There's an alternative, and almost certainly cheaper per watt with cost of scale, where your tax dollars go to a new solar farm instead, something everyone could take advantage of.
Right, but as always, ROI is hardly the most important thing in life, there is more considerations than just "makes more money". For example, as someone affected by a day long country-wide electricity outage where essentially the entire country was without electricity and internet for ~14 hours or something, decentralizing energy across the country seems much more important, than optimizing for the highest ROI.
But again, this is highly contextual and depends, I'm not as sure as you that there are absolute answers to these things.
If you personally have battery backup, that helps you personally and you should pay for it, just like you might pay extra to turn up the heat while I keep it lower to save money.
Decentralizing through subsidies at the homeowner level is maybe not the best use of money.
Consider the lower production cost of renewable electricity: in the long run, it offsets the investment. Bonus: no risk of accidents, no hazardous waste, no dependence on a fuel source, no weapons proliferation...
Decentralizing solar power reduces electricity transmission costs and improves reliability. This doesn't offset the additional cost, but it's not negligible.
It's not as if homes outside of cities have their own diesel generators to power their house.
(Since I'm guessing from this line of comments you'll point out the less than 1% of people who actually do do this, maybe it's better to focus only the 99% here).
Yeah, no true, I don't understand the point/argument though?
More people relying on renewables == long term better for everyone on the planet
That includes moving people outside of cities to renewables energy sources, is your point that this isn't so important because they're a small piece of the population usually?
If a country has abundant land and expensive labor, the money is probably best spent improving grid transmission capacity and otherwise getting the f- out of the way of utility-scale renewables. Places like Pakistan, which is going through a rooftop solar boom, are arguably the opposite - scarce land in the cities, but cheap labor to get up on roofs.
Happy to hear any analyses to the contrary and update my knowledge accordingly.
On the other hand, it is also distributed which from some perspectives is a benefit, and is also do-able with very little planning and grid extension. So that's one argument for it.
How things come out on balance depends a bit on what you value and how you imagine the future.
I think homeowners should install solar panels and batteries where it makes economic sense. If there's money left over after funding utility-scale solar then it should be used for EV incentives and/or funding electrified mass transit. The whole point is to electrify everything rapidly and reduce carbon emissions.
Solar panel grid tied inverters generally will refuse to function if there's no external power coming in.
The benefit from the distributed generation means that if your local area has large loads added you don't necessarily need to upgrade the HVDC lines from the power plant to accommodate.
though linemen are trained that they are working on a live line unless they have personally shorted it out. There are many other ways a seemingly dead line can be live so they don't take a chance.
The load side (your neighbors) cannot pull more power than is being generated. My 7kW array can generate 7kW and no more. No breakers will trip in a hypothetical scenario where my inverter fails to shut down during an outage, and my neighbors are trying to drawing 10kW.
You're probably right about linemen but there are a lot of other reasons not to feed power onto a dead grid.