> but I never can get past the challenges of maintenance and replacement costs for solar panels
Maintenance? Compared to fossil fuels that require a complex global supply chain just to burn the damn thing you spent so much effort digging up? And large, complex power plants with a large number of moving pieces and complex machinery? Which also require big water supplies?
Solar is the most modular, easy to install, scalable, and cheapest energy source on the planet. And dare I say most reliable, because it practically doesn’t need any major scheduled or non-scheduled maintenance over several decades, other than cleaning it like a window. And get this, once it’s installed, what are the operating costs? They just sit there, on land (which could be taken from ethanol production), any give you free electricity for 30+ years.
Other power sources seem and overly complex in comparison, and it especially seems crazy to use anything that relies on finding, digging up, shipping, and then burning fuel, when such an alternative exists.
Current battery technology is very solid, increasingly cheaper (solar+battery already cheaper than most others), and only getting better.