Balcony solar panels can save 30% on a typical household’s electricity bill and, with vertical surface area in cities larger than roof space, the appeal is clear
a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.
Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.
Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
ok so, even if we assume that you NEED to do this, which is an errant assumption on the basis of “you can just not have that problem through over provisioning” you could use that extra generated power for other things, selling to industry, energy storage, a community center whatever, there are literally endless things you could do with free power, most often you just dump it into heating since it’s cheap, and storing it is fairly trivial in something like water.
At worst possible case scenario, your required grid imports are still going to be less than they currently are, which means less external grid maintenance, and less strain.
Granted it’s not going to be used year round, unless of course, you over provision production and consume in the winter, and produce in the summer, where now you’re getting effectively double the usage, if not more. You probably won’t reach peak micro grid infrastructure, but the flexibility providing by something like solar is worth the consideration. A really good example of this is actually the texas power grid, although that is a pretty large power grid, i never said you should island micro generation, just that it’s likely going to be beneficial.
a mix of both is good, there’s arguments for doing local co-generation. Where you essentially turn a community into it’s own power plant, and when you’re talking about things like micro inverters, the cost doesnt really change.
Is it more efficient to do it at a utility grid scale? Yes, does that make it overall better? Not really, you still have to deal with grid inefficiencies, and maintenance, and well, you still have to deal with installations, so the cost isn’t that significant at the end of the day.
Solar is one of very few renewable energy sources that you can actually locally build and maintain on a small scale, no sense in removing that utility from it, that’s part of the reason it’s so popular.
Even if you have perfect eutopic solar communities you would still have to build and maintain the grid for the times when it’s cold and cloudy/snowy/rainy for a week straight to import from somewhere with different weather. It’s completely unreasonable to build that much battery capacity into every town, as nice as it would be.
ok so, even if we assume that you NEED to do this, which is an errant assumption on the basis of “you can just not have that problem through over provisioning” you could use that extra generated power for other things, selling to industry, energy storage, a community center whatever, there are literally endless things you could do with free power, most often you just dump it into heating since it’s cheap, and storing it is fairly trivial in something like water.
At worst possible case scenario, your required grid imports are still going to be less than they currently are, which means less external grid maintenance, and less strain.
Granted it’s not going to be used year round, unless of course, you over provision production and consume in the winter, and produce in the summer, where now you’re getting effectively double the usage, if not more. You probably won’t reach peak micro grid infrastructure, but the flexibility providing by something like solar is worth the consideration. A really good example of this is actually the texas power grid, although that is a pretty large power grid, i never said you should island micro generation, just that it’s likely going to be beneficial.