Edit: To those who downvoted me, can you please explain why? I'm asking a serious question. There are plenty of small solar production businesses in America at the moment, this idea is totally possible.
Alum.js. You guys can have that one for free.
Does no one ever see how ridiculous they sound when they say things like that?
Sure thing. "Then why not start a business that does low-volume runs?" is not helpful. OP is likely in a different business, and starting a resource and capital intense business just to do low volume runs is likely not part of their roadmap for the next 5 years. It's also far from trivial.
Put differently: Given how easy you make it sound, where's the "Show HN" about your lifestyle business offering such services?
Unless, you happen to be on the cusp of a disruptive technology change.
Also, nothing wrong with chasing any customer at first just to get revenue coming in.
As a business owner, attempting to circumvent a nation state economically is painful.
Protectionism has it places; solar manufacturing is not one of them.
There's much more money (and sustainable jobs) to be had in the creation of the solar cells.
In addition, as someone else said, there's a LOT of roofs left to install solar on.
On top of those factors, these systems will surely need some amount of maintenance and repair; the installation companies can do that too, since they're already experts on that particular hardware.
On top of that, solar panels degrade with age, and newer panels are technically superior, so just like people replace cars after using them a certain amount of time, people are going to replace their solar panels eventually (though it may be 25 years), so there's also going to be business in upgrades.
And as solar installation continues down the "shingling the roof" - there's already an industry in place to take care of that.
If we want solar to sustainably employ a lot of people, installation alone is not the way to do it.
I can name lots of other industries just like this. You're just spouting nonsense, or you have unreasonable expectations. If you're expecting solar to employ gigantic swaths of people in this country, you're being unreasonable; you don't expect that of HVAC or shingle roofs or just about any other industry, so why would you expect this of solar?
Being ready to buy something is orthogonal to being capable to create a business selling it. Not everything has a low hanging scratch your own itch as in open source software development (and even there)
Sure, it's good for the consumers in the long run (assuming the established players don't just resume their regular playbook once the upstart has been crushed), but who is going to invest money in such a poor risk?
Cheaper is not what business owners want. Cheaper is what customers want!