Can't shake the feeling that domestic PV is a con designed to try and shift responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers rather than industrial energy providers.

The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.

>The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.

There are many benefits to letting homeowners do it. First of all you get a lot more solar deployed in much shorter time, because you mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to the effort immediately instead of having them wait for a solar plant. Homeowners pay for it, provide the area for it, hire and organize the workforce - small scale but "everywhere at once" so to speak.

The government/state/county doesn't need to wait for the land to be available, raise the money, build infrastructure to transfer electricity from a new large solar site to the consumers and so on. So for the "state" the ROI is better with home installs.

>responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers rather than industrial energy providers.

That's where the responsibility belongs through. Most of us drove fossil fuel cars for years, which is the largest single emission source. In democracies we could have voted for guys wanting gas to cost 50 bucks per gallon, or who would prohibit any more oil and gas to be traded. We didn't. We could have refused to travel for vacations, refused to buy goods shipped from overseas and so on - but we didn't. So this is on us.

Check out your grid bill and you'll probably see that cost of the grid is higher than the cost of the generation.

Local solar requires far less grid, and expanding the grid is one of the greatest (political, not technical) challenges of this era in the US.

Unless you're accounting for the grid costs, the "cost" of utility vs. rooftop is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

As far as a "con" the only con is that the costs in the US for rooftop solar are multiples higher of other places, like Australia. That's the con. Australia also shows that rooftop solar is great for grid in general, greatly driving down costs.

Of course, rooftop solar is terrible for utilities, so you are going to encounter tons of astroturf denouncing it all over the web, and even face to face. Utilities are fundamentally threatened by consumres taking over more and more of their own electricity responsibility, especially as batteries get super cheap.

Rooftop solar doesn't require additional land to be purchased, reduces the need for more transmission lines, and reduces transmission losses. I don't know how big these all are but it seems plausible they make it a better deal than industrial solar.

Batteries on the other hand feel like they take less space and thus could be colocated near consumption without having to be on consumer property. Warehouse size within the city. Transmission costs would be minimal.

The answer is do both, industrial utility PV has so far been lower cost, but individual PV is higher resilience - especially in the age of extreme weather events.

I have a grid detachable PV system with battery. It's been invaluable for grid blackouts in my area to have the capability even as I have paid (at least for the first couple years) a higher price per kwh for it. Over more years, it's really nice to have price insulation against utility price increase.

It's the best kind of revolution: one that doesn't need permission from gatekeepers. At least not anymore.

Don't underestimate the value of decentralization in some scenarios.

If one can offset your electricity bill by more the cost of the install and come out financially ahead then that is compelling to the individual, I doubt many people are knowingly eating a loss and stumping thousands upfront solely because they think they are helping the environment

Yes and no. Having your own electricity production shields you somewhat from rising energy prices. That added predictability is worth something.

It depends. 80% of my electricity cost is taxes. If I produce it using PV, the consumption is never taxed, and the benefit is pretty substantial, on top of the market electricity price. (One rarely finds low risk investments that return 20-25% year)

We're paid £0.18 to generate (subsidised), £0.15 to export, and if I shift load via our battery, all our import is £0.07 per KWh.

Even with a large house, homelab, and an EV, we barely pay for electricity over the year. Doesn't seem like a con to me.

It’s a con in the same way a generator is a con. Yes of course utility scale PV is much cheaper, but this way you get control of your own supply and demand.

> The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.

Actually, it's the other way around.

A rooftop solar doesn't require much: the land is already there (it's yours), there isn't any bullshit with permits, all you need is a ladder or a bucket truck, a few ultra cheap panels, an aluminum frame, an inverter and a few dozen feet worth of wiring.

A large scale solar farm however? The developer needs to find suitable land (challenging to do when competing against big ag), there's permit paperwork involved because solar farms ain't agriculture, they need to pay for a high voltage connection to the nearest substation, the huge ass panels need a really solid support construction that can withstand wind and weather and that needs a solid foundation as well, you need thousands of feet worth of wiring, complex and massive inverters, lightning arrestors, god knows what.

Oh and you get resilience against natural disasters for free on top of that. Some drunk driver plows into a power pole, some redneck shoots up some birds and kills the power line (yes, that happens so often that utilities release yearly reminders to please leave the birds alone), or a heavy storm / flood takes out entire substations for weeks, whatever - you throw the transfer switch, kill off all the non-essential consumers and can easily ride through a week worth of outage.

You might want to start playing factorio ;-)

The answer is yes: it is a lot easier to make a PV farm than a home scale install!

While I oppose climate hysteria, climate change is a consumer responsibility. You must limit your energy use, and you must choose better, more responsible options. Companies just do what consumers demand, they don't force anything onto anyone. There are lots of green energy power companies, I'd use one of them.