this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Rooftop solar means managing hundreds of small installations. You need every one of them to have small inverters instead of one big one. Each of those installations will be a custom job to fit it to the roof. You will likely need to upgrade your electrical service, as well, typically from 100A to 200A. The first few people in the neighborhood can do that, but as soon as everyone does it, the power company needs to upgrade the lines coming in.
Rooftp residential solar is the worst, most expensive way to do it.
Having enough land for solar is not a problem. With the amount we use on raising beef cattle, eating a few less burgers a week would open up plenty of land. Even without that, there's plenty of dual-use ideas for covering parking lots, roads, irrigation canals, and even some types of farming.
Custom installations are good because it means more trade jobs and having to upgrade the power lines doesn't seem that bad compared to building new infrastructure, including roads, in order to support large scale remote installations. Furthermore, distributed rooftop solar better equips the public to handle grid failures.
As for the cattle, even if we ever manage to liquidate all of them, it's probably better to put their former pastures to some other type of agriculture or reforestation rather than cover it all with photovoltaics.