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Comment by Arainach | Hacker News Reader

Solar is profitable to install at both industrial and home scale in most areas. You're moving the goalposts.

It's a lot more complicated than that -- Solar is great for discretionary, opportunistic, and time-shiftable additive demand, but not for replacing all-day baseline load. Using solar to dip into baseline demand sometimes is catastrophic, because the "profit" is exploiting its failure to provide consistent, reliable power but charging "default" prices that have an implicy assumption that power is consistent and reliable.

Nobody suggests moving to 100% solar. Some off-grid homes do it, but generally there are multiple complementary power sources available. There is no assumption that any single power source always provides consistent output and it wouldn't make sense, because production needs to match consumption, which is variable.

There is also no default price on energy markets, it fluctuates with supply and demand. Dynamic pricing by itself is enough of a reason for industrial users to build up their own power storage, which allows them to time-shift consumption from the grid.

Time-shifting is definitely going to increase, but it's not a bad thing. Look at how battery storage has made electricity cheaper and more reliable in California.

It would be even better if it had ROI in 2 years instead of 10 for northern installs.

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