But what you lost in scale you gain in:
- Lack of distribution costs. Roof-top solar (esp. when combined with storage) can be consumed at the point of generation.
- Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.
Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.
What are the "distribution costs"? Presumably any cost besides the cost of infrastructure to connect to the grid are negligible, and you have to pay the infrastructure cost anyway (or rather, if you pay to over provision on production and storage such that you can be truly off-grid, then you're going to be paying far more than the infrastructure costs).
> Distribution of maintenance costs. Right now the biggest cost is installation. But it doesn't seem at all infeasible that this could be simplified to the point that it is something that people could easily install themselves.
I doubt it. First of all, making plans based on some unknown innovation seems, uh, unwise to put it nicely. Secondly, it's very unlikely that such an innovation would reduce the cost of rooftop solar but not farmed solar. Thirdly, such an innovation seems very unlikely since we already have ubiquitous tasks that every home needs (electrical, plumbing, roofing, dry-wall) for which we still hire professionals--the ubiquity hasn't manifested an innovation that lowers the technical barrier enough that we all do these things ourselves.
Moreover, economies of scale work in the other direction. It's much cheaper to maintain a single 1MW solar farm than it is to maintain 50 20KW rooftop installations.
However, we don't need to speculate about tradeoffs. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., rooftop solar costs 2-3 times as much as farmed solar, so it seems the economies of scale dwarf any advantages rooftop solar might convey.
> Places like Germany already have somewhat significant contributions from rooftop solar.
If I'm understanding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany correctly, solar only accounts for 8.2% of German electrical capacity and of that 14% comes from rooftop solar. So something like 1% of Germany's capacity comes from rooftop solar?
Once the subsidies dried up, the snake oil salesmen came out. Timeshare hawkers are evil, but they have NOTHING on rooftop solar companies.
And in Nevada the regs changed and now people aren't getting paid for what they generate at anywhere near the same level which further levels the "value proposition".
Home solar was always propped up and if adoption has dropped off significantly in climates that are prime for it - it has zero chance elsewhere in the country.
Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.
Having it be an arrangement where a power provider owns and maintains the panels isn’t necessary or desirable. Lease-to-own or outright purchase by homeowners works fine.
If we could cheaply and efficiently transport hot water over miles and miles like we can with electricity then communal water heating would be much more common. Note that communal water heating is fairly normal (i.e., not "absurd") in large apartment, condominium, and commercial office buildings (one large boiler providing hot water for all tenants).
> Millions of individual homes running their own solar, even with everybody hooked up for exporting, is quite feasible. It’s happening today.
The question isn't whether there's an issue hooking individual residential solar installations up to the grid--no one disputes that. The relevant question is how expensive is it to build and maintain tens of millions of individual rooftop solar installations versus several orders of magnitude fewer, larger installations. According to https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/what-is-a-solar-farm-do-i-..., it would cost at least ~$2.8M to generate 1MW via rooftop solar systems while it would cost only about ~$1M to generate the same amount of energy via solar farm.