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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?

Yes, grid scale deployments are cheaper, but I'm generally guessing a lot of the grid scale solar deployments do not price in the grid infrastructure adaptation costs, and I'm not even talking about grid storage.

Consumer rooftop solar is fundamentally democratic: it reduces reliance on centralized institutions for power delivery, Make society a lot more resilient in bad weather and other emergency situations, insulates everyday people from wild variations and petroleum and other consumable energy availability.

Combined with plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, it would enable electrification of 80 and 90% of daily driving without grid infrastructure costs.

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> Why shouldn't that be true practically every consumer home in the world?

Here in Sweden nearly all of the electricity bill you pay is concentrated on the winter months when there is literally zero sunshine. Even then solar is popular here. I calculated that installing solar would take around 10 years or more to pay for itself, but I have very little hope to stay in the same house all that time so for me it seemed like a bad investment.

That said, if you live in places where it’s sunny most of the time even in winter, like Australia, then solar is absolutely great, just don’t assume most places are like that.

10 year ROI is what I got quoted on a solar setup. I live in Queensland. It’s very sunny here.

Wow your current electricity must be really expensive... or your solar setup is?? Also the calculation was done by the company selling it, I'm pretty sure that was far too optimistic.

That actually sounds pessimistic to me. My ROI for 18kW solar plus 42kWh battery will be under 3 years.

- Expensive electricity

- Government subsidy for solar and battery

- Much sunshine

- 3 hours free charging daily

Nearly $5000 yearly bill gone. $14000 installation cost post rebate.

With a calculation like that I'd buy solar in a heart beat!

But as I said, my main concern is my winter bill, which I know by asking people who own solar in the region, is almost the same with solar since there's no sun at all (it's not that it's cloudy, it's that the entire day duration is like 4 hours - under which you barely feel any sun heat and in practice the solar output is exactly zero on the worst month and near zero for 4 or so months). Hence the very long ROI here, but I agree that for Queensland, 10 years would be a bit too long if you dimension the solar array properly.

You are mere hundreds of miles from cheap Chinese panel manufacturing. The Chinese are going to pump manufacturing oversupply for likely a decade more.

10 years roi is mass scale corruption

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