And the US has plenty of literal deserts to use for that anyway.
The issue is really mostly the difficulty of smoothing production over consumption. And transmission.
The issue is really mostly the difficulty of smoothing production over consumption. And transmission.
1) Heat kills PV efficiency, since, to a first order approximation, current is proportional to irradiance (deserts good), but voltage is inversely proportional to temperature (so deserts very bad). You make way more power on a clear winter day in Colorado (assuming no snow on the panels!) than you do on an Arizona summer day. If you don't like this, take it up with God, since it's just the way he built the universe and the quantum physics of semiconductor junctions.
2) Dust (and/or salt, if you're anywhere near the ocean) is a huge enemy of solar power production (so deserts bad, again). Dust or salt spray can easily cost you nearly half of your power output. PV panels are scarily susceptible to even small shading from leaves or even bird crap on them. I can throw a business card on most panels and take out 1/3 to 2/3 of that panel's output. If wired in a string, as is typical for utility scale PV, the loss of that single can take out the power production of that entire string (typically 12-22 panels worth), since it can no longer reach the inverter bus voltage set by the unimpaired strings.
Oh, and cleaning panels is really expensive - it was $0.50/panel a decade ago when I was collecting the largest database of DC solar panel data in the world - I don't imagine it's gotten any cheaper... (One of the big selling points of our software was that it could optimize cleaning and maintenance timing and intervals. This can actually make the difference between breaking even on the array cost or not!)
Wait, how does this shit even work at all, then? Are solar farms just perpetually functioning at <50% capacity because everything broken all the time?
Bonus if you use that heat to generate more power at night.
Some companies do Time of Use contracts which do this to a degree, but flat incentives (cut a one time check to the homeowner) seem much less complicated. The grid gets smoothing and the homeowner gets to keep the lights on when the power goes out and doesn't have to spend nearly as much on the install. The power company doesn't have to manage a big bank of batteries somewhere and saves on distribution costs. Plus the homeowners technically own the systems so when something goes wrong the power company doesn't have to roll a truck to fix it.
The only real problem with this scheme is that the battery market is already squeezed with so many companies jumping into the electric vehicle business and production lagging behind demand. However, this is likely to be a short term problem, so hopefully in the next couple of years something like this will be practical.
The batteries may be identical but installing them, monitoring them, doing AC>DC>AC conversions etc become much cheaper at scale.
A sharing program foists most of this complication off on homeowners.
https://www.greentechmedia.com/amp/article/from-pilot-to-per...
The general term is Virtual Power Plant, where software let's a bunch of distributed items act in concert as if they were a big powerplant.