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1970-01-01

Why is solar deployment measured in MW and not # of installs? It doesn't seem like the best metric for measuring growth.

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There are two solar installs going in my county just north of me. One is 5000 acres and one is 3500 acres. If I buy a 10kW system for my house I could increase the number of systems by 50%!

Are they Tesla?

Sure, but Tesla Solar generally advertises to smaller customers. If they get one big deal, its addition might overwhelm the sustainable growth in their business. They've definitely had multiple situations like that before with their energy storage business.

Presumably because price is basically per kW, and installations can vary significantly in size?

They only offer 4 sizes. They could break it down by # of installs per size:

https://www.tesla.com/support/energy/solar-panels/going-sola...

It makes no sense to break down the value of installed capacity that everyone will understand into four different meaningless values.

Not to mention that order mix is almost always guaranteed to be a highly prized secret that companies rarely give out. You don't see Apple breaking down iPhone shipments by their variants in detail.

more importantly, why is it in any economic to install solar cells on a home instead of at scale on a solar farm?

Same reason you have heating units in your house/building rather than at a municipal heating plant … people want to buy self-sufficiency for their house/building, and it's easier than scoping/building large-scale projects and running wires and dealing with municipalities.

self-sufficiency has a cost, hence my "economic" question. Also, steam transmission is way less efficient than electricity transmission.

It does appear people are willing to pay those costs :)

Also, electricity transmission appears to be much more expensive than generation. On my PG&E bills in California, delivery costs 2.5x as much per kWh as generation for 100% renewable power.

One benefit of rooftop solar is reduced transmission losses, but that isn’t usually enough to offset the costs from small scale/custom installation work. People like having them on their own rooftops for self-reliance, to flex on their neighbors, and to feel like part of the solution to climate change.

those aren't strictly "economic" reasons.

Economic for who?

Solar farms charge us grid retail prices everyday. Here in Australia, my payback time on home installed solar ended up to be 3.5 years. Not a bad investment.

for the economy as a whole. In the US, would anyone other than Prius drivers install solar panels if there were no tax credit?

For two basic reasons:

- the home owner owns the roof top and it is already there and unused, for a solar farm, the energy company needs to find and acquire land.

- the home owner uses most of the produced electricity at cost rate, a grid company has a lot of additional costs a home owner does not have, like operating a grid, ensuring service 24x7.

land is cheap. especially in the desert where there's lot of sun, and not much else.

"Not much else", like no customers for the electricity produced? /s. Yes, there are regions for example in the US, where putting up solar cells would be very cheap. But then you have to run power lines to where your customers are. That can be 1000 kilometers or more. Doable, but that certainly affects the economy of things. And yes, I think the US should put large solar farms into its deserts. And of course, there are countries, where land is not cheap and there might not even be deserts. Here in Germany for example, basically all land is somehow used.

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