That said, it's not like one thing is dependent on the other, so good to see efficiency increasing regardless.
The “solar is the cheapest form of energy” is a marketing gimmick. If it were true free market forces would already gone 100% solar because the purpose of energy companies is to make money.
Point being it is those areas that will need to be solved (i.e. come down in price) and that marginal improvements in panel efficiency aren't the limiting factor in going to 100% renewables.
EVs might be cheaper than ICE cars now (including energy expense over their expected lifetimes)... But that doesn't mean the free market should be 100% EVs (all of a sudden).
So it's not competing for land against say buildings or agriculture.
Now sure, the owner of the roof may want some rent etc, but that really doesn't alter the cost of the energy, it just spreads the benefit.
At first sight, it seems economies of scale would make it easier to have one company handle a solar power station, rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them.
And 2 solar panels only make 2x as much energy if exposure is the same. So go where the sun is already done if the sun is above your head.
solar is different to say coal, because the economics of home-generation, and grid generation are not miles apart. In other words it's not like I can have a coal-fired power station at home, but I can have solar panels. Up to now electricity generation has been constrained to large-scale (hydro, coal, nuclear etc). The advent of solar, and to a lesser extend small-scale wind and hydro, makes local generation more accessible.
>> rather than now having to pay expensive home solar panel loans and maintain them.
Solar maintenance is minimal. (Again, not like a turbine generator.) Loans are a function of capital. It takes capital to populate a home roof, and capital to build a power plant. If you have no capital then the point is moot. As an individual I have enough capital to fund my solar system without loans. (I get about a 14% return on that capital.) I don't have enough capital to fund a power station.
Other benefits of home generation include more resilience should the grid fail. So for example, after a storm, power lines may be down, but I get electricity during the day. That's a bonus though, not the main driver.
So to answer your question - it's not either or, it's both. There's a lot of roof-top solar in my city (measured in gigawatts), there's also solar farms generating power.
Lastly' I'll point out that distribution _from_ my house is cheaper than from a plant, because I generate a few spare kw, and the wire already coming into my hose is sufficient for that. So no new (grid) hardware is required.
Not that it matters to your point, but you can, they're just awful — there many reasons why everyone moved away from heating homes with open fireplaces.
(My current apartment in Berlin is old enough to have a chimney, but there's no unit attached to it; likewise the house I grew up in back in the UK has a chimney, but it was bricked off since before I could remember, possibly before I was born).
For heating this does not matter.
Utility scale farm might be ~$1/Watt for installation. https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
Residential is ~$3/Watt.
Commercial rooftop is somewhere between but still more expensive than a solar farm. Rooftop has the advantages that it delivers where the load is, and there are often subsidies available, plus some marketing kudos. But if just considering land cost by installing rooftop instead of solar farms is usually not an economic tradeoff.
And note that agrivoltaics (dual use solar+agriculture) is more expensive than pure solar farming: https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/26/cost-comparison-betwe...
Installation costs are going to depend a lot on your location, roof type and to an extent size.
My (residential) install (9600w) was around 60c per watt.
Ymmv
Utility-scale solar PV comes in anywhere from $24/MWh to $96/MWh
Unsubsidized residential rooftop PV has an LCOE between $117/MWh and $282/MWh,
the LCOE of community and commercial and industrial (C&I) solar ranges between $49/MWh and $185/MWh.
When factoring in federal tax subsidies under the US Inflation Reduction Act, including domestic contest provisions, rooftop PV comes in at $74/MWh to $229/MWh, and community/C&I rooftop PV at $32/MWh to $155/MWh.
I guess the viability of roofs depend on the construction techniques in your area. In my experience roof's here have plenty of extra load availability, and I'm not sure what effect the panels would have on water.
In my area something like 5GW of solar has been installed on rooftops, and that has moved the needle.
And of course land availability varies a lot by country.
YMMV.
"Solar and battery storage to make up 81% of new U.S. electric-generating capacity in 2024"
Not saying it’s a bad thing, but I don’t buy that any company is being fooled by this.
Infrastructure takes time to roll out so the timeframe of solar is maybe 10-15 years before we see 50% of the worlds power switch to solar. If the 10-15 year estimate is true, this would be a breakneck speed for such a fundamental infrastructure change.
I’m not going to speak on whether solar truly is the cheapest form of energy as I have no idea whether or not that is the case. But I’m going to suggest that one of your premises is wrong: we don’t have a true free market in energy — see all of the subsidies that gas, oil, and coal companies have gotten (for quite some time).
Yes, solar gets subsidies, too, but comparing a relative newcomer to entrenched players makes this a lot less clear of a picture than you’re painting.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/volts/id1548554104?i=1...