It seems like the parent comment was suggesting that natural gas was a necessity. I whole heartedly disagree. For winter months in extreme latitudes, other forms of renewables (hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass) should be sufficient.
I looked at doing this recently in the Seattle area. There just isn't enough sunlight to get a payback within the life of a roof (25 years or so).
In addition, electricity in the area is mostly from hydro, so it's both clean and cheap.
You have a point about the longevity of roofing materials though. You might want to use longer lived/higher quality roofing materials next time your have your roof renovated, and combine with solar then. Almost anything but asphalt shingles should do: epdm rubber, metal, tiles, slate, ...
Have you been to Seattle? They don’t have Alaska levels of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but it’s pretty bad. Mountains on both sides shave a little time off sunrise and sunset, and partially cloudy is every day. People basically ignore astronomical events because they won’t be able to see them anyway, although we did luck out on the last solar and lunar eclipses.
They have a special term for “overcast with a few moments of sun”: they’re called, “sun breaks”. Sun breaks. A break from clouds that lasts moments. Just a break, then back to work.
The only time the sun comes out reliably in the winter is when the wind shifts to the north and an arctic blast comes through. If it looks sunny outside, put on your heavy coat.
Tesla has a pretty detailed solar power estimator that uses historical daily sunlight levels at a fine-grained level. When I used it, the time to pay off my costs was close to 25 years, and that involved a lot of assumptions about future energy prices.
Given that you only need to store energy for about a day[0] and that the batteries last at least three years when you use them like this, world battery production is already 1% of the storage requirements for worldwide 100% renewable.
One forecast I’ve seen estimates that battery production will go up by a factor of four by by 2028.
[0] longer periods with no wind and no sun are dealt with more cost-efficiently with long distance power lines than with storage.