I got solar installed by the local power company and while it's well done and was a great deal regarding the price, the inverter stats are locked behind a really terrible app. At least there isn't a subscription cost but I wouldn't be surprised if they add one someday.
Would gladly pay more for fully open and serviceable replacement.
Agreed - a lot of the inverters do some real BS moves around data management clearly a way to extract more value in a subscription mode. Its mind numbingly frustrating.
In Australia you can go from the notion of "hmm I might want to put some solar on my roof" to having it, approved, installed and running in a couple of weeks. Safely and legally. In the US you lose months at best. Half a year is nothing. And everybody involved wants to make a profit so that's where all the cost goes. The crazy thing is that even with all that cost and bloat it's still worth doing. Imagine how good it would be if the US could figure out how to do stuff efficiently.
Both cost and complexity have to come down there. A lot of the friction in the system is a combination of the fossil fuel industry lobbying very successfully against anything to do with renewables, local energy monopolists resisting change and the notion of competition from their own customers (or any form of competition), and inept politicians coming up with ways to keep those happy.
And as an EU person, it's not that much better here. Better than the US. But we can do better.
This project isn't being marketd to people who call up a company to white-glove the whole-home installation end-to-end. This is for DIYers who have enough knowledge to tinker with self-designed solar projects but not the EE degree required to engineer some of the more specialized equipment themselves.
I'll give a good example: I use solar to power a ham radio station for a weekend in the summer. However, nearly ALL of the equipment you can buy for the production and storage of solar power emits some degree of radio-frequency interference, which is bad when your whole goal is to power a very sensitive radio.
When it comes to charge controllers in particular, there are exactly two companies that claim to make RFI-quiet MPPT controllers. One has mixed reviews (some people say they work great, some say they are not any better than anything else), and one is very good but also very expensive for what you get. So, more open design and community feedback from people like me might get the cost of a reliable RFI-free charge controller down to where it should be.