this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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It's true today that you can easily drive your entire home on solar power, but only if you live in a sunny country. If I was, I would install them immediately. They will pay back in like 5 years and after that, energy costs are zero.
I look forward to them becoming smaller and more efficient. In the future, we may be able to have glass that is made of solar panels, which means entire skyscraper buildings can charge their power continuously from the sun.
Americans in Massachusetts are able to install solar panels and run their house.
It's not like a cloudy day means 0% generation
Shit, my panels were still kicking at 95% when covered in a layer of dirt so thick I had to hose them, and wash em twice.
Now they're back up to 99%, and they're about ten years old
Yeah, I am lucky to live in such a country and it's amazing. The state and municipality each subsidised part of the purchase, so I ended up paying 300 something euros to install 3.5 kW of panels. My electricity bills are almost non existant during summer and also cheaper during winter. To make it even better, anytime I'm not using the produced electricity, it gets sold to the grid, even if pretty cheap, rebating on my next billing cycle.
The truth of that statement is entirely a function of the price of solar panels. Again, if they are cheap enough, even on a cloudy winter day, you can power a city with them. My point is that solar is becoming so stupidly cheap that "spam solar panels" is becoming a viable option for our power production needs. Unless you live in such a high latitude that you're near the Arctic circle, you will be able to power things off solar. Solar panels will produce power literally in the middle of a snow storm. It may only be 10% or their peak output. But if you have enough of the damn things, it doesn't matter. And solar is getting cheap enough that this is a viable path forward. And that's before we even talk about other energy storage methods like green hydrogen production or long distance power transport.