of the disaster, so unless you have a stockpile that's been treated for longevity, you might not even be able to run your whole home generator for long.
> Interlinking local capacity
Is this a thing IRL? Every system I've looked at stops feeding the grid as soon as the grid goes down
They have to. Feeding your own home needs some setup but is fine. But electricity companies require you to disconnect generating capacity from the grid when the grid is down to make it easier to effect repairs.
But that's more a policy decision than a technical restriction. We could change it so power can flow on both sides of a fault instead of only the "upstream" grid side.
With battery systems getting so cheap maybe community batteries will become a thing where a neighborhood exports it's solar too and is it's own small grid.
that would mean either:
a) government mandates that turn over existing grid infrastructure to such a project, because the existing grid infrastructure is almost all privately owned
OR
b) building new infrastructure to create an isolatable local grid
Neither of these seem particularly likely to me.
I mean it isn't though: it's defense in depth - policy is you must disconnect. Line workers will drive a ground stake in on both sides anyway, but if you don't disconnect then they'll just short your inverter to ground.
Referring more to microgrids here; think city block/neighborhood level independent grids
Ah I see. AFAIK selling electricity is highly regulated in most states so I can't imagine microgrids taking off in the US. It would be cool though
There's a program involving F150 lighting trucks out in CA that pay you to grid tie them, that way a couple of them in your neighborhood can power the neighborhood for a day or so if wildfires take out the local grid
Anything grid tied is generally required to have phenomenally reliable shutdown if the grid goes down OR proven (and very expensive) automated switching that disconnects it from the grid if the grid goes down.
This is so those F150s are not backfeeding the wires while a repair crew is trying to fix it.
Ergo, if the local grid is "taken out", those F150s cannot be "on the local grid".
I'm sure you know what you're talking about, but Duke energy is running the program, and they wouldn't be paying people to grid tie their EV for disruptions unless they could use it: https://news.duke-energy.com/releases/illuminating-possibili...
The lightning extended range has a 135 kwh battery and can backfeed 90A@240V. That's a heck of a lot of power.
Article says "customers will allow their EVs to feed energy back to the grid – helping to balance it during peak demand". It doesn't say anything about what happens when the grid goes down during disasters
>> Grid connected solar goes down when the grid is out though. You need specific inverters to retain power.
Yes, and sort of.
Inverters will prevent power flowing to the grid if the grid is off. However most inverters will continue to supply power into the house while the grid is off.
There are various factors in play here, and you need to do proper homework, but certainly a fraction of the house can be powered, if not all of it.
I'm not sure if this is "special" inverter or not. Every one I researched had the same functionality.
Most solar installations without batteries do not function without grid power present. Sure, some could, but most do not.
> a diesel generator is still the cheapest and most reliable option.
The shelf life of diesel is about a year; the shelf life of propane is effectively unlimited.
Not if you have a battery system attached
One advantage of distributed solar is that it can at least come online right away and when installed with a battery, can get a home pretty close to being fully self-sufficient (depending on the climate/heating system), whereas the generally much more efficient solar pv power facilities have to contend with backlogs in connecting to the grid, insufficient grid capacity, etc.
But yes, distributed solar will not be the general solution to decarbonizing our energy systems as a whole. Does serve a meaningful role though and there is no reason to not do both.
Insufficient grid capacity can also be local, there are many cases of inverters turning off because of too high grid voltage in the Netherlands
Australia manages to install rooftop solar at well under half the cost the USA does (most of that is soft costs) and integrate large amounts of it into the grid.
As of lunchtime today, nearly 50% of all electrical generation on the national grid was rooftop solar (and another ~10% was utility-scale solar).
Rooftop solar works just fine if utilities don’t actively try and obstruct its use.
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...
That's a great achievement, but could be stated in a more clear way.
Not 'As of lunchtime' but 'At precisely lunch time'. An hour later it wasn't 50% anymore, and it won't be 50% except at noon for a long time yet. As of the moment I am posting this, solar is 0% and coal is 80%. If Australia cares about global warming they should build nuclear plants and stop generating 70% of their overall power from coal.
It's still remarkable how much solar is growing and I hope it's 100% 24/7 soon!
Sorry. The point of my post was to respond to the claim that you can't effectively integrate meaningful amounts of rooftop solar into an electricity grid in a cost-effective manner when the evidence from Australia is that you can and we have.
If I'd looked the example when South Australia's interconnector with the rest of the NEM went out, they had periods with the instantaneous penetration of rooftop solar was over 90%. AEMO, the body that manages the Australian electricity grid, are aiming to be able to support a 100% instantaneous renewable mix on the NEM within the next year or two.
As for Australia's overall electricity mix, that is rapidly changing (and the numbers get a bit distorted by the amount of self-consumption of rooftop solar). We're at 40% renewables overall now, and while it may not hit the government's 82% target by 2030 we will almost certainly reach 70% or so by 2030 and I'd think 90% by 2035 is very doable. The last 10% is harder, but there are enough options (gas with CCS, green hydrogen, biofuels, long-term energy storage of other kinds) that I reckon we can get there. We are in the fortunate position of not having solar completely go away for months in the winter.
As for nuclear, it's never, ever going to happen in Australia (despite the claims of the conservative side of Australian politics). Even if Australia could build nuclear power as efficiently as South Korea - an extremely big ask, given we have the same challenges at building large infrastructure as the rest of the English-speaking world - it still doesn't make economic sense.
>...Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it?
The data shows that you are correct. Utility grid solar provides low cost power and consumer rooftop solar does not and will not. The rooftop solar price is usually hidden because no power source has been as subsidized as rooftop solar. Besides direct subsidies, wealthier home owners have often been paid the retail rate for the electricity they sell to the grid which causes higher electricity bills for those who can't afford to put panels on their roof - sort of a reverse Robinhood scheme.
As the statista.com report says:
>...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.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/493797/estimated-leveliz...
Looks like that report is a year old, but I doubt the installation costs have really gone down much since then. (Panel prices come down, but labor costs, etc. don't.)
Yes it's relevant and no we didn't all agree it was a bad idea.
It generates power at roughly the cost of nuclear. It's distributed and resilient. It works around sluggish government and/or corporate monopolies. It reduces transmission requirements. It enables and encourages electrification and time-shifting of load. Adding it at build time can be cheaper than tiling.
It’s generally a good thing and we'll see even more if it as the tech progresses and gets cheaper.
[Given your comment history, as you surely already know...]
Yes and:
With the rise of "virtual power plants" (VPPs), "all the above" (PV, batteries, EVs, water heaters, HVAC, residential geothermal) will be stitched together to create decentralized, more resilient power grids, capable of peer-to-peer power sharing.
Analogy:
Remember the term 90s "convergence" (turrible term)? Describing how the computer (digitization) was becoming the everything tool? VPPs (turrible term) is just the electification of "all the things", unifying all energy (heat, electricity) stuff (source, sink, storage).
It's a good way to anticipate this interation of "convergence". eg VPPs' analog to "traffic shaping" is "load shaping". eg Just like internet is a network of networks, the "intergrid" will be a network of grids. Etc.
It's really easy to see the rough outlines (age of renewable energy) once a person learns of the 100s (1000s?) of puzzle peices currently being assembled. Just reflect on the internet and superimpose those notions onto energy.
Thanks for listening.
Hate to sound like a broken record but the barrier isn't the technology, the barrier in the USA is permitting and soft costs.
True. The opportunities are insurmountable. h/t Yogi Bera
Or to put it another way: available with a rate of return that makes it sensible for average middle class home owners to say yes to, to the point dirty power sources are having to shut down in some markets (or fiercely lobby through the political system to be propped up).
One such example: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/08/...
Perfect is the enemy of good
I’m amazed at the amount of opposition to centralized solar generation. I assume there’s a fair bit of fossil fuel industry astroturfing involved.
There's the perception that it's an "either" question. When in reality its both.
Home solar is a big win, and if nothing else allows capital to be sourced from a million home owners.
Centralized solar is a big win, generating grid power Erich is obviously important.
It's not a question of either, it's a question of both.
I should have made it clear: I’m referring to people who are adamantly opposed to large solar installations, apparently because it’s a threat to agriculture? It’s very odd, but I see yard signs and bumper stickers everywhere in rural Indiana.
Do you think some farms in rural Indiana will make more money by converting to a solar power park? I could imagine it, and I could imagine that some people would feel threatened by this change.
Sure, but follow the money: unsurprisingly it’s the usual big money bad actors who are funding opposition.
https://energyandpolicy.org/fossil-fuel-funding-opposition-r...
It all hinges on how much your infrastructure costs. At the moment something like 1/3rd of your retail cost if delivery. At some point it's 15x cheaper to have 1kW home feed in + battery vs 15kW feed in.
Responded to a sibling comment: I’m referring to people who oppose industrial solar installations for some reason.
Sounds like a rare case of America's ubiquitous suburbs working out for the environment. Everyone has a "roof" that gets sunlight most of the day, so rooftop solar, while being less efficient, is still a viable candidate.
(Although, if you factor out all the extra driving needed for the suburban life, it would likely still come out negative compared to a proper city.)
Yeah, don’t over look the fact that the thermal demand from space conditioning homes is way higher on a per capita basis in a suburban context compared to an urban context with multi-family housing/apartments etc. There’s just way more air volume to condition per person, generally more inefficient systems, etc.
Even for the same amount of living space, apartments are way more efficient. A typical apartment unit is surrounded by other units up/down/left/right, so only two sides are exposed to outside air. A single house is exposed on five sides.
> A single house is exposed on five sides.
Six. The most heat escapes through the roof, but thermal loss through the floor is generally about 10-15% of the total.
Yeah we refer to this as the heat loss form factor of the building, which is determined largely by the surface area to volume ratio (so you have a square-cube relationship at work) as well as the the number of floors in conjunction with the roof area. With more floors, the heat transfer through the roof (which can be substantial, as mentioned by a sibling comment) is less significant for the same roof area (after normalizing for the gross floor area).
Same goes for the slab/foundations (which can also have substantial thermal transfer in many contexts).
There are enough panels available to do both and there is no overlap in financing for both. So just do every installation that is economically viable, they don't compete for money or panels.
The majority of the cost of electricity in most jurisdictions is distribution, not generation. Grid-solar still requires distribution, so it is always going to have significant cost even if the cost of generation is insignificant.
If it can remove the need for a grid-tie, then rooftop solar can be significantly cheaper and more efficient. Can be, but isn't yet, because enough overcapacity and storage to eliminate the need for a grid tie is still too expensive.
This is exactly the challenge. Here in California wholesale solar plant sell power for 0.03-0.04 kwh. Cost at the meter is 0.45/kwh.
Rooftop is competitive with the meter price, but unless you can cut the cord entirely, connection fees and rates will just keep increasing proportionally
>> Haven't we more or less concluded that a million piecemeal rooftop installations of solar are about the worst way to do it?
It really depends on what you mean by 'worst'. In terms of land-usage it's the best. In terms of speed-of-deployment it's the best. In terms of distributing capital spend its the best.
In terms of capital return, that will vary from one house to the next because it depends on location, energy consumed (and when), elec prices in your region, grid stability, and so on.
what do you mean by "distributing capital spend"? as in the money to pay for the installations is not concentrated to large utilities? why is that desirable?
Sometimes it’s easier to find a thousand people with a thousand dollars than one guy with a million dollars.
> More complicated and expensive
More durable for individuals in the face of large scale failures. You're paying for something real there.
With rooftop solar there's a path towards mass deployment that other alternative electricity generation solutions currently lack. Rooftop solar for residential houses doesn't require permits or planning, and can be done by individuals within a reasonable budget, unlike solar farms or rooftop nuclear.
> Rooftop solar for residential houses doesn't require permits or planning
Either you're assuming residential battery storage systems replacing the grid, or your ignoring the connecting rooftop solar to the grid requires permits and planning (the grid may not be able to handle it).
Depends on your jurisdiction. UK home solar under 4kW doesn't require permission.
Depends on your cost of electricity. In most places, a solar setup pays for itself long before the warranty runs out max 5-10 years typically (depending on a lot of factors). Even in the US which has a lot of extra cost related to people making things needlessly complicated and costly, lots of people are installing solar and earning their money back.
I can actually get balcony solar here in Germany for about 240 euros. Here's how that works:
- I buy a kit on Amazon. I found several nice ones. This one is rated for 850w and includes cables, inverters and other bits and bobs needed.
- I zip tie the panels to my balcony
- And I plug in the equipment and connect it to a wall socket
The idea is that this would offload some of the power used by e.g. my fridge. Not the same as a rooftop setup obviously and in my case quite pointless since I don't have a lot of sun on my balcony.
But I might actually qualify for a rebate if I do this and get all or most my money back. The government is sponsoring this and landlords can't stop you from doing this. Nor do you need their permission, a permit, or special insurance.
The point is that this stuff is cheap, easy, and pretty much plug and play. Roofs aren't a whole lot more complicated than this from a technical point of view. You need more panels and more expensive equipment and you probably need some professional electricians and installers to do the work.
The rest is just nonsense that relates more to your local government and legislation than anything being inherently expensive or difficult. I'd suggest reminding your local politicians of their responsibilities during the next elections and maybe voting for the ones that aren't being jerks on this front.
Otherwise, solar panels are pretty reliable and generally covered by long warranties. Repairing them is mostly not a thing, somebody would come and simply replace them. I doubt that a lot of solar panel companies and installers are suffering a lot under the enormous burden of this happening all the time for the simple reason that it this isn't a thing.
Balcony solar sounds brilliant and probably has clear ROI. Rooftop solar is an awkward middle between grid-scale solar and balcony solar. Rooftop solar might only make sense in developed countries through subsidies.
Actually, there's a lot of unsubsidized solar popping up in a lot of developing countries all over the middle east, Africa, etc. Anything from villas to shanty towns. Reason: local grids are unreliable and solar is affordable enough. Add some batteries and you are pretty much energy independent. Most of that solar goes on people's roofs.
The reason that's affordable there and requires subsidies in wealthier nations is all the nonsense the nanny states we live in come up with to over complicate things. You need certified this and that. Only people in possession of a special license can plug component A into component B, or strip some wires. And then there is the local grid monopoly that throws up all sorts of obstacles.
There's a way around this. Just buy some panels and batteries on amazon and wire up your shed, boat, cabin in the woods, etc. It's all plug and play. You don't need any permits, special skills, etc. And you end up with a system that can provide a couple of KW of power. Not that hard. There's nothing special about a rooftop. You might need a ladder to get there and you might want to take some safety precautions to avoid dropping off.
Yes, but one back-of-the-envelope calculation (it was a Python program someone wrote up as part of a comment on Slashdot as I recall) demonstrated that if all of New York's roofs were covered in solar panels there would be enough energy to run the city....
Enough energy or enough electricity?
Good point. It feels right that the calculation ignored losses --- but if I recall, it did include panel efficiency and that has gotten much better, so maybe it would work now?
I thought we may have concluded that shareholder efficient centralized single point of failure systems are the least robust providers of basic human needs in the face of natural levels of uncertainty.
At a certain point shouldn't things get good enough you don't really need a traditional power grid?
Grids are pretty much the best solution available because any kind of good/service that can be transported at close to light-speed benefits tremendously from ubiquitous connectivity.
Smarter grids are an even better solution; batteries backing local high-variance demand combined with rapidly negotiated requests for transmission power to meet expected future demand (and then stored in the batteries) reduces (electrical) inefficiency to a minimum.
Residential power demands are highest in the morning and in the evening. That's when people shower, cook, and are generally around using power. Solar peaks at noon.
Maybe when battery prices come down even more. But the cost of grid-level storage are also falling, and wind pretty much only works at grid scale. Grids have to change but won't become obsolete anytime soon.
That usage pattern will be quite different in places with cold winters when most people there are using electric-powered heat pumps (which is "the plan").
Why not both?
I'll take 3kW on my rooftop over 5kW in billionaire's company.
This is really incredible. If they could plug in local utility prices and come up with estimate for dollars saved per year, that would be an incredible conversation starter for homeowners who might not have considered taking on a home solar project otherwise.
> incredible conversation starter for homeowners who might not have considered taking on a home solar project otherwise
Once you do the math in a Northern country (sans subsidies) it's not as compelling as you might think.
Because (at least in the USA) the soft costs are excessive:
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2022/11/16/tackling-soft-costs-a...
Considering "Customer aquisition" as a cost is really funny (and that seems to be the "soft cost" discussed).
In Minnesota the "deal" for solar if you cannot DIY / off-grid is just meh.
They do not allow use of battery backups or cutover, they cut out when the power goes out, and they "credit" you to reduce your overall bill. You can make money if you produce more power in sunny warm times than you use year around (at least while you are the only one!), but the dream of energy independence at a local scale just isn't there yet.
What I want is something that offsets my grid use (potentially to zero but not negative), so that I can use grid or solar to charge my EV and a whole-home battery bank with three days reserve. I don't care about becoming part of the overall grid solution, but in city limits, it appears I must, and that necessitates extra equipment and rules out my backup use case.
And yet, I get constant calls and fliers about it - all "soft costs" - no matter how much I say no.
By "Northen" I assume you mean Europe, and (most of) USA?
I live near the 33rd parallel South. Since installing solar my annual grid requirements are around 30% of before solar [1] ‐ even as my actual consumption has risen [2].
As far as "Northern" goes countries in my latitude north (or better) include India, Mexica, all of Africa, most of China, and so on. So for most people living in the north it is compelling [4].
[1] a very large fraction of my grid usage is really cold, wet conditions for 6 weeks in winter. A combination of low generation and high usage for heating.
[2] cooling in summer is free, so we run the aircon a lot more. Plus things like slow-cooking etc are free as well.
[4] my return on investment (grid cost of generated electricity over capital invested) is 16.7%. Projected lifespan is 10 years for battery and inverter, 25 years on panels, 50 years on wiring.
> By "Northen" I assume you mean Europe, and (most of) USA?
People wrongly assume that you can put Europe and the US in the same basket (because temperature-wise climate is comparable), but half of Europe is further north than Montreal, and almost all of it is beyond Philadelphia, so no you can't really say “Europe and most of the US”.
Northern places (thinking UK here) don't use AC in summer, the economics are different.
like this? https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/
Aw, I hoped for a second for global coverage.
,$
I am sceptical about putting PV on roofs, seems a lot of hassle and waymore expensive then using just flatground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park Any additional money spent on it, could have helped to install more PV or batteries.
In general yes but due to both taxes/regulations and real issues with the grid it is "easier" to just consume what your produce vs producing and selling to the grid. And since space is limited on most peoples property if you live an urban setting then roof might be the only place to put it. If you got plenty of space though roof is a worse place than the ground from almost every point of view.
Every PV system on a roof means producing and consuming energy directly.
In Germany we already have large distance energy transfer problems.
And PV is so cheap now + battery, you get independence / real freedom out of the box.
If you have valuable space on the ground and want to remove the utilization of it, sure but I prefer it on the roof were it doesn't do that.
But yes next to autobahns or other smart locations yes put it on the ground.
But when I invest in myself I will not sponsor pv somewhere else
The image processing described is very cool, but I have questions about the application. Google started doing these solar potential estimates about 10 years ago, so let's imagine that they have been developing the capability since about 2010 or so. In that time the cost of PV has fallen by an order of magnitude. Hasn't that settled the question of where PV should be installed? I thought the answer is now "yes" everywhere.
Even assuming 100% solar rooftop coverage is the goal, given limited capacity of raw materials, labor, infrastructure would still necessitate prioritization of when to allocate those things to which places.
But the audience isn't an omnipotent controller of PV panel allocation, it's emergent market participants. Presumably, the market emerges more plentifully in those sunnier places. It's hard to imagine the place where this data is useful to local construction firms who were previously not well-informed (potentially by just walking around with their eyes open).
Maybe it's useful when trying to justify solar adoption. If you have control over some level of panel allocation, you could use something like this to explore where you'd want to put panels first -- answering the question of where are you going to make the best economic case for solar panels.
Then, once the top places are addressed, you can move onto the second tier of locations, then the third, etc...
This could be helpful if you're in gov't and have some control over a pilot neighborhood project. Or a developer that wants to include solar on some homes/businesses and wants to know where it makes the most sense.
You're right that this probably isn't too much better than qualitative reasoning about how sunny certain places are, but this is quantitative, so you can have a little more confidence in your qualitative assessment.
There are several allocation opportunities I could think of. You’re a local government considering some subsidies for rooftop solar initiatives. How much bang for your buck will you get? You’re a regional grid operator and have some estimates for rooftop solar adoption. How do you translate that into plans for future grid capacity needs? You’re a rooftop solar installation company. What neighborhoods do you send your mailers to?
Perhaps those three different groups should just coordinate together, rather than individually using this data, and arriving at three different and possibly interfering conclusions.
Aside from that grid operators buy power from producers. They don't plan future capacity more than 72 hours in advance. If you're a producer with expensive power you won't sell much. If you're a producer with cheap power you will sell a lot. It's already a functioning market. Solar is a very small part of it.
A lot of new homes are still constructed without solar. Either market participants are sleeping on easy money or the answer isn't a simple "yes, everywhere".
The cost of panels has fallen a lot, but the cost of mounting hardware and installation is still pretty high in the US.
That's exactly my point. This isn't telling you anything about the controlling variables: labor, G&A, taxes.
Estimate for a house in SF with a typical roof and typical electric bill.
$20k upfront cost.
$4k in savings over 20 years.
That's an implied rate of return of 0.9% annually.
No thanks.
How are you calculating that? Solar installations are around $2.50-$3.50 per watt, so $20k would get you 6-8kW. Assuming actual output is 10% of capacity, that's 14-19kWh/day or 5,000-7,000kWh per year. Current residential electricity prices in SF are 38.9 cents per kWh[1], so that's $2,000-2,700 per year in savings, or $40-54k over 20 years. The actual amount saved depends on how much electricity you're consuming during peak times, but I doubt that number is off by a factor of 10.
1. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/averageenergyp...
I didn't calculate anything I just put in an address and a monthly electricity bill.
https://sunroof.withgoogle.com/
Ahh, ok the tool sucks it doesn’t seem to calculate based on your current cost per kWh or the local cost per kWh.
It’s ignoring inflation on those calculations, acting like your electric bill will be the same in 20 years. It’s also ignoring residual value in the system after 20 years they typically last 25-30, and you don’t pay taxes on savings.
There install estimates where also really high for my area, but I don’t know if that’s a general issue.
Your electric bill 20 years from now is just as likely to go down as it is to go up.
In two decades, we could see advancements like mobile generators offering free power, ultra-affordable battery packs delivered to homes to meet energy needs, or even the widespread adoption of low-cost fusion energy.
The key takeaway is that predicting the future cost of electricity is as challenging as it was to predict today’s solar energy costs—now far lower than anyone expected.
None of what you just said is even vaguely realistic. Prices can’t drop below zero but they can easily more than double, so even if you assume equal odds in either direction it doesn’t cancel out. Worse, any physical device is going to have a cost to produce it which requires charging people to use it thus they can’t even drop to 0.
Beyond that none of their prices or timelines are accurate, even ignoring the issues with inflation.
When did PGE prices ever go down?
Neither option I mentioned would require PGE or a centralized entity. Both options would be off-grid.
Mobile Solar Generator Feasibility
With solar technology, powering a home with a mobile generator is possible. Yes, the generator and batteries will have associated costs, but the long-term benefits make it worthwhile. This assumes uninterrupted access to sunlight over the next 20 years without new restrictions.
Key Considerations:
Energy Need: The average home uses 30 kWh/day, requiring 6 kW/hour over 5 peak sunlight hours.
Multijunction Panels: Lab efficiencies are already at 47% (2023), and with 20 years of progress, 60% efficiency is probable.
Efficiency Impact: At 60% efficiency, panels generate 600 W/m², requiring 10 m² (e.g., 2 m × 5 m) to meet energy needs. This size fits on most home roofs or could be mounted on a pole or hung through an apartment window.
System Components:
High-efficiency solar panels.
30 kWh battery storage for nighttime or cloudy days. An inverter to convert solar DC power to home AC power. Outcome:
A mobile solar generator with advanced panels and efficient storage provides a sustainable and portable solution for powering homes.
Doing that is what installing solar is
So you’re assuming the big competition for home solar is… home solar but ignoring what makes home solar expensive (permits, electricians, tariffs etc panels are already shockingly cheap). Installing solar in 15 years also means you’ve lost 15 years of cheap solar power and are buying panels after inflation, waiting just hasn’t seen instillation costs drop for a while.
But you’re also wildly mistaken about the rest, it’s not actually 47% or now 47.1% efficient when placed outside. Panels get more efficient as extreme levels of light so people going after records create wildly irrelevant numbers as a dick measuring contest.
Further the day someone invents 60% efficient panels isn’t the day we put those suckers into mass production we hit 40% in 2006, but they are nowhere near commercially viable for home installations. We might see widespread use of 60% efficient panels long after we’re dead, but that’s not exactly relevant for these calculations.
It seems like we're talking past each other. My main point, as stated in the parent response, is that there is a plausible future where energy prices, adjusted for inflation, could decline rather than continually increase.
Many here are relying on inductive reasoning, arguing that since this hasn't happened historically, it can't happen in the future. I'm presenting a counterpoint: with current technology and 20 years of advancement, this outcome is entirely possible.
To clarify, I'm not suggesting that mobile generators and solar panels would be free. Rather, the energy they generate could become effectively free. The current challenge is that centralized grids are often necessary because we can't store enough solar energy in batteries. However, with advancements in battery technology over the next 20 years, it could become possible to go completely grid-less. If that happens, we could see significantly lower energy prices—something we should remain as open to as the possibility of higher prices, all on an inflation-adjusted basis.
Specifically in terms of batteries, you can also add batteries to an existing solar installation.
Rather than competition what you’re describing is a way to increase the value of installing solar today.
> adjusted for inflation
I brought up inflation because buying a hedge that keeps up with inflation and selling it in the future results in paying taxes on that nominal increase in value but saving money doesn’t have that penalty. You also lose out on the lost productivity from a solar while waiting for prices to drop so it takes a lot more than just moderate inflation adjusted savings to make waiting advantageous.
Now you're sounding all pie in the sky. The cold hard reality is that hedge funds and billionaires control most power utilities and lobby governments to keep the cash flowing.
We know for certain that pricing is going to get really bad in CA due to a 2022 law that permits PG&E and other utilities to charge large connection fees based on your income (will probably hit in 2026).
I would gladly be the counterparty to any wager that 20 years from now electricity is going to be cheaper.
sunroof was a 2015 project. if they haven't adjusted their cost estimates since they launched it, it could be wildly overestimating things.
Same for panel efficiency
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar-cell_efficiency#/media...
I find this argument short sighted time and again based on personal life experiences as a former electrician given the life impacting results I have witnessed from power losses.
My electrical experiences are regional to my area in the NorthEast US where long duration events have caused many thousands of US dollars in lost food, tens of thousands of dollars in losses from flooded basements, and when temperatures in Winter often drop below freezing and the power goes out pipes begin to freeze causing even more damage structure wide. In time we will see insurance companies reducing rates for those with local energy storage as the corporate insurance machine catches up to understand the benefits of having such power storage locally. I laugh when people make this exact financial reasoning argument because so few people look at the big picture and fail to comprehend the impacts to their life when that switch on the wall leaves one in the dark. Then again I have designed and architected many successful software systems for high availability and my foundational starting point with any system is always energy. Most of those in society assume that switch will always turn on that light and when it does not then those impacted begin to realize what a "centralized grid" truly means.
Decentralizing the grid is already happening as CA very recently announced any new residences built as of 2026 and beyond must be constructed with PV and storage. Individuals can act in ignorance on the energy problems for now however in time everyone will be forced to participate as the issues continue to compound.
Proactive versus reactive, because by the time it matters it will already be too late.
My plan is just to use my EV with generator interconnect to house with V2L. No color or gas needed. Ioniq can run house for like 5 days.
Was that paired with a battery? Under NEM3 (and reduced net metering rate), it doesn't make sense to install PV in California without a battery.
Solar installations have a 30% tax rebate currently. So your $20k would actually be $12k, makes the math a bit better.
Plus, are you counting in inflation of electricity prices in those 20 years? I'm sure electricity isn't going to get cheaper
i've heard of some business models that install these and have you pay what would be the difference to your electric bill to the company until they pay themselves off, not sure if the panels last long enough to make that work though
Yes. In Germany they are selling a lot of models, but none, I mean, really, none asked about the rentability. So I went to a neighbour who just installed his 25kW and was very proud and happy, and asked him, in how many years is the return of investment. Siderated, he could not answer and then a few days later, with a very stern face: 25 years or more because if more people install these, the price that the city is paying for the pumped energy goes down.
So no. 20kw is not the answer. I showed my setup: 3.5kw + big battery. Pays the bill approx 60 70% of the daily usage. Investment payback : 5years.
What if he added previous generation crypto miner (so it's cheap) and use the excess electricity instead of selling it to the grid? This could also save some money on heating in winter unless he has a heat pump priced in already.
prev gen crypto mining is phenomenally inefficient in terms of energy that ends up being converted to heat, but it is absolutely not what you would use to take electricity and create heat given any other choices.
What are other choices? Heat pump is obviously the best but any other thing is just electric heater with 100% efficiently of heat generation. Pushing some bits around doesn't change that. I guess for some applications you might prefer higher temperatures but for residential heating crypto mining is as good as anything else, right?
this guy is a carpenter :). cryto mining would sound like chinese to him...
25kW? That is crazy huge! How many panels? What does this guys house (mansion!?) look like? Google tells me that average installation size is about 7-8kW.
Is not that big. you have approx 400W ( mine are 440W) on a 2sqm. Hi sroof is like 15 x 8 m. and is not fully covered. You can easily reach 25kw.
Damn, your neighbor got robbed by the installer …
Yes I think in general those are a better deal for the homeowner.
They're a terrible deal for those companies investors though.
Presumably at some point they go bankrupt and sell your roof at auction??? weird setup
One of these wouldn't sign me up as they couldn't offer any savings (92% of my use is off peak, around 16ct NZD (9 USD) / kWh).
A lot of the time such companies pray on people on stupid plans (or those paying thru the nose for "exclusively renewable") power.
This exactly the case when a battery would make an immense difference.
(9 USD / kWh sounds terrifying. Not only an electric kettle begins to cost you; probably playing computer games at high quality / resolution comes with a noticeable price tag in electricity that the GPU would eat.)
I think he meant 9 USD cents per kw. (He included ct with NZD but forgot it with USD.)
Woah, your electricity is so cheap! Is it mostly hydro?
Related:
Global Solar Power Potential Map - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40303570 - May 2024
An interesting use for satellite in future will be accurate estimation of solar power output in the very near future e.g. in the next hour period such that grid operators can adjust storage and demand to get a balanced grid. At the moment we can't do these predictions as we don't know where solar panels are in relation to any passing clouds.
I'm sure you could get that data from public permitting filings. And failing that, train an AI model on scraped Google Maps imagery. I would be surprised if people aren't doing it already.
This is fine and all, but each individual having a solar panel introduces a lot of issues.
Your energy bill is about 1/4 or 1/3rd distribution. As you take less power from the grid because of the solar on your roof, that proportion grows larger and larger.
At the same time, the power company makes less money off of you, because you are using less power. Therefore, they have less money to invest in distribution, which means they must increase distribution fees further to stay a going concern. This is to say nothing of the ballooning costs of distribution in general (nimbyism, permitting fees, can't build jack shit in this country for no good reason etc.).
Therefore: in the hypothetical where everyone has solar rooftops, we all effectively pay the grid operator only for dirty/offpeak power. This makes the grid operators look bad to everyone (they're using dirty power, aren't we trying to fight climate change!? Why is my electricity bill astronomical, even though I only use a tiny bit of power!?) and puts them in an impossible situation -- they're stuck between capped profits, creating expensive clean power at off-peak hours, and limited cash in general, since their expensive power plants are dormant half the time. Yet they still must deliver power to their customers, 24/7.
People have to have 24/7 electricity, even though the solar on their house does not cover them 24/7. It's illegal to sell a house that is not connected to the grid in most areas. Therefore, consumers must pay for the option of using electricity in off-peak hours. Everyone will be upset. The grid operator, who is constantly thrashed by politicians who insist on their using clean power, their customers who are enraged at them for the seemingly exorbitant electric bills (which are mostly distribution).
The upside is that the grid is more resilient, but as others have mentioned, only if significant investments in local distribution are made (i.e. the ability to very dynamically/granularly pump power back up, from house to grid). Which is a big capital investment that the grid operators will not be able to afford.
All this is downstream of the fact that it is hugely inefficient to put a ton of tiny solar panels all over the place, where they cannot be installed, cleaned, maintained, replaced cheaply. It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network.
Everyone will pay for that resilience, in their electric bill, one way or another.
> "It's just way less expensive per watt to put a bunch of solar panels in one spot on cheap land in the desert and pipe it through the existing distribution network."
If that were true people wouldn't be buying solar panels for their homes because grid electricity would be "way less expensive" and it wouldn't be worth it. Which means either it isn't true, or the grid companies are too busy profiteering and it's not "putting the grid operators in an impossible position where everyone unfairly hates them" it's "grid operators putting themselves into an impossible position where everyone deservedly hates them".
No. People put solar panels on their homes, but crucially, they still receive power from the grid when their solar panels are not producing electricity.
People who don't have solar panels pay for electricity at 11:00AM. That's lucrative for the grid operator between 11:00-3:00 only -- when the duck curve is low. When demand peaks at 5-6pm, the grid operator pays boatloads of money to import power from elsewhere, burn expensive fossil fuels to service the demand.
Crucially, the grid operator is limited on pricing: they cannot "gouge" consumers at 5pm -- they must keep prices below a cap. Utility pricing is extremely regulated, it's set essentially by the state.
What you're doing when you set up solar panels on your home is actually freeloading. Your electric bill is less than it should be: you take power (at an artificially low rate) when it's super expensive, and don't take it when it's super cheap. This is very very bad business for the grid operator. They're also mandated by law (!) to keep your house hooked up to the grid and run distribution lines all over the place. Just in case you want to plug your car or run your AC at 5pm. Try getting a permit to build a new transmission line anywhere and see whether that's good business. If you have solar panels on your house, you are being subsidized by them -- not the other way round!
Timing is everything here. The United states has on the order of minutes of energy storage across the electric grid.
Valid points. Is there a known solution to this, even if it's too expensive today?
Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups? Or are batteries too expensive, or don't last long enough, for this to be feasible?
What about a wind+solar combination? Both of them are unlikely to go offline at the same time.
I see articles that the cost of wind and solar keep going down every year at a rapid rate, and the same for battery tech too. How far are we from where the costs are low enough for cities to have their own reliable grids composed of renewable energy?
The real solution is the dynamization of electricity prices. This needs some adjusting from your average consumer but not a lot if done right. In Germany there are startups like 1.5C, Enpal etc which will sell you a heat pump, solar, ev charger pack with some "smarts", switch you over to a dynamic pricing electricity contract and then claim to optimize the overall cost (i have no direct experience of my own). If you are willing to take a small amount of temperature swing your house is a big thermal battery (even more so if you have a heat pump to water with a big, well insulated reservoir), your ev is a battery with vehicle to grid. With this you can shift your main loads a good amount. Washing machines and dryer as well as cooking/baking might be slightly more problematic/harder to shift, though the car battery should be more than enough for average evening cooking and i have seen washing machines/dryers which can take an external signal as to run when the price is low/there is excess electricity...
The most sensible solution in the short term is to keep the distribution that we have in place and aggressively invest in large solar plants coupled with very large battery systems to ease the duck curve.
Individual homeowners can do their part with solar + heat pumps to shift that duck curve. Power rates should see way more wild swings: 0c at the trough around 11am-2pm, $.50 at the 5pm peak. That aligns consumers to make sensible investments, either the energy they use or the energy they produce/store.
Smart charging of cars, so that those car batteries can help shift the load? But that requires global coordination that is nonexistent today.
Solar is no doubt the energy solution, there's really nothing better. It's low maintenance and lasts a long time, capital scalable, and can be deployed basically anywhere. Solar is far and away the cheapest thing for about 70% of our energy needs. For the last 30% that is very tough to squeeze out -- that baseline power for 24/7 stuff like aluminum smelters, datacenters -- you basically have: high voltage transmission (only available if you have land to your west), big battery banks (tenable, but only if batteries follow solar's dramatic reduction in cost), or nuclear (but requires a big culture change that I cannot really imagine). Or fossil fuels but those are not good obviously.
Basically any of the other green stuff (hydro, wind, geothermal) can't be built at any price most places.
> Would it make sense for local electricity companies to go full solar with large battery backups?
Sure. But opposition to those battery energy storage systems (BESS) is intense and growing.
The solution to that is as much distributed storage as possible and cryptocurrency mining (or LLMs) for monetizing excess energy.
Sorry, capex for crypto -- let alone llm (datacenters must be on 100% of the time to pay nvidia) -- is way too high. It must see high utilization for amortization to be favorable.
You only see crypto in areas that have really cheap, 24/7 power. Big crypto mining operations are only built near remote hydroelectric power stations, or worse, natural gas or coal rich areas. Places where fossil fuels are made but that don't have easy/cheap access to refineries, rail lines, or pipelines.
You are probably right about LLM because barely anybody tries to use distributed compute (like folding at home was using).
But crypto is running 24/7 because energy price is still positive so people buy latest, most efficient hardware to be as efficient as possible. But latest hardware is expensive. You can buy prev gen mining hardware for peanuts comparatively. It can make you money if you run it when you have more energy than you can use or sell.
Wow, all this goes to show that distributed power storage systems will absolutely destroy contemporary power utility companies
Querying overhead nadir satellite imagery - captured at a vertical angle relative to its spatial position - and feeding it into Geo Deepmind's ML program gives us roof-segmentation data. Ostensibly, annual flux prediction imagery in the global south, after being ran in Google's Solar API gives us some enhanced DSM-RGB imagery.
Nice to see, I hope it helps people get more cheap energy.
All I have are nits to pick:
> 10.7k TWh globally
This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".
Also, and this is not a criticism of Google, the IEA link on that text looks suspiciously like the IEA is still forecasting linear deployment of PV between 2025 and 2035, despite at least a decade of people pointing at it being historically exponential and asking why they don't assume the exponent will continue — I'm expecting about double their number for PV by 2035, if trends continue.
>despite at least a decade of people pointing at it being historically exponential and asking they don't assume the exponent will continue.
So crazy and true. Sources:
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...
https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-forecasters-gap
7 years ago (!): https://xwpxpfefwalgifkr.quora.com/A-modest-proposal-to-the-...
> This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".
For the uninitiated, what's confusing about this? It seems to communicate the intended meaning accurately. Is there some ambiguity here I missed?
I think it's that a thousand terawatts is equivalent to one petawat. So this is 10.7PWh.
Ah so the complaint is of moving the last order of magnitude onto the quantity rather than the unit. I can't imagine this affects readability that much (although I can understand why you'd want to enforce consistency in an academic context).
Sometimes it's useful to distinguish these, though. And after many do have the inexplicable "MM" suffix (ie s thousand-thousand) to suffer through which seems much worse.
Both linear and using the current exponent are likely to be wildly off.
If you assume it’s ~26% annual growth now, and drops by 2% per year so 24% next year then in 10 years you’ll see 4.25x last years installs and the cumulative initiation over the next decade is 2.8x a linear estimate.
IMO that’s probably a reasonable ballpark, though capacity factors are an open question as they could fall dramatically or maintain fairly steady depending on how much grid storage shows up.
> 10.7k TWh globally
Agree I hate this, but at the same time I don't know if I would have groked it correctly on first read if it had listed "10.7Pwh globally". We simply aren't exposed to numbers at that scale on a regular basis.
Not sure what the correct solution is here.
Joules is the solution to both the problems (the second is that Wh for energy is as silly as speed hours for distance)
Watt-hours is a perfectly pragmatic unit. Measure instantaneous power and multiply by a common human unit of time. It's easy to compare.
Part of me is tempted to suggest kilograms as a unit of energy.
428.6 kg relativistic mass-energy equivalent: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=10.7PWh%2F%28c%5E2%29
But then, I am a silly person.
Call the unit "Kilogram-Joules", abbreviate as KgJ and it works pretty damn well and unambiguously.
The problem is we don't live in a society powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactions, or black evaporation so it's not really useful - unlike say, the electron-volt which at least serves physicists nicely.
>(the second is that Wh for energy is as silly as speed hours for distance)
This would be a devastating own if a single Joule wasn't exactly equal to a Watt-second.
I was reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units and a few related the other day for fun and pleasing moment, and one thing I retained from that is that "The kilogram is the only coherent SI unit whose name and symbol include a prefix." Also that the standard explicitly forbid redundant use of prefixes like kilo-kilo-.
I guess that if you want to stick to TWh you can use
- 10700
- 10,700
- 10.7×10³
- 1.07×10⁴
- 10.7e3
- 1.07e4
- 29E8₁₆
SI prefix words are just kind of silly. We should just use the exponent as a number instead of having a different word for every 3 zeros. 10.7 E15 Wh or something similar.
Scales to everything, you do not need to know any mapping, and directly supports mathematical manipulation.
We should also do the same for large number words in general. No thousand, million, billion, etc. E3, E6, E9, etc. Now you can count and represent any meaningful number without needing to memorize a dictionary of words and they would precisely match the unit scale “words”.
I agree! I use ^3 etc for the notation: https://saul.pw/mag
You mean 1.07E16
It's pretty common in some contexts to only use Es for powers of 1000, so 100,000,000 is 100e6 rather than 1e8.
That's commonly called engineering notation.
We should be. Why? Because reasonable estimates of the amount of extra energy contained within the atmosphere due to anthropogenic effects are in the single digit petawatt range. It's a number everyone should be carrying in their heads.
Put a different way: the total annual harvestable solar yield is within an order of magnitude of the energy we've caused to accumulate inside the atmospheric boundary. Think about that, for a second or two.
Well, given that the intent is to communicate, using GWh is probably ideal. 10.7 million GWh is probably the easiest to understand and compare, given that GWh is probably the most commonly used unit for this purpose.
The correct solution is 10.7Pwh. We are often exposed to 'Peta' when dealing with data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_prefix
EIA Electricity Monthly gives data in certain tables in terms of either million kWh or "thousand megawatthours" which isn't even English. Let's just use J.
> This brings back memories of the time I almost shortened "thousand kilometres" to "kkm".
SI is such a senseless system. Unit prefixes were not a good idea. Did you move the decimal point or just switch to "Mm?"
In that specific case, I chose megameters.
At which point even metric-users who think in km are confused.
Certain things are measured in certain units, prefix included.
This would be like writing interstellar distances in km instead of light years or parsecs.
Builders: optimize energy capture, put roof planes directed south (in northern hemisphere).
There’s not always a lot of freedom to control roof angles like that - it might eg be directly determined by the orientation of the street - and even if there is, it might come into conflict with other thermal considerations. For instance, perhaps orienting the building such that the roof midline is E/W and the surface is due south results in more windows pointed due south, which in turn drives much more solar gain on the interior and greater cooling loads as a result - maybe the increased solar output outweighs those gains, maybe it doesn’t. You have to run some thermal sims to check. On the other hand, you will have more solar gains in the winter, which will decrease your heating demand.
So it’s not universally applicable - but it is absolutely true that it will increase solar output!
> more windows pointed due south, which in turn drives much more solar gain on the interior and greater cooling loads as a result
C'mon ... people figured this out in 70s ... and centuries before that in various parts of the world.
You put a shade above the window the excludes direct summer sun, but allows direct winter sun to enter the window. The angle and extent of the shade depends on where you are in the world.
On my old adobe in New Mexico, a roof at about 30 degrees with about an 18" overhang prevents all direct summer sun from entering our south facing windows, but provides 6-10F of additional ambient temperature during the winter from direct sunlight.
Oh I’m totally with you! There is a long and storied history of passive design strategies, and exterior shading is one of the oldest ones out there!
But what I stated is plainly true, and many people simply don’t want exterior shades (or just don’t think about it).
The point I was trying to make was just that there are thermal implications to the orientation, and you should think those through (using thermal simulations can help detect these issues) and come up with appropriate strategies (thermal simulations can help validate them). Maybe you don’t want shades, but you would be okay with emissivity coatings for your windows. Or maybe you just want to position windows on both sides of the home with continuous air volumes connecting them to promote natural ventilation. Maybe you can take advantage of thermal mass. The list goes on…
I was not describing exterior shading. The terminology is hard. I was describing overhangs that create shade during the summer.
Overhangs are considered exterior shading in the industry/practice/academia. Any obstruction that prevents solar gains by blocking radiation from entering the window falls within the general category of external shading, whether that’s a fancy high tech actuated shading system, a grille, a simple awning, a structural overhang, vertical fins, etc.
A structural overhand is viewed by homeowners as something utterly different from everything else you've mentioned there.
That isn't quite true.
Electricity use is more common in the evening, so west facing panels do really well because they offset demand.
We have an East/West split on our panels and they're excellent for providing instantly useful electricity as opposed to stored electricity.
That's terrible advice unless it's tied to local energy storage.
When every roof and every solar panel is angled the same way, a sudden cloud (or a sudden lack of clouds) can cause huge fluctuations in power output. Diversity is protective.
Unless there is something I'm missing, the sun still shines from the same direction regardless of the cloud coverage so I'm not sure how having panels pointing in other directions could improve the matter. Perhaps there is a case for optimizing panel area for different times of day but since panels are so relatively cheap it seems the advice is just to get more panels than spend much time worrying about such things.
Are you signing up to point your panels north and take a 30% efficiency hit? Or east/west for a 15% penalty? People point them south because it's the most efficient fixed orientation north of the equator. A more efficient solution is to use a tracker which keeps them pointing directly at the sun as it traverses the sky.
Not every roof allows for perfect southward angling (obviously).
And I'm obviously not saying that you should point panels north either. I'm disputing the parent commenter's claim that it would be beneficial to have all panels aimed directly due south. Because that way you get one strong peak at noon, which is the time of day when solar energy is most abundant but also least used.
The potential for mechanical failures in trackers makes them quite unpopular now (unlike in the 70s when they first started to appear, and seemed like an obvious win).
You're better off just adding however many extra fixed panels you need to make up for the lack of tracking (and its normally not very many).
It might be that south gives you the most electricity (I’m southern hemisphere so north for me), but if you’re after power for yourself, early am and late PM energy generation is very helpful.
A battery helps negate this issue but not entirely.
Pointing west is a reasonable option in California. Pointing west reduces production, but also shifts it later in the day, and addresses some of the duck curve.
This problem has been know for well over a decade...
This is a very neat exercise but I don’t think it’s going to create change. These models already exist and I’ve never met anyone who said their reason for not investing in solar is because they felt the accuracy of existing models is not good enough. I say this as someone who lives on a part of the world where a large % of the inhabitants could have solar but do not - and I find it sad, frustrating and puzzling.
Biggest blockers for solar are (total conjecture) : 1- Inertia - flat out. 2- Long-term ROI is not totally clear - How long till I need to replace, roof damage, ability to hold up in storm. 3- Cost - You need to invest sig $ to see your electric bill decrease meaningfully. Gov subsidies are nowhere near where they should be.
I am praying for a major breakthrough in cell efficiency to make it a no brainer. Does anyone have any insight on that?
I think it has to do with the assurance of the warranty. The ROI is loooong; solar contractors can go out of business leaving the parts on the roof lacking in the promised energy savings. Who wants to litigate against a bankrupt company?
This chart on the progress of PV cell efficiencies always blows me away: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photovoltaics#/media/File:NREL...
Seems like qcells are on the road to a ~28% solution with silicon-perovskite tandem cells. When I researched for my own home install, it seems most of the cost is actually install labor, markup, electricians rates for hookup, etc. The plain BOM is close to $1-1.50 per watt for cells plus inverters and mounting hardware, but people still charge $3+ for systems.
Do you get the depreciated value added on to the house price if you sell? This was always a big problem for solar hot water systems. If the payback period is seven years but the average house turnover is five years, then there is little incentive.
Gov subsidies are the government giving the tax money of poor people who cannot afford houses to rich people who have houses. Highly regressive. Your PV system should stand on its own merits without holding out your hand to other taxpayers to fund you.
I have low confidence in the whole industry. High prices, holes in my roof, and many reports of systems being installed poorly with warranties not being honored.
Unfortunately the beta is available just for enterprises. I'd love to run it for my house.
There was a startup that was doing something similar, can't find it but their entire business was built on providing similar service.
I applied at a company called WattTime a few years ago. I didn’t get the job but their work involved some of that. It sounded really interesting.
https://watttime.org/about-us/climate-trace/
https://www.transitionzero.org/products/solar-asset-mapper perhaps
hundreds of people do this at the moment worldwide, no surprise someone is productivising it, or many people are.
I used an early version of the PV roof tool in 2020 for my own PV roof design. The front of my rectangle shaped home faces exactly North and therefore all sides are respective to exactly E/W/S. Given my professional experiences and knowledge awareness of photons I therefore opted to cover my entire roof in PV collecting technology and not just what faces direct sunlight, if one can see outside during daylight hours then the PV is functioning. Case in point, right now it is currently very cloudy and rainy here in the NE,USA and the roof is still generating 700 watts while my home's base load demand of 400 watts has the overage of 300 watts going to batteries. I have had this system for 3 years now and my choice to have such a system proved itself in our first outage when everyone else was panicking in the dark for hours. I sat relaxed and watched others in great stress and anxiety planning on how to preserve their refrig/freezers while visually panicking over their sump pumps not running in their basements. PV with a battery is a quality of life choice that directly impacts one's health and what price do you put on your health? I will also share with such sites that the energy and cost saving estimates are very much often wrong since the energy data is generalized for everyone and energy use per person significantly varies, some estimates are laughable to only me since I have my families own real world data for the last decade. I have also tracked our entire resource consumption at home for nearly a decade now, yes I am a data nerd to the extremes, and not only does such a solution save one GREAT stress and anxiety when it matters most but it also greatly reduces variable financial expenses and can also make one revenue.
Proactive versus reactive : The data doesn't lie, people do.
Stay Healthy!
> sat relaxed and watched others in great stress and anxiety planning on how to preserve their refrig/freezers while visually panicking over their sump pumps not running in their basements.
I hope you at least offered to help...
Yes, I did mention this in closing: "can also make one revenue."
I was commenting on the sentiment of sitting back and relaxing watching your neighbors struggle. I don't think revenue relates to it
Electricity is not free and when one really needs something money talks right?
Given the distance from my home to others some people I cannot help because the voltage drop would be to great over the needed corded run. Those within proximity to me that would not suffer voltage drop and undue strain on my own storage system I would gladly help but my own storage is finite and if I help just one person then...
My proactive planning and execution for my decentralized energy generation and storage system was done for my own families quality of life continuity based on my life's experiences. Everyone's life experiences are different and therefore your mileage will vary.
Thanks for confirming that I'm glad not to be your neighbor.
Last time we flooded, they came over and helped us bail water. When power was out, we helped them power their fridge with a spare generator. We generally help each other when we can, and enjoy doing so.
Nobody enjoys relaxing while watching others stress out and panic.
related: NSRDB (Nat'l Solar Radiation Database) Viewer from the National Renewable Energy Lab - https://nsrdb.nrel.gov/data-viewer
I had the privilege of working with the heart and soul of this solar rooftop work.
Carl is a mensch.
He's also the brilliance behind https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-airlines-contrails-clim...
marginally relevant. space based dawn dusk LEO solar infra is the answer. vastly more power than we'll ever get on the surface of this rock and then onto Sol.
This is where Google much more than
- GCP vs AWS
- Gemini vs ChatGPT
etc
[flagged]
And they're worse than belching smokestacks, somehow? Criticisms like calling wind power turbines "bird shredders" are either crocodile tears from the Drill Baby Drill conservatives (who curiously never cared much about birds until now - except for shooting them with shotguns, that is) or from Quixotic enviros who can't accept any tradeoffs, no matter how dire our circumstances get.
[flagged]
"We lose a little on each transaction, but make up for it in volume."