Solar panels are money printers. Yet no company is offering to put them on my roof at their cost.
The catch was that the companies took the feed-in tariff (the government subsidy for generating renewable electricity), and that you needed to commit to having the panels on your house for a minimum number of years (making it unviable if you rented, or planned to move in a few years).
In the mid-2010s the UK changed how the subsidies worked, changing from the feed-in scheme where you were paid per unit of electricity generated (regardless of if you consumed that energy or sent it back to the electricity grid) to the Smart Export Guarantee, where you are only paid for the electricity that you sent back to the grid. According to Wikipedia [0] this caused many of the companies operating the "free solar panels" schemes to go out of business.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed-in_tariffs_in_the_United_...
The reason solar panel manufacturers don't go into the power generation business is because building a solar plant is a political problem, while building solar panels is a technological problem. It's not their core expertise.
[1] In locations that need more electricity, have regulators that will favor you over coal-burning and gas-burning incumbents, and where you can deal with the NIMBYs.
[2] It should be obvious when you consider that economies of scale mean that utility solar will always be cheaper than rooftop solar for on-grid homes.
Not really. Panel lifetimes are measured in decades and the break-even point is usually around a decade, less if daytime utility power is expensive. They're not high volume money printers but they'll eventually pay for themselves (including their carbon usage during production).
Solar works mathematically because the Sun is constantly bombarding the Earth with energy. Rooftop solar increases the efficiency of otherwise wasted acreage of rooftops of buildings. Not only can they offset energy use of the stuff inside the building but the rooftop shade is that much less cooling needed for the building.
My point is that daytime utility power that comes from a solar farm will always be cheaper then rooftop solar. Because it takes a lot less labor to deploy solar at utility-scale, than to bolt it to your roof.
The only reason rooftop solar can currently be cost-efficient[1] is if its competing with expensive sources of energy generation. If it has to compete with cheap sources (utility solar), it's not cost-efficient.
[1] Or if you're receiving subsidies for the energy you sell back to the grid.
If you ignore the cost of maintaining the grid between A and B, yes and if you ignore the value of people having storage in their house being able to optimise their in house consumptions to match the solar production, yes (this would be possible with pricing signals but it is not done, also there are slight psychological differences for the user) and if you ignore communities having access to power in case the electricity grid is under attack due to foreign invasion, yes.
If your house is off-grid, and you have to invest tens of thousands of dollars into battery capacity, your economics will look worse then the grid's economics.
Because if batteries were a cost-efficient way to deal with solar's intermittent generation, every utility in the world would be tripping over itself to order batteries by the TWH.
They, uh, aren't.
I also can't optimize my energy usage around the sun. I'm not home when the sun is shining. I don't have an AC. I don't run heat most of the year. I need electricity for lights (Because it's dark), and appliances (which I use when it's dark, because that's when I'm home).
I would a lot of on-site storage to get me through the days when it gets dark before I'm home. This is not cost-efficient. It would be cost-efficient if my entire town could aggregate their generation and usage... At utility scale.
Yes but building new solar causes new grid cost.
> Because if batteries were a cost-efficient way to deal with solar's intermittent generation, every utility in the world would be tripping over itself to order batteries by the TWH.
They are cost efficient in Germany. So i am not to familiar with other countries situation.
> I also can't optimize my energy usage around the sun.
With batteries you could do that more.
Both have a role to play. Another reason for solar is that people rather invest $10000 in their house then $5000 in shares of a grid scale solar installation. So while it might not be capital efficient it unlocks more capital investment for the green transition. From an economic view roof top solar is a jobs program where well paying trade jobs are created all over the country.
How many GWH of capacity have they deployed?
And isn't it the country where a KWH costs 33 cents?
Given that solar produces electricity at ~2 cents per KWH, this seems pretty damning.
[1] Are you sure you're not confusing this with minute-over-minute smoothing, which requires ~two orders of magnitude less battery capacity?
Yes. https://www.vb-bordesholm.de/batteriespeicher.html
> Are you sure you're not confusing this with minute-over-minute smoothing, which requires ~two orders of magnitude less battery capacity?
Yes, Frequenzregelmarkt (minute over minute smoothing) and the normal electricity capacity trades happen in two separate markets in Germany right now. Allowing battery storage to take part in both markets is one of the goals of the current coalition government. Since this happened before that change and the article mentions it being involved supplying a city decoupled from the long distance energy transmission it is legally impossible that this battery installation just did minute over minute smoothing.
> How many GWH of capacity have they deployed?
4,5 GWh [1] out of which 1GWh is grid scale and industrial use.
> And isn't it the country where a KWH costs 33 cents?
For normal consumers, yes. Industrial users have a lot lower rates. A lot of this is taxes and similar stuff too. I found conflicting numbers on the precise details but 9-12ct are the used for producing the energy (including profits and investments of those companies), 8-9ct are used for the network (including profits and investments of those companies). The rest are taxes or other kinds of levys.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.de/2022/03/15/rekordjahr-im-speicher...