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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

Rather than destructive action ("Do as we wish or we will hurt you!") I prefer productive action.

If one million people came together to put solar panels on roofs - that would be cool!

We could have a giant forum where we plan on helping each other by raising funds, sourcing the materials, negotiating with landlords, hiring contractors ...

If something is really important to you, how much would you donate? $10? $100? $1000? Imagine every one of the one million people this campaign aims for would donate $100. We could put solar on roofs for $100000000. Solar panels that will reduce the need to buy from the energy companies for decades.

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>If one million people came together to put solar panels on roofs

That sounds cool. Are you going to pay for those millions of solar panels? If so, sign me up.

Australia did pay, and we now have one of the highest uptakes on residential solar.

... too bad utility companies then reduced the feed-in credits to zilch to make up for lost margins.

How big the roof needs to be to house solar panels enough to supply 50 families? Not everybody leaves in single-family housing in suburbs, some people live in dense highrises.

From what I can see, average EU consumption is 6000 kWh per capita per year, or 500 kWh per month. As far as I found, solar panels can provide about 200 W per square meter. According to https://climatebiz.com/average-peak-sun-hours-united-kingdom..., this requires - in London - 28 square meters per person to cover their electricity needs. For a multi-family house housing 100 people that'd be 2800 square meters. That seems to be a bit too big to fit on a roof (and we haven't accounted for distribution losses, needing to space them out to be able to actually get to them and service them, etc). Now take houses like these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartment#/media/File:St_James... and there would be likely more than 100 people per house...

> If one million people came together to put solar panels on roofs - that would be cool!

That would be “cool” and actually great. The problem is that people who cannot get through the month because the bills have skyrocketed, cannot afford the upfront price of installing solar panels. So unless there’s government intervention, I don’t really think this would be feasible.

They cannot get through the month, but they have time to start a fight with the legal system by withholinding their due payments and then deal with whatever trouble comes from it?

What?! Following this logic then, the bread riots in the French Revolution[0] would not have happened because “they don’t have the money but they have time to start riots to demand a cap on the price of the good”?

By the way, I’m not commenting on whether this is the right approach to the issue, just commenting the current situation considering what’s happening now.

[0]: https://revolution.chnm.org/items/show/491

Sounds good. Where will those solar panels come from?

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