It gains the space underneath. Flat roofs (of large commercial buildings, for instance) sound like a good place for them. I don't understand why they are put on the ground instead so often.

Most people live in cities where land is very expensive, but rural land is cheap. So, it makes sense to do large-scale solar projects that aren't near cities at ground level, and put solar panels on roofs in cities and towns where the power is being used on-site and land is expensive.

If people are putting installing solar panels at ground level in expensive urban settings, then yeah I think that's pretty weird. (It might be an artifact of land use planning rules in some towns where people put solar panels in places where they aren't allowed to put buildings or parking lots, for whatever reason.)

In my country (the Netherlands), there are a lot of huge distribution centers, large warehouses with flat roofs. But instead of putting solar on the roofs of those, rural land is used, and we don't have so much of that. It's a shame.

Hopefully more shared use becomes a thing. Stick the panels a bit higher, space them out a bit more. No reason why you can't have a mix of livestock and solar panels on one piece of land. Raises the price a bit for now, but everyone wins I guess?

Because it's difficult to install them at scale like that. For example, if you want to do a big solar project, you have to negotiate with the owner of every building you want to put panels on, you have to find a place in every building for inverters, you have to install metering, you may have to upgrade the grid to handle the extra power going out, then you have to have an account and customer service and payments for every building, and if the panels need to be maintained, you have to schedule a time and send out a crew.

Then you also can't practically do certain things like install trackers, because they break more often and it's too expensive to maintain them if you have to have a crew go out there instead of your on-site maintenance people just go over to the broken tracker/panel.

Overall the costs of rooftop solar are just more expensive than a central solar farm. Plus, you can site the solar farm where there is better sunlight and land is cheap.

Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.

> Ultimately this is the problem I have with solar: It puts an effective cap on our energy use. Solar will never be more than 100% efficient, and there is only so much land that it is reasonable to use, so if we say, wanted to expand our worldwide energy usage 10x, it's not really feasible.

Isn't this exactly why we should be installing solar on rooftops. It might be more exensive, but it's a bettet use of space. Plus most of the extra cost is labour, and aren't we constantly worrying about how their aren't enough jobs. Seems like a win-win to me.

It does not out any kind of cao on our energy usage, the amount of land that needs to be covered in solar panels to supply a country is a tiny percentage of it's area, and is basically a rounding error.

The limiting factor is cost of instalation and eqioment, not land. Additionally there are mnay deserts which are totally uninhabbited and uninhabbitable.

Yeah, I keep coming back to this "$1 billion idea" of building a solar plant on big shed roofs. Quite literally buy a reasonable sized property in the country(with/near rail) and cover it in sheds.

Once the solar energy output is established then the shed can be used for productive work. Preferably with some level of energy storage but a lot of productive sheds don't need much overnight electricity.

Sounds like a pretty good idea. You could run it as effectively two separate business, one is a power utility and the other rents storage or workshop space.

> increasing the height of the panels on a solar power plant gains nothing

Well, not nothing, since less atmosphere means less energy dissipated before light hits the panels, but certainly it’s a better tradeoff cost-wise to keep them low.