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.