Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It’s designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn’t work very well.
The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.
Distributed rooftop isn’t supposed to be about feeding the larger grid so much as topping off local demand right when it’s needed.
I’m kind of eccentric so I got a humongous array; even then at peak production I was running the A/C for 3-4 houses in my cul-de-sac other than my own. Most installations around where I live are like 1/4 of the size I put up and rarely feed much back.
And home-scale batteries are getting cheap enough that excess won’t necessarily need to get fed into the grid anyway.
Distributed rooftop solar is the worst way to use our grid. It’s designed to pump a lot of power from a single place to a lot of little places. The opposite doesn’t work very well.
The solution is to not focus on solar by itself. Solar/wind/water/storage/long distance transmission need to be balanced with each other. Each has strengths and weaknesses that cover for the strengths and weaknesses of the others.
Distributed rooftop isn’t supposed to be about feeding the larger grid so much as topping off local demand right when it’s needed.
I’m kind of eccentric so I got a humongous array; even then at peak production I was running the A/C for 3-4 houses in my cul-de-sac other than my own. Most installations around where I live are like 1/4 of the size I put up and rarely feed much back.
And home-scale batteries are getting cheap enough that excess won’t necessarily need to get fed into the grid anyway.