Solar generation has little economies of scale: PV arrays scale linearly, unlike turbines and electromechanical generators. Batteries also scale basically linearly; maybe you can have a better deal if you buy a truly massive amount of batteries, but I'm not certain it's so dramatic.

Transmission costs seem to dominate the price structure; I currently pay a generating company about $0.1 / kWh, and pay Con Ed $0.25 / kWh for transmission of that energy. And this is in dense New York City; in suburbia or countryside the transmission lines have to be much longer.

Centralized generation makes sense when the efficiency scales wildly non-linearly with size, like it does with nuclear reactors.

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lostdog 4 days ago | parent [-]

Does solar scale linearly when you have to get onto roofs to install it? And when each roof is available for installation at different times, so only small crews can do it piecemeal?

	▲	nine_k 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		It certainly complicates things a bit, but the roofs are independent, so several small teams can independently work in parallel. So yes, it's sort of linear. Building a large solar installation may scale a bit sub-linearly, if you can e.g. order things in bulk at better prices, and have some electric assemblies done at a factory, more efficiently.