The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.
There are many benefits to letting homeowners do it. First of all you get a lot more solar deployed in much shorter time, because you mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to the effort immediately instead of having them wait for a solar plant. Homeowners pay for it, provide the area for it, hire and organize the workforce - small scale but "everywhere at once" so to speak.
The government/state/county doesn't need to wait for the land to be available, raise the money, build infrastructure to transfer electricity from a new large solar site to the consumers and so on. So for the "state" the ROI is better with home installs.
>responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers rather than industrial energy providers.
That's where the responsibility belongs through. Most of us drove fossil fuel cars for years, which is the largest single emission source. In democracies we could have voted for guys wanting gas to cost 50 bucks per gallon, or who would prohibit any more oil and gas to be traded. We didn't. We could have refused to travel for vacations, refused to buy goods shipped from overseas and so on - but we didn't. So this is on us.
Only kind of. The oil companies dusted off the old tobacco playbook. Democracies are unfortunately terribly vulnerable to well-funded liars.
A communal solar farm is not the same product as personal home solar anyway. When someone with surplus money decides to pay for their own solar it might be suboptimal ROI for them, but the rest of us get a little bit of solar benefits for 0 money.
And more importantly, solar starts replacing fossil fuels rightaway. No waiting for a communal, optimal ROI initiative to get started.
But of course, we should do those as well.
A home owner who puts PV on their home could instead have invested in a larger scale PV business and made more energy per dollar. By putting the panels on their home they have robbed us of electricity.
Most of the solar we have today exists because these "robbers" paid for it themselves, and got it done rightaway. We all benefit from it. Maybe you meant robber like Robin Hood? ;-)
Your idea seems to be that homeowners can somehow choose their ROI by adding solar to a central power plant instead of their homes.
But that's not the case, they can't do that. There's no checkbox that says "instead of having 20 solar panels on your roof we can add 25 to the central power plant" when you order solar for your home.
Utility solar and home solar is built from separate pools of money for different purposes, and I don't see how you can meaningfully compare ROI between them.
Edit: Also, money isn't the bottleneck so we're not missing out on anything. Every solar panel made is being mounted somewhere, there is no surplus being stored because we ran out of money.
Local solar requires far less grid, and expanding the grid is one of the greatest (political, not technical) challenges of this era in the US.
Unless you're accounting for the grid costs, the "cost" of utility vs. rooftop is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
As far as a "con" the only con is that the costs in the US for rooftop solar are multiples higher of other places, like Australia. That's the con. Australia also shows that rooftop solar is great for grid in general, greatly driving down costs.
Of course, rooftop solar is terrible for utilities, so you are going to encounter tons of astroturf denouncing it all over the web, and even face to face. Utilities are fundamentally threatened by consumres taking over more and more of their own electricity responsibility, especially as batteries get super cheap.
In many (most?) areas, wind picks up at night, wind can't really be "local", and demand is lower at night time so that's a great use for the grid.
Also, batteries are getting so cheap that people are putting multiple days' worth of storage on wheels, driving them around, and parking them at home during the evening peak and overnight.
When they are that cheap, adding 10-20 kWh of local storage is going to pay for itself in no time.
When my neighbor is overproducing solar during the day, that means that he's sending his power over to my house, which doesn't have solar. Which means that my neighborhood is pulling down less peak power. And the grid is sized for peak power, not for minimal power, so whenever that peak is lowered, it saves me money but costs the utility profits.
Because the utility gets to recoup a fixed profit rate off of any amount of grid they are allowed by the PUC to install, whether it was needed or not. My neighbor, with the solar, also pays lots of fees for the privilege of sending me power and requiring less grid.
This effect of shaving the peak is so extreme that solar causes the California duck curve. Though the storage that's been added in just the past two years has pretty much solved any problems needed for the evening ramp as the sun goes down, now.
It also seems likely that HVDC from sunnier areas like Spain or maybe even Morocco could be cheap enough. I'd recommend nuclear but EDF is having such great difficulty building it. HVDC and other exotic solutions like enhanced geothermal seem for more practical at the moment.
Perhaps local solar installations could be incentivized to include their own smaller scale storage...
It makes solar a very financially unattractive option unless there's storage attached to the system, and has drastically reduced the rate of residential solar deployment.
NEM3 was justified under the proposition that lower-income households were "funding" the higher income households to get solar. So as solar finally gets cheap enough for the lower income households, they changed the rules again so that only those rich enough to afford batteries and solar can save money.
NEM3 has a few nice things about it when looked at narrowly, but overall seems pretty disastrous for the state.
Residential solar installs are way down, that's correct, residential isn't the only venue for solar, and within residential storage capacity is skyrocketing and it's already having a measurable effect on the early evening peak. Lower peaks means less capacity needs to be built just to handle a few hours. This is good.
The unequivocally negative impact I don't have an answer for is the job losses for solar installers.
If that was the concern they literally did nothing to stop it. Instead of dealing with backfeeding from a distribution station, they went entirely the other direction.
Those grid costs, if they actually existed, were in isolated areas with high levels of solar, and NEM3 will continue deployments of solar in exactly those areas.
Solar is not "savings for some homeowners" it's literally keeping grid costs down for everyone, keeping our grid reliable on the hottest hardest to run days.
Batteries on the other hand feel like they take less space and thus could be colocated near consumption without having to be on consumer property. Warehouse size within the city. Transmission costs would be minimal.
Roofs have to handle several tons of wind pressure, snow, people walking on them and so on. They can handle solar panels no problem - which is why it's such a good idea to put solar panels on them.
If your roof can't hold up solar, it also can't hold up the people that need to work on it.
I can't put PV on my neighbours house, I have to buy land to put it on. My home still needs a grid connection so all that infrastructure still needs to exist. Except now it's even more complex.
PV and energy generation in general benefits massively from economies of scale. Home generation doesn't have that.
I have a grid detachable PV system with battery. It's been invaluable for grid blackouts in my area to have the capability even as I have paid (at least for the first couple years) a higher price per kwh for it. Over more years, it's really nice to have price insulation against utility price increase.
Actually, it's the other way around.
A rooftop solar doesn't require much: the land is already there (it's yours), there isn't any bullshit with permits, all you need is a ladder or a bucket truck, a few ultra cheap panels, an aluminum frame, an inverter and a few dozen feet worth of wiring.
A large scale solar farm however? The developer needs to find suitable land (challenging to do when competing against big ag), there's permit paperwork involved because solar farms ain't agriculture, they need to pay for a high voltage connection to the nearest substation, the huge ass panels need a really solid support construction that can withstand wind and weather and that needs a solid foundation as well, you need thousands of feet worth of wiring, complex and massive inverters, lightning arrestors, god knows what.
Oh and you get resilience against natural disasters for free on top of that. Some drunk driver plows into a power pole, some redneck shoots up some birds and kills the power line (yes, that happens so often that utilities release yearly reminders to please leave the birds alone), or a heavy storm / flood takes out entire substations for weeks, whatever - you throw the transfer switch, kill off all the non-essential consumers and can easily ride through a week worth of outage.
Plus, when people compare the cost of home solar vs utility solar, they often ignore all of the infrastructure (especially last mile infrastructure) that's needed to get the power from the utility scale solar farm to someone's house.
If you live somewhere with expensive electricity and decent sun (California, New Mexico, Arizona, Florida, the Carolinas, etc) it's usually worthwhile to put solar on your home. It's less effective than if someone competent were to spend the same money improving the grid, but in this day and age that's a lot to ask.
Don't underestimate the value of decentralization in some scenarios.
Once the panel arrives at your home it keeps making electricity for decades, without asking anyone's permission.
Should I interpret the 20-25% returns as being, your annual savings on the utility bill are 20-25% of the cost of your PV install?
Roughly speaking the electricity is about €0.06 with about €0.20 in taxes on top. So offsetting consumption nets me about €0.26 cents per kWh.
The installation of a 2800kWp system cost me about €2600 and generates between 2400-2750kWh annually, so about €650 euro. In a 10 year timespan that’s an IRR of 20%, creeping up to 25% for 20 years.
After the first year of having PV, I determined my own payoff time of about 5-7 years, so that was nice and self-justifying, and haven't dug deeper into details on that.
Did you DIY your install?
Even with a large house, homelab, and an EV, we barely pay for electricity over the year. Doesn't seem like a con to me.
The answer is yes: it is a lot easier to make a PV farm than a home scale install!
We can still individually make better choices, and also eat our vegetables, etc, but in the aggregate public policy is more efficient to make the large scale changes we need
And perfect information. Too bad 0% of consumers have the expertise and time to fully audit the supply chain of every product/service even assuming they could get ahold of that information.
They don't force at gunpoint. They use cash and lies to convince. And the legal system to cow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
You aren't wrong that we should choose better. But what do you do when so much money and effort has been expended to ensure so many people don't know what better even is.