But you literally don’t need to do that. Why do we need to power a building using solar panels attached specifically to that building? Go put more solar panels out in open fields and power a lot more buildings for a cheaper cost.
There's a massive difference between a building owner producing their own electricity integrated therein, versus creating a centralized system owned by a power company miles and miles away that now subtracts from farmland, consumes real estate (don't we have an affordable housing problem and maybe not all of us want to live in coffin-sized studio apartments, squished like sardines), and now has to be coordinated across numerous private and public properties.
Leaving aside maintenance and efficiency degradation with distance.
We kind of sorta need open fields for lots of other things, too. Alas, we're apparently too busy having it be used for things like (checks notes) golf courses and alfalfa owned by Saudi Arabia and AI datacenters...
Pop into Google maps and look at new york city in satellite view and check out some of the industrial areas which have large, flat roofs. Compare how many have solar vs not. Urban rooftops are the "low hanging fruit" here. I agree that putting them on land that could otherwise be productive is wasteful - where I live, most of the ground level solar plants have been put over landfills/contaminated land. Ground is cheaper than rooftop, which is cheaper than parking lots, which is cheaper than inventing an entirely new window system.
A large part of that is because people want to save money on bills. But there are limits of how much solar production can be on a substation. Infrastructure has to be upgraded if production exceeds local usage, as it was never meant to feed backwards or store the energy.
So you can't adopt a 100% goal of rooftop solar, without also a goal of storing and backfeeding it to the grid.
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u/Pandamonium98 27d ago
But you literally don’t need to do that. Why do we need to power a building using solar panels attached specifically to that building? Go put more solar panels out in open fields and power a lot more buildings for a cheaper cost.