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Comment by CapitalistCartr | Hacker News Reader

The answer to wind and solar power turns out to be huge, centralized installations, not a hundred million individual installations. There is a solar farm near my house, at a power plant, that is over two miles long. Windmills are most efficient when they are huge and slow.

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I see the industrial advantage of massive windmills, but "industrial" solar is generally the same panels they slap on roofs. The scale isn't due to physics, it's due to financing.

Residential solar would work great if financing was generous but stipulated the cost had to be reasonably close to grid procurement cost.

Well, and we need to scale up sodium ion cells for home storage.

Home solar with storage adds resilience to communities, and should lessen the amount of transmission infrastructure needed for EVs.

The problem with residential solar is not the panels, it's the installation, connection to the electric network which differs from house to house and having to work with the homeowners.

But I see something that is essentially local labor, so investing government funds into that labor should produce more localized GDP effects.

And I fail to see how that should inflate the cost 2-5x over grid solar. Ok, 2x I can somewhat accept, I guess. But it's not like each house in existence is a complete random topological shape never seen before.

I feel there is some ... impedence ... in the home solar business that is holding it back. I think grid solar and home solar are two separate fronts attacking the same problem, but home solar makes home owners much more aware of efficiency as well. IMO there is policy failures in home solar currently.

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