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Comment by devjab | Hacker News Reader

This is true. A lot of the older panels are also rather inefficient and come with a rather poor lifespan. It's part of the reason I don't personally have any form of solar despite working in the industry.

Technology is catching up on the solar panel front though. French Heliup are producing panels which are only 5kg per square meter. Which makes them significantly easier to install on roof-tops. I imagine I'll eventually have solar panels on my roof, but I'll likely wait another decade for battery tech to also be more viable.

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I would have to cut down so many trees around my house to get effective sunlight on the roof more than a few hours a day. Plus my roof is pitched east/west so at best I have half the roof in sunlight for half the day. I do have quite a bit of clear space behind the house, so I could consider a system that sits on the ground.

I just like paying the utility every month and not having to worry about owning, maintaining, and repairing my own infrastructure though. As it is now, if anything goes wrong upstream of the meter, that's not my responsibility.

Why don't you do a small installation where your generation does not exceed your usage so storage considerations are moot?

Because you mostly end up generating when you don’t need the power, and need the power when you’re not generating.

If the way things are structured in your country let you draw the same amount of kWh that you’ve put into the network, that works. Where I live they recently changed to buying the solar at market prices. When the sun is up during sunny months that’s zero or close to that. So you pretty much need the battery installation too.

My neighbour got a solar + battery installation, and it works well enough!

>a small installation where your generation does not exceed your usage

I meant explicitly a small system where the moment to moment generation generally did not exceed moment to moment usage.

>the way things are structured in your country

In the US things are structured per utility which varies widely by state, city, or even neighborhood and they have many different kinds of rules.

Mainly that I've yet to follow through on my 5+ year old plan on building a small greenhouse and using solar for water pumping. For most use cases it's a fairly bad "business case" compared to simply buying the power you need. If anything, you would probably be better off setting up a storage sollution to buy power when it's cheap, and then using it when power is expensive, compared to actually setting up power generation yourself.

If I had a good area for them which wasn't some form of rooftop I might have. Rooftop installations are very expensive in Denmark because they are too heavy to be installed without building a lot of support. Even my carport would basically need to be an entirely different structure with a custom foundation to support a roof of solar panels. Which you can absolutely do, but it would be decades before it was worth it.

Oh, that' s surprising. In the US everyone just puts them on their roof and most people don't have any structural considerations it just works. I wonder what's different about your roofs.

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