alt.hn

4/22/2026 at 12:04:30 PM

3.4M Solar Panels

 https://tech.marksblogg.com/american-solar-farms-v2.html

by marklit

4/22/2026 at 1:50:34 PM

Florida and most dry / sunny states having little to no solar panels is pretty damn wild.

I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy.

I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage.

The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.

by himata4113

4/22/2026 at 2:09:58 PM

Don’t underestimate how politicized renewables have become. You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself, but any time solar comes up in a rural community there’s a whole host of bad faith “but what about x?” comments

by parpfish

4/22/2026 at 7:43:41 PM

I was shocked (pun) to hear how my relatives were each reacting to solar energy. One was rural and was concerned about nearby land getting turned into a solar farm. Another was concerned about farmland being edged out in favor of solar. And a third spent some time in emergency response on a solar farm and was off-put by their vastness and the electrical danger while traversing through them.

Coincidentally this video emerged within a day of my conversation with the three of them. I shared it; they probably didn't watch it but it sure was pertinent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM

by MetaWhirledPeas

4/22/2026 at 9:15:14 PM

That video is imho his best work, the ending made all the more powerful by how reserved he normally is.

by RankingMember

4/22/2026 at 10:04:19 PM

I really liked the land usage discussion. That (for the US) if you took the land currently being used to grow crops for ethanol based motor fuels. Turned them into solar farms you'd cover 80% of current grid demand.

I was already pro renewables for a myriad of reasons. But that put the scale into a much better perspective.

by AndrewDavis

4/23/2026 at 3:30:30 AM

or we could build like 200 more fission plants and rewild all that ethanol land. not really a compelling point in favor of solar land use this factoid...

by andbberger

4/23/2026 at 9:56:33 AM

That, however, would be vastly more expensive. Maybe worth it from an overall ecological PoV, but I doubt power companies have an appetite for the CAPEX involved.

by iSnow

4/23/2026 at 1:31:53 AM

The deep south is so different from the rest of the country that it's hard to describe without hyperbole. It's true they've been misled. But what's amazing is just how gullible they are. And just how angry they can get about things that aren't remotely true or simply have zero effect on their life. After a funeral I had the pleasure of sitting at dinner with someone engrossed in the fox news culture. The things they believe to be true are simply astounding. And the shape of their world view is repulsive.

by sixothree

4/22/2026 at 3:34:23 PM

Maybe, but the data speaks for itself. Texas, a huge oil state, is loaded with wind and solar and is leading the country in battery storage right now.

by kilroy123

4/22/2026 at 5:36:19 PM

Texas looks _almost_ as underserved by solar as AZ/NM in that map, TBH.

by rconti

4/22/2026 at 5:46:51 PM

AZ/NM have highly concentrated populations, so I would expect to see only a couple of hexagons over Phoenix and Albuquerque. Texas looking like that is pretty bad, but I suspect this has more to do with the data set.

I would expect Texans to independently go for solar, given the... complications of their power market.

by tadfisher

4/22/2026 at 6:49:49 PM

https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix

by sjs382

4/22/2026 at 7:53:03 PM

I only get the following message:

Access Denied Error 16 www.ercot.com 2026-04-22 19:52:02 UTC

If you believe you have a valid business reason for accessing ERCOT resources, please contact the ERCOT Service Desk

by folmar

4/22/2026 at 8:37:48 PM

I can access it fine (I am in the US). At this moment, 37.2% of the generation is from solar.

by pfdietz

4/23/2026 at 12:57:39 AM

At the moment being important. Previous day it was higher at 38.8% but only for that 15min. As a percent of the whole day it’s much much lower. (California goes to 110% in the middle of the by comparison). It’s a good upward trend, I’m confident Texas will get there eventually.

by sroussey

4/22/2026 at 8:58:54 PM

You're looking at the rooftop solar arrays heatmap. Page down for arrays and panels heatmap.

by metabagel

4/22/2026 at 5:04:08 PM

Lot of people died for that pragmatism. Froze to death in the outages of winter storms or overheated in the summer ones. Sustainability was the last resort.

by peterlada

4/22/2026 at 4:56:33 PM

Idaho is as well.

AZ just has some of the dumbest rules in the US WRT to solar. It's a state where every home should have solar panels.

by cogman10

4/22/2026 at 2:16:15 PM

I do have a funny story to share for this specific case:

A landowner wanted to run power to their land, they got quoted 100k and possibly 250k to run less than 2 miles of powerlines.

The land owner fired back with the question of installing solar panels instead as it would be cheaper and free.

The representitive replied with: "Look around you, there's no solar panels because they don't work."

Less than 100k later, the landowner had full off-grid power via solar and a backup generator.

I guess at the end of the day they saw all the sunshine around them and said: "You're right, all that sun is mine and mine alone."

by himata4113

4/22/2026 at 7:29:38 PM

2 miles of power line? 11k ft of line? For 100-250k$? About $10-23/ft?

Sounds about right. I’m guessing the land was far from the right of way. And a little bit off road.

by nashashmi

4/23/2026 at 1:39:34 AM

Probably needed a transformer off a medium voltage distribution line too.

It would also likely have some expensive maintenance at times.

by lazide

4/22/2026 at 8:59:16 PM

I was going to say that's weird because around here (I live in a rural community), all the new barns going up and many new houses, have solar panels on the roofs. Given the cost to run power hundreds, if not thousands of feet to an outbuilding, it's no wonder people are putting up solar.

However, my general area is somewhat upscale, so that might account for it.

by HeyLaughingBoy

4/22/2026 at 7:04:00 PM

Rural conservative areas in CA are highly pro-solar. Mostly because PG&E is a company many do not like.

by saltyoldman

4/22/2026 at 3:11:33 PM

>> You’d think essentially free energy would sell itself

I think it would if it was indeed “essentially free”. Rooftop solar is unfortunately a racket though, and companies price-gouge like crazy and also collude to keep prices inflated.

by enraged_camel

4/22/2026 at 3:25:06 PM

American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones. I got 3.9kW installed almost ten years ago for just £5500, including all the paperwork for feed-in-tariffs. It has long since paid for itself just in subsidy, let alone actual consumption.

by pjc50

4/23/2026 at 8:53:06 PM

It isn't often we Australians get to brag: I put 32kW solar, 40kWh battery, DC EV car charger, AC car charger - US$35,000.

My 4 adult household has two EVs and the house is centrally air-conditioned. Average daily usage in January-March: 100kWh per day. Average feed in price when the sun is shining: about $0/kWh (but negative if it's a bright cool day.) Average electricity bill: a small credit. Cost of electricity where I live USD$0.23/kWh. Pay back time: 4 years.

Country with the most rooftop solar installations per capita: Australia.

Country with the most household kWh of batteries installed per capita: Australia.

by rstuart4133

4/22/2026 at 7:26:38 PM

We had 18x510w panels (9.2kw), 2xZappi chargers, PW3 & Eddi (to heat hotwater) installed ~5 weeks ago. Total cost was £17k (inc. scaffolding, cert, etc), in the SE England, with a small recommended contractor. The UK solar market is full of rogues as well, charging massive sums, many for pretty questionable systems. We had 5 quotes to get there, 3 of which were crazy in one way or another.

We hit our first MW/h of power today. In England. In April. Total electricity bill for the last 6 weeks is about £30, and that includes our driving (previously £150 to £200 p/m) and most of our hot water. If you have the property for it and available investment, the ongoing savings are instant and obvious! My instant regret was not having done it sooner. Driving around on your own sunshine does feel magical as well!

by christoph

4/22/2026 at 3:28:27 PM

In general, contractor overhead in America is obscene, compared to Europe. We have a lot of regularly capture working to keep it that way, too.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 3:49:31 PM

DIY is viable if you're a bit nutters (like me).

I just paid ~$35k (pre-now-expired-tax-break) to install a grid-tied 25kw ground mount system. I DIY'd everything except the connection between the array and the grid, which I paid an electrician to do, and the trenching which I paid my buddy with a mini-excavator to do.

It was a bit of a PITA, but mostly because I didn't finally make up my mind to do it until October and had to have it constructed by Dec 31st to take advantage of the expiring tax credit. If I'd given myself 6 months, it would have still been a big project, but way less stressful.

My neighbor's paid the same price to a contractor for a 11kw system.

Even at 46°N, and with relatively cheap electricity, my system should pay for itself in 6-8 years.

by atourgates

4/22/2026 at 8:01:43 PM

In EU it would be some $3k for inverter, $5k for panels, another $5k for cables, connectors and mounting and that's it if you DIY everything. Prices with VAT included.

by folmar

4/23/2026 at 1:45:06 AM

Same in the Philippines here, and we're all buying the same Chinese materials at the end of the day so somehow Americans are getting really fleeced hard on this equipment.

Payback time is 2-4 years.

It reminds of healthcare and infrastructure in the US. When you really dig into why both are so expensive, it's literally every step. Every link in the chain between supplier and consumer is some kind of inefficient market, or burdened by regulations, etc.

Americans are just so rich they don't care enough to see these huge margins and undercut the competition, which is what happens here and keeps markets much more efficient.

by zhivota

4/22/2026 at 5:21:29 PM

Do you have a blog or a writeup about this?

What would have been the cost if it was not DIY'd? Is this doable only in a rural/semi-urban settings?

by cuttothechase

4/23/2026 at 6:59:34 PM

I was in the same boat.

I'm in the bay area, did a roof mount system. ~9.5kW with Enphase microinverters.

I think it cost be ~15k all in. The usual installer price is normally around $2.5-$3/w (so about $25k - $30k).

I got someone to do the plans (because I was under the gun to get on NEM2), but that was $300 well spent.

Did it all myself -- mounting, running conduit / wiring etc. Wasn't too bad. Probably about 3-4 Saturdays of work.

Here's my install log: https://www.reddit.com/r/diySolar/comments/1c6jfjv/finally_d...

by hex4def6

4/22/2026 at 4:08:06 PM

Being an honorary or actual redneck in an exurban American setting will be the sweet spot for this. Your neighbor's rusting Bobcat is not useless after all. You have the space for ground mounting. I toyed with a rooftop solar DIY project with an electrician handling the AC side, but in my urban context PG&E wanted a six-figure fee for a subterranean transformer upgrade. In 2024 the state regulator established rules that PG&E can't charge for that kind of service upgrade so maybe I should start considering it again.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 4:12:27 PM

It all comes back to insurance- they're used to getting crazy sums of money because nobody questions the rates

by scottyah

4/22/2026 at 6:30:22 PM

The Common Law Theory of Everything

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 6:22:05 PM

I am counting on physical, semi technical contract work to pay once SWE opportunities shrink to the point where it’s not worth it anymore.

Now is the time to get handy if not already. Robotics /physical automation will lag info by a good stretch.

by bredren

4/22/2026 at 4:46:58 PM

We looked at trying to get some mini-split heat pumps for my mom's place & were getting quotes $30k figures for two modest units (it's a tiny well insulated house). I don't know what the frak is wrong with this nation; this is so fantastically worrying.

by jauntywundrkind

4/22/2026 at 7:51:22 PM

Home HVAC is the most obvious current regulatory caused scam in the US. Virginia just added an 'easier' license that 'only' requires two years of experience to receive (and 160 hours of formal training, but that's not the bad part obviously).

Something like a minisplit though can literally be DIYed in under a day. With experience, a DIYer can do it in a couple hours. They're literally designed to be easily installed as a complete system. Even in Japan you can get one installed for under a grand (including the unit). In China it's obviously even cheaper.

Obviously HVAC companies don't want it to be easier to get a license, they make boatloads on entire home systems and maintenace. Being able to just replace a broken unit for $600 would kill their entire business model.

Electrical is a similar scam, though for some reason if you get enough quotes you can usually find one that isn't charging the equivalent of $1k/hr in labor like getting a mini-split from an HVAC company tends to be.

by ApolloFortyNine

4/22/2026 at 8:44:08 PM

There indeed are plenty of mini-splits you can just buy & install.

I would too. Alas mom lives in a northerly area, and we really would prefer something high efficiency. There's some rebadged 37mpra units about that are 35+ SEER2, which if the number means anything is a colossal leap. The good stuff though doesn't seem to be directly purchaseable. I'd be happy to lay the concrete bed, set it up, drill walls, mount the ductless... Getting help actually vacuuming would be good but I could do it.

But I can't go purchase the system.

It's all deeply infuriating. This is just such a rude awful thing that American society keeps having to put up with such deeply captured deeply absurd base costs everywhere. These tradespeople deserve to make a living, I don't bergrudge them that, but this feels like there has to be so so much more going wrong for these prices to escalate like this.

by jauntywundrkind

4/22/2026 at 11:42:21 PM

You can get efficient DIY units - specifically look for mini splits with quick connectors and you’ll find them. Installed one last year and the efficiency is actually better than it says on the box.

by madaxe_again

4/23/2026 at 1:06:03 AM

Show me anything that promises anywhere near that SEER2. 35 is absurdly better than what the market has seen. High efficiency used to mean >10.

by jauntywundrkind

4/22/2026 at 5:19:14 PM

HVAC is wildly variable, even more so than other trades in my experience. Get several quotes, there will be five digit differences between the top and bottom.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 4:58:17 PM

Try looking up HVAC workers on thumbtack.

by projektfu

4/23/2026 at 12:30:11 PM

Since people seem to misunderstand what I'm talking about, if you call a major HVAC vendor you will get a high price, but they have spent a lot on advertising. If you buy the equipment and have someone install it, it can be a lot cheaper, and those installers can often help you source the equipment as well.

Mini-split systems should be the cheapest to install but things like brick walls can make an aesthetic installation more difficult.

by projektfu

4/23/2026 at 3:36:59 AM

Your labor costs are far lower than coastal US... and that was 10 years ago. Ten years ago in San Jose I got 5.5kW installed for $17k. Because it was that long ago, this is something like 23 panels.

by eitally

4/22/2026 at 4:06:28 PM

> American solar installer companies do seem to charge way more than European or British ones

One of the reasons for this is that in many parts of the US, solar has sadly been market segmented as a luxury product, just like other high efficiency products like heat pumps or EVs.

This is enabled by both the prevailing cultural attitudes about efficiency and renewables as indulgences for the better off, and industries that are happy to keep captive high margin markets of those customers, i.e. the continued lack of a US produced low-cost EV.

The American cult of individualism is also at play, wherein collective solutions are shunned vs private ones, which is why renewables and storage are so popular among off grid libertarian types.

by danans

4/22/2026 at 3:16:35 PM

One of the things I like most about balcony solar is that you can DIY it (at least, in the places I know that have approved it) instead of getting scammed.

by CalRobert

4/22/2026 at 8:46:10 PM

The disruption from below cycle is coming on hard here. I'm so excited for balcony solar. This is going to expand solar access for so many people & be such a great thing!

It's also such radically better priced equipment when it's consumer focused. My little Bluetti Elite 100 v2 was $400. It's a 1kWh battery. But as much as anything I bought it because it takes 800W of solar input! On this tiny cheap thing! That's better solar input density than most of these stations, but also, the other guys don't really have an excuse: if you are making a power station like this, it's such a minimal extra cost to integrate a decent solar buck MPPT controller controller on too. 60v 20a capable mosfets transistors have become unfathomably high performance & affordable.

There's all sorts of really amazing units being built. Zendure SolarFlow 2400 Pro doesn't come with batteries but is ~ 1500$ for a 3000w input unit. Not quite as good a proposition (2W:$1 again, but no battery) but is more home sized, to put down another data point. Lots of players & competition, vs the "buy Victron" age! (Still, that Victron reliability.) https://www.notebookcheck.net/Zendure-SolarFlow-2400-Pro-rev...

When there's so many contractors involved, it's like, yeah, give me the good expensive electronics; the marginal cost is whatever. I like how balcony solar is so disruptive from below though, how it breeds a cost conscious

by jauntywundrkind

4/22/2026 at 8:17:39 PM

I have one of those terrible fake balconies on the front of my house.

I am working on replacing it with a real deck/carport combo and will probably put 600w solar over it, should be room for 4-6 of them.

That will be a 2-3kw solar install, not enough to replace my entire draw by a long shot, but enough to carve a pretty big dent out of it.

I'm already going to be spending $10k-$15k on the deck/carport install plus the french doors to replace the window looking over the fake balcony, so what's another $3k-$5k for a modest solar install?

by BizarroLand

4/22/2026 at 3:15:36 PM

There are so many scams in the solar industry. I feel like a ton of installers joined just to make a quick buck with no effort.

by chung8123

4/22/2026 at 3:28:57 PM

This tends to happen when a lot of government “free money” is on the table.

See also: War profiteering.

by twoodfin

4/22/2026 at 3:22:55 PM

Sure it isn't up front, and there's probably something to be said about scammers seeing green with subsidy money.

But the very idea of not being dependent on the grid or fossil fuels, if one can afford it and costs are comparable, should sell itself.

But my dad watches Fox News so he brings up lies like how bad wind turbines are for the environment (coal anyone?) or how we shouldn't make ourselves dependent on China for solar (as if we aren't dependent on a lot of bad hombres for our current energy mix or as if receiving solar makes us dependent at all).

---

Edit: HN's conversation throttler childishly patronized me for "posting too fast". At least do me the honor of telling me you don't like what I'm saying, instead of telling me I'm posting too quickly when I'm making 1 message/hour.

---

In response to dataflow below:

It still reveals an ignorant cult-like derision for renewables that isn't explained by reality. The people who gleefully mock the issues with renewables do it because they have been trained to want renewables to fail, and to see active support for renewables as a signal for softness and liberalism.

by unethical_ban

4/22/2026 at 3:33:39 PM

My local town Facebook group gleefully mocks local solar each time it snows/is cloudy, as if. There’s never been anything (eg, a war in the Mideast) that could disrupting fossil fuels pricing and availability…

by parpfish

4/22/2026 at 3:58:57 PM

> My local town Facebook group gleefully mocks local solar each time it snows/is cloudy, as if. There’s never been anything (eg, a war in the Mideast) that could disrupting fossil fuels pricing and availability…

Your counterargument is even worse than theirs. The predictability, frequency, severity, mitigability, etc. of these are extremely different.

by dataflow

4/22/2026 at 4:42:16 PM

> predictability

I'm giving this one to renewables.

> frequency

I guess technically the weather is probably bad for solar or wind more often than geopolitical disturbances to the oil market but, if we go by when its bad for solar _AND_ wind, I feel like I'd need to see the data.

> severity

Tied, maybe? Depends if we're including like, the 70s and if we're looking at just from a US standpoint or if we're including Europe.

> mitigability

I feel lot more confident in my ability to add more panels than to negotiate reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

by kaibee

4/22/2026 at 6:17:29 PM

Fossil Fuel is disposable energy, like dixie cups, use once and then throw it away. Renewables are reusable energy, day after day.

Also oil and gas tankers move at about the same speed of someone riding a bike, across the ocean, taking nearly 2 months to cross. Its insane the amount of time and resources wasted like that.

by downrightmike

4/22/2026 at 8:50:04 PM

I understand why.

The people excited about it turned it into a other-shaming morality issue. That kind of behavior creates opposition. It got obviously associated by the Democratic party and thus a target for opposition for Republicans. The attention economy feeds on making people upset at each other so the fire was stoked so we have a nonsensical moral battle over renewable energy.

If you want to ruin something and turn it into a needless battle, treat it like a moral imperative and start shaming people for not agreeing with you. No better way to harm a cause you care about.

by colechristensen

4/22/2026 at 9:59:06 PM

I know this narrative is very popular these days cause it allows to frame voting against one’s interests as some sort of justified rebellious act, but let’s not forget that the opposition to renewables is a decades in the making, paid for, “opinion-shaping” operation (uncharitably, brainwashing)

by yks

4/23/2026 at 12:01:05 AM

Eh, I think the "political agenda" brainwashing is overrated and the real issue is more "anything to get me elected / to get people to watch advertisements".

Abortion/environmentalism/crime/drugs/whatever are the selected political issues because it's what successfully gets people emotional to watch tv and vote. Sure there are people with agendas pushing these things but the real reason they're the issues is evolutionary -- the ideas at the center are there because they upset people not because they are the subject of dark motives of people pulling strings. They throw everything they think of at the wall and whatever sticks becomes the agenda.

by colechristensen

4/23/2026 at 8:55:07 PM

Yeah, it's the people that think solar is relatively clean and has become cheap that are the problem, not the people that never grew out of oppositional defiance disorder.

by maxerickson

4/22/2026 at 2:08:09 PM

In Florida, the irony is that hurricane is the reason for not having too many solar panels. For example, Miami-Dade county requires commercial solar panel installation to have hurricane-approved solar mounts, which can withstand up to 160mph+ winds. This means installation is very costly. Even for homes, many insurance company will not insure homes with roof solar panel because of hurricane.

by otterpro

4/22/2026 at 2:11:34 PM

That's a requirement for everything, not just solar panels. The price premium for it is not that big since that's the only type of mounts you can get in florida. All modern housing is mostly category 5 rated due to the fact that hurricane damage grows exponentially as it picks up mass.

by himata4113

4/22/2026 at 6:17:51 PM

Do they build a lot of cinder block homes with flat, tarred roofs?

by nick_

4/22/2026 at 4:20:08 PM

I could have sworn that FL was like top five in solar production.

Edit : it is! It’s 3rd https://seia.org/solar-state-by-state/

by balderdash

4/22/2026 at 7:35:15 PM

Get out of here with facts! We're having a nice hate-session.

by bombcar

4/23/2026 at 1:11:33 AM

Yes! The blog uses a dataset that excludes rooftop solar. It’s only for ground mounted arrays.

by Aurornis

4/22/2026 at 2:06:22 PM

In Alabama regulatory capture is such that installing solar panels attached to the grid incurs fees higher than just buying the electricity from Alabama Power.

by the_sleaze_

4/22/2026 at 3:17:18 PM

Why not install and not attach to the grid? My understanding is if you have them attached to batteries and not feeding back it is considered off grid in some places.

by chung8123

4/22/2026 at 3:33:04 PM

I don't know anything about Alabama but in California you generally can't create off-grid developments without permission from a local authority, because it's a recognized problem that "off-grid" systems are often under specified, leading to danger for the occupants. And nobody really wants off-grid to proliferate because it would tend to concentrate the costs of the grid upon the remaining users who will be the ones least able to afford it.

For a place that was two miles from a power line, I would think anyone would approve of off-grid.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 6:30:02 PM

Lots of places that will get $150k+ quotes for electrical service too.

At that point, off grid is a no-brainer for everyone except industrial users (and those lots aren’t useful for them anyway).

by lazide

4/22/2026 at 2:28:01 PM

I'm interested to read a source on this if you have it

by wing-_-nuts

4/22/2026 at 8:44:18 PM

Sure.

> Alabama Power, with approval from the Alabama PSC, charges residential solar customers a monthly fee of $5.41 per kilowatt based on the size of their solar system

> Alabama Power's residential electricity rates generally range from approximately 11 to 13 cents per kWh, plus a $14.50 monthly base charge

https://www.selc.org/press-release/court-allows-alabama-powe...

by the_sleaze_

4/22/2026 at 9:56:22 PM

interesting, ty for the follow up

by wing-_-nuts

4/22/2026 at 5:31:30 PM

Hawaii is the one I don't get. Every building there should be festooned with panels. They have the best opportunity to be a world leader in electrification.

Instead they import bunker fuel. The tankers dock at the power station, which then burns it, to power the island.

by HoldOnAMinute

4/22/2026 at 9:26:14 PM

Wasn't there an article years ago about how there was so much PV in Hawaii the power grid went negative causing problems for its operators?

by MisterTea

4/23/2026 at 1:12:12 AM

> Every building there should be festooned with panels

The dataset used in this blog is for ground-mounted solar. Rooftop solar would be excluded.

by Aurornis

4/23/2026 at 5:03:53 PM

What are all the tables and plots for rooftop solar presented in the article then? I am confused.

by mbfg

4/22/2026 at 6:32:12 PM

The vast majority of natives have very little capital.

The industries with more capital (mostly tourism) don’t usually have a lot of land, or would prefer to use it for tourism activities. They also tend to be seasonal, which messes up the math.

But yes, it is silly.

by lazide

4/22/2026 at 2:41:40 PM

I know California has reduced the incentives to purchase solar panels. You have to also have a battery backup system which increases the costs considerably. I'm guessing we may have too much solar in the day and not enough storage for the energy created.

by vondur

4/22/2026 at 3:21:33 PM

The battery increases the upfront cost but also increases the roi very much (at least where I am living). You get way less money for feeding energy to the grid than you have to pay for withdrawing energy(as you said some utilities even limit/forbid feeding during peak hours). In my case that means (Austria): Sell 1 kWh - 0,04€ Buy 1 kWh - 0,25€

by Haemm0r

4/22/2026 at 5:55:05 PM

Oh yeah, it's just the initial cost goes up and the payoff time becomes longer. And you were one of the people who had installed solar panels, the rewards for it are reduced.

by vondur

4/22/2026 at 6:17:18 PM

Wrong, payoff time will be shorter. Why: During the next few years energy suppliers will "force" people, who feed energy to the grid into flexible pricing, so the reward for producing will be less and less ( current flexible prices https://markt.apg.at/en/transparency/cross-border-exchange/d... ) and the incentive for having a battery is getting stronger. For my situation that means almost zero energy costs from March to October. Even in December and January it covers 30-50% of the total energy demand (heat pump).

by Haemm0r

4/22/2026 at 3:45:55 PM

Don't you have to replace the batteries every few years though? That should be factored in the equation.

by alternatex

4/22/2026 at 4:32:14 PM

Modern lithium batteries can last decades! LFP batteries can take thousands of discharges cycles, and most systems wouldn’t be designed to fully drain the batteries anyways (keeping them at more optimal levels of charge to maintain capacity).

solar systems don’t require that much ongoing maintenance. There just aren’t many consumable components. (And battery recycling is getting better by the year)

by anon7000

4/22/2026 at 3:56:44 PM

You have to replace everything you own on some cadence. Eventually I'll need to replace the battery on my solar system. I'll also need to replace the panels at some point and even the roof the system is installed on.

My solar system uses a Tesla powerwall. I'd expect its real world performance over time to be about the same as what you see in batteries for Tesla vehicles.

by fredophile

4/22/2026 at 4:04:48 PM

most batteries can last 10+ years

by danaw

4/22/2026 at 3:01:28 PM

A partly cloudy or partly sunny day produces some insane changes in output without a battery system to smooth them out

There is a limit to the size of the instantaneous increases and decreases in generation that the other generators on the grid can compensate for

by applied_heat

4/23/2026 at 12:51:57 AM

I'm not aware of janky laws in Florida, when I had panels installed on my last house in 2017 there wasn't much friction from the perspective of laws. Standard permitting process (basically just expensive paperwork).

The issue was with the insurance companies. We had an 11.6Kw array, and it was getting difficult to find insurers that would allow more than 6Kw of rooftop solar.

by brk

4/23/2026 at 2:20:20 AM

Yah sorry janky insurance policites - not laws.

by himata4113

4/22/2026 at 4:45:36 PM

I have said it before in another comment - on a related post.

It's wild that Southern US which gets most of the sun - has relatively little solar compared to the North - which gets less sun days - but has more solar.

the damage politics has done to the US is crazy n sad.

by dzonga

4/22/2026 at 7:33:52 PM

Is this blog potentially suspect/misleading? Up-thread someone pointed out another source for PV production with rankings:

  1 - California
  2 - Texas
  3 - Florida
  4 - Arizona
  5 - North Carolina
  6 - Nevada
  7 - New York
https://seia.org/solar-state-by-state/

And here's a different source for residential PV:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1419901/us-residential-g...

  1 - California
  2 - Arizona
  3 - Texas
  4 - Florida
  5 - New York
Is there any chance that people are jumping to incorrect conclusions?

by Jblx2

4/22/2026 at 5:25:02 PM

Optimistically, I would expect to see more panels in raw numbers up north due to necessarily overbuilding the capacity to account for fewer sun-hours per year.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 5:38:22 PM

Well also the desert southwest is still relatively sparsely populated, so rooftop solar won't show up as much on a map like this. Plus their power is cheap(er) than CA.

But yeah, you'd expect some bigger utility-scale installations.

by rconti

4/22/2026 at 6:34:26 PM

Many utility scale solar plants are indeed being built out in the desert. The Antelope Valley and along the 15 corridor in particular, as they have the power distribution lines already in place. However even along 80 you’ll see a few.

They tend to be where high voltage distribution lines leave high demand urban areas, and the land gets cheap enough.

A lot of other places just need some high tension power lines, and it will happen. Permitting for those is a nightmare.

by lazide

4/22/2026 at 10:21:52 PM

IIRC we are at the point now where the cost of high tension lines is significantly greater than just overbuilding the PV. No need to put all the panels out in the southwest and run wires everywhere, just put 2x, 3x, or whatever you need much closer to where you need it and skip those expensive lines.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 11:24:16 PM

There are no open spaces close enough to demand to avoid high tension power lines - at least not without demolishing all the customers houses.

by lazide

4/23/2026 at 1:10:34 AM

This dataset is for ground-mounted solar arrays.

It excludes rooftop mounted solar. It doesn’t indicate total solar deployment.

Florida has a lot of solar panels on roof tops, but not as many ground-mounted solar farms.

by Aurornis

4/22/2026 at 3:33:32 PM

We're off grid and have 7kw of panels, and 40kwh of 48v lithium batteries, with a generator for backup, which is rarely used since we are frugal with electricity and switch everything off when not in use.

I set it all up myself, and while it is not trivial, it's not difficult either.

Learning to put connectors on properly, size cables and put lugs on properly, learn about earthing and breakers...just one bit at a time.

I'm about to set up another system on the roof of an outbuilding to supply power for a water pump and irrigation where we grow food. This will be much easier and simpler since it will have only one 48V lithium battery, but I'll still use Victron stuff and connect it to a Cerbo so it can be monitored.

If I sold this place and bought somewhere on the grid, the first thing I'd do is cut the cord and set up my own system again.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 4:42:46 PM

What inverter hardware did you use?

I have an el cheapo 120 VAC 3600W import inverter with just two 100AH AGM batteries in series as it's a 24 VDC unit. Right now its all temporary and more experiment than practical.

Inverter mounted to a portable frame I built from bolted slotted angle with two battery shelves for a total of 4 batteries (only 2 now.) The batteries have a 200A terminal fuse and run through a 200A disconnect to the inverter using #2 AWG cable. The inverter, AC input, AC output are all grounded to a single ground bar that is bonded to the metal frame. AC Input is fed from a 12 AWG cord with 15A plug. AC output runs two 15A MCCB's, each terminated to a single socket hanging off a short whip cord. A cheap two wire digital DC volt meter is wired in series with a push button so I can see the battery voltage at a glance when I have the inverter powered down.

I temporarily setup the panels in my yard as an experiment but since I am in the city, I don't get good sun in my yard with all the obstructions. Honestly I ran it for two days, took the panels down before it rained, and didn't get a chance to measure anything. The panels really need to go on the roof and I have no intention of doing that any time soon.

The system did come in handy as a backup for my boiler when a wind storm knocked the power out for an hour and a half this past winter. I have thought about setting it up as a UPS for my little IT setup at home but 3600W is super overkill.

by MisterTea

4/22/2026 at 5:23:42 PM

Victron MultiPlus-II 48/10000/140-100/100

All of my system, aside from batteries, is Victron and installed in a small lean-to. Batteries are 8 x Fogstar 48V 100AH, in an outdoor rack, since I have no dry space indoors for batteries.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 6:03:04 PM

Aren't lithium batteries cheaper than AGM these days? On top of lasting much longer and allowing full deep discharge.

by andruby

4/22/2026 at 6:35:09 PM

While I realize LiFe batteries are quite safe, at the time I bought this setup I felt more familiar with AGM so I went that route. The prices were also comparable and I can use these in a truck project I also have.

by MisterTea

4/22/2026 at 3:55:19 PM

do you have a blog or some links of walking through the process of getting everything setup?

by johsole

4/22/2026 at 5:37:28 PM

I don't, but Will Prowse on YT is very good, and lots of other people are too. Victron has great documentation, and lots of system layouts as examples.

The most challenging part was getting and victon stuff talking to the fogstar batteries, which was hampered by not reading the manuals and trusting chatgpt, but in the end it was trivial.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 5:04:43 PM

Curious, how did you deal with inspections and building codes? Or is it in a county with no building codes?

by andreybaskov

4/23/2026 at 2:37:44 AM

If it's not grid connected, you can get a way with a lot of stuff in many places. But if you live in the middle of nowhere, you can just buy a lot of stuff on amazon and wire it together in plug and play style.

I was watching a Finnish guy over the weekend on Youtube (handle True North) that recently took his self built solar powered boat from Helsinki to the Mediterranean, via about 3000km of water ways through Germany, Switzerland, France, etc. In the winter! He just got there a few weeks ago. This stuff is easy if you are a bit handy. He used cheap ply wood and epoxy to glue the thing together. I think he has maybe 4KW worth of panels on the roof, a 6KW motor, and about 16kwh of battery if I remember correctly. Mostly he runs the boat at ~3.5KW because the boat's shape actually limits the speed. More power doesn't make it go much faster. The impressive thing here is that this boat is super simple and it works. He charges using solar panels. On a sunny day he arrives with a full battery. On a cloudy dark winter day, he can still do tens of nautical miles. And he only needs a few hours of daylight to charge up his batteries.

by jillesvangurp

4/22/2026 at 10:07:24 PM

I have a similar situation with a smaller system in rural CO (4kw panels, 6kw inverter, 15kwH batteries).

If you get far enough out it ceases to matter.

The (unpermitted, about 25-year-old) shacks I live in never had power and getting an easement was prohibitively expensive. It doesn't impact anyone but me (and potentially my son, who will inherit this mess when I die in 30 or so years).

There are codes here, and codes enforcement. But it's largely complaint driven and I suspect that all my neighbors are in a similar situation.

If I were in town and could get utilities I'd prefer that, but the county won't even pick up the last 1/2 mile of roads to where I am living... maybe if they'd do that I'd consider only building things that are permitted.

by scarecrowbob

4/23/2026 at 12:54:44 AM

You also run the risk of insurance declining your claim due to unauthorized or self-installed electrical work, even if your work wasn't the source of a fire/problem.

by HDBaseT

4/22/2026 at 5:24:29 PM

I live in the UK, and I didn't invite any inspectors for a review :-)

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 10:15:12 PM

At least in the US, you're not going to see any building inspectors out in the country unless you're trying to sell the property.

by pixl97

4/23/2026 at 4:00:24 AM

Man, I need to learn from you! My wife and I are building an offgrid cabin right now and I was just trying to figure out some of the specifics!

Very cool!

I think we’re actually going to use lead-acid marine batteries? But very similar plan. We’re going to need a LOT more solar though than you I think. The winter here in South Central Alaska is pretty bleak in terms of available power. Still, very cool to see someone else living the dream!

by piloto_ciego

4/23/2026 at 1:14:12 PM

Go straight to 48V lithium, you won't regret it.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/23/2026 at 6:00:35 PM

I have thought about this, but getting them shipped here is hard (not impossible just a pain) and I don’t think I can service a lithium battery? I can service a lead acid battery and they’re ubiquitous in the marine industry around here, but I’m also not an EE.

Got any reason why I should go for the lithium over lead acid other than the size?

Thanks!

by piloto_ciego

4/23/2026 at 9:57:27 PM

You can switch cells if you need, or switch the BMS if you need, heck, you can build a lithium battery from cells and wire your own BMS.

With lithium, you hvae a deeper depth of discharge than lead acid, but you're better off reading about the pros and cons and making your own decision.

My system started with 3 x 12v100ah lithium batteries in my van, with panels on the roof, and a dc-dc charger for backup, which worked amazingly well, but for faster charging with larger panel arrays, 48v is the way.

With my 12v I could charge 1.2kw per hour maximum, but 48v means I can charge 4.8kw per hour, which means in winter, with at most 4 hours of good sun on my panels (due to trees), I can put in more than I consumed.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 8:41:33 PM

> If I sold this place and bought somewhere on the grid, the first thing I'd do is cut the cord and set up my own system again.

Why?

by hx8

4/24/2026 at 9:36:08 AM

Reliability, no changes in charges, and self-reliance, to name a few.

by CrzyLngPwd

4/22/2026 at 5:07:05 PM

»We're off grid and have 7kw of panels, and 40kwh of 48v lithium batteries, with a generator for backup, which is rarely used since we are frugal with electricity and switch everything off when not in use.«

Good for you, but this is neither a concept for large cities nor for the industry.

by cbmuser

4/22/2026 at 10:07:52 PM

Good for you but we don't all live in large cities or participate in "the" industry.

by scarecrowbob

4/22/2026 at 1:14:32 PM

What's the big deal with having a whole liquid cooled workstation, and why is it important information for me to know what this dude's hardware is? And seriously, is there something about the rig that is necessary to chew through a dataset with a few million rows?

by noduerme

4/22/2026 at 2:09:05 PM

Liquid-cooled computers have one major benefit; usually, your computer ages over time, and there's a long period where it's still barely fast enough but you wish you had something nicer. A liquid-cooled workstation prevents you from needing to manage this grey area by catastrophically failing at unexpected intervals.

by everdrive

4/22/2026 at 3:10:49 PM

Also prevents you from messing with it too much, as any substantial change requires draining and refilling your loop.

by buildbot

4/22/2026 at 3:21:43 PM

I had to re-read this three times. My sarcasm detector must be on the fritz.

by carlosft

4/22/2026 at 2:31:17 PM

Had me in the first half.

I looked at using an AIO for my PC build but ultimately went with an air cooler the size of a damned rubix cube and a high airflow case.

My room gets toasty with raytracing titles, lol

by wing-_-nuts

4/22/2026 at 4:16:02 PM

Wouldn't your room get equally/more toasty with liquid cooling? That heat has to get dumped somewhere, and liquid would theoretically be more effective at dumping it into your room.

by virgildotcodes

4/22/2026 at 10:01:51 PM

yeah no doubt. Interestingly, I have seen a water cooling setup that dumped heat to a massive outdoor radiator, but that was obviously a one off project.

I'd say I was surprised by the amount of heat a gaming pc can generate these days but when you have a gpu that can consume ~ 400W and a cpu at ~ 100W, only so much my 'space heater that draws pretty triangles' can do, lol.

I might look into undervolting this summer.

by wing-_-nuts

4/22/2026 at 8:27:16 PM

What alternative wouldn’t end up dumping it in your room?

by NetMageSCW

4/22/2026 at 8:54:14 PM

With a liquid cooler you could theoretically have the heat exchanger in a separate room or outside.

by Xylakant

4/23/2026 at 2:54:29 AM

Or add underfloor heating to the bathroom. My girlfriend might actually be happy that I'm gaming.

by noduerme

4/23/2026 at 11:45:42 AM

I never understood this problem. I am positive this is a solved problem in cars. I mean within reasonable timelines — ten years or so — the pipes and the radiator should not leak at all. Especially for something that stays in one place, if we have figured out how to not make it leak for something that travels at 70 miles an hour.

by collabs

4/22/2026 at 3:21:14 PM

I got an Aigo AIO (AC SE 240) off of AliExpress and use it as an automated reminder that my system needs an upgrade: once it stops working (with an upper bound of maybe 4-5 years), I'll know that it's time! Didn't even need to pay extra for that feature!

by KronisLV

4/22/2026 at 9:15:23 PM

[flagged]

by eagegsegg

4/22/2026 at 9:29:32 PM

This comment is a joke. Are jokes entirely warrantless?

by kiddico

4/22/2026 at 9:15:51 PM

And if your karma is high enough, he’ll let you flamebait in the political threads even!

by guzfip

4/22/2026 at 1:39:27 PM

He just does this with all his blog posts, don't overthink it. The tech industry is full of people with unexpected quirks.

by seanalltogether

4/22/2026 at 1:49:26 PM

We need more of this, not less. This is Hacker News. He gave us exactly what we need to know to exactly replicate his results.

by basilgohar

4/22/2026 at 2:55:10 PM

I think it feels a little bit of an Ad for the hardware, especially the way he describes the case, telling you the exact model and how spacious it is. Bit sus but perhaps he is being OVERLY detailed and just likes telling you he has a bunch of CPU's that are well cooled in a case with two big ugly fans on the front (not into that look at all.)

Though I can totally understand, geeky people love details. I have a habit of getting way too detailed in my writings here. So I then spend most of the time editing it down to be as clear and brief as possible. I refuse to use an LLM for my own thoughts.

by MisterTea

4/22/2026 at 2:00:41 PM

That's how I took it too. You always provide hardware information when publishing any data set that takes a long time to compile.

by hparadiz

4/22/2026 at 2:16:38 PM

I really don't think we should be shaming computer enthusiasts for being enthusiastic about their computers on HN of all places

by swiftcoder

4/22/2026 at 1:26:39 PM

It had a very 90s/early-2000s tech blog feel to it. Only thing missing was his custom Gentoo build.

by biesnecker

4/22/2026 at 1:49:43 PM

I found it delightful. It added character and created a sense of relatability from the outset.

by cyberge99

4/22/2026 at 3:10:46 PM

you are visitor 18813!

by wigster

4/22/2026 at 3:50:55 PM

The 9950X is an excellent CPU at a reasonable price point and works perfectly fine with an ordinary air-cooled heat sink in an ordinary case without stupid numbers of fans. The TDP is just not that high.

source: my 9950X, happily running air cooled.

(Embarrassingly, I have an M4 Max that can almost match it in the CPU-bound workload I care about while sipping some 45W. The rest of the industry really needs to catch up with Apple on power efficiency.)

by amluto

4/22/2026 at 1:42:27 PM

> 96 GB of DDR5 RAM

Most people drive cars worth less than this.

by blitzar

4/22/2026 at 2:52:28 PM

A single stick of DDR5 RAM on Amazon in about $450 now. Three sticks would be $1350. Do most people drive old clankers with less than $1500 resale value?

You still need a few terabytes to enter the real cars territory.

by nine_k

4/22/2026 at 1:49:49 PM

He could have gotten it when it was still cheap.

by basilgohar

4/22/2026 at 2:36:06 PM

It’s no less valuable because he got it cheap.

by johanvts

4/24/2026 at 11:04:49 AM

I too daytrade sticks of RAM.

by blitzar

4/22/2026 at 3:29:03 PM

Most people don't own or drive cars.

by a3w

4/22/2026 at 5:32:19 PM

Where? Even in Europe, 88% of households have a car, and on average just over half of all people.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 6:11:04 PM

I have seen global estimates for number of people with access to a car to be about 20%. But can't find a link.

Some related stats [1, 2] from which one can infer that the above number is roughly correct.

[1] https://www.motorbiscuit.com/number-car-owners-world-less-th...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/registered-vehicles-per-1...

by abdullahkhalids

4/22/2026 at 6:15:13 PM

I guess if we expand it worldwide that makes sense, though in a discussion about 96GB of RAM it feels like an apples to oranges comparison to bring in the entirety of the world. That is including a whole lot of people who probably couldn't afford the RAM or a car even if they saved most of their income for a decade.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 10:43:18 PM

1.6 billion cars in the world. 8 billion people.

by hdgvhicv

4/22/2026 at 2:51:53 PM

96gb of ddr5 ram is about $800.

by segmondy

4/22/2026 at 4:12:39 PM

If you're not familiar with his blog, he also occasionally does benchmarks of databases & extensions. He starts every post by outlining his setup.

by russfrank

4/22/2026 at 2:50:36 PM

Obviously he's telling you their spec incase you wish to reproduce his results. Why don't you try it and tell us how your result compares.

by segmondy

4/22/2026 at 1:52:01 PM

Why is the top comment criticising a geek for being a geek? He gave us a wealth of information including his exact methodology and queries on how he produced his results. This is an ideal approach. You want just results and "trust me, bro"?

by basilgohar

4/22/2026 at 3:31:53 PM

My initial thought was that was a weird choice in this article, but I wouldn't fault someone for being thorough.

Probably a better choice as an appendix, move the good stuff up to the top. But overall its NBD.

by TheGRS

4/22/2026 at 3:15:06 PM

It's funny how I started skimming as soon as I saw "My Workstation" without ever consciously perceiving why I had started hitting Page Down, until you mentioned it and I went back to notice what it said there. My brain has really automated web page signal extraction.

by Noumenon72

4/22/2026 at 1:35:20 PM

I had the exact same thought, particularly when I read there were fewer than 4M records.

I really have to wonder if people truly know how powerful any modern computer is. Like I just assume any modern PC with sufficient storage can handle a database with a billion rows of data. I think my phone probably could.

Now if you were, say, analyzing commercial satellite imagery of the entire US and trying to find rooftop solar, matching it against the database and finding data that wasn't in the dataset, that's something where your computer power would be way more relevant.

Come to think of it, you could probably use such imagery to construct a power generation network from power plants to transmission lines to utility poles. Of course some places have underground cables but there are other datasets for that.

Another interesting project is mapping the growth of solar. This would require access to commercial satellite imagery over time. I'm sure some government agency already does it. Or used to at least. Snapshots years or even months apart are less interesting.

Anyway, I guess the point is the author's computer is capable of way more than I suspect they think it is.

by jmyeet

4/22/2026 at 2:17:57 PM

> than I suspect they think it is.

Because he wants to tell you about his computer it means he doesn’t know how capable it is?

by supermatt

4/22/2026 at 3:40:38 PM

I always make sure to downgrade my computer hardware before running a trivial analysis. Every dataset needs to redline the current configuration.

by 0cf8612b2e1e

4/22/2026 at 12:59:10 PM

To put this in perspective, China installs around 3x that every single day https://reneweconomy.com.au/just-staggering-china-installs-1...

by yogthos

4/22/2026 at 2:17:03 PM

It's not a comprehensive dataset. The US installed 43 GW_peak in 2025, which should be around 80M new panels.

Still, an order of magnitude less new capacity than China - but not two orders.

by pbmonster

4/22/2026 at 2:48:18 PM

There are also 4X as many people in China, little domestically available oil, and their government supports domestic manufacturing. This is an expected result.

It’s OK to celebrate small wins. The US doesn’t have to be #1 in everything. We also seem to have a curious diseconomy of scale on mega infrastructure projects for complex reasons, so maybe slow growth is the right approach.

by GorbachevyChase

4/22/2026 at 3:20:08 PM

People aren't sad about the US not winning the race, they are despairing about the US actively trying to lose.

by kristofferR

4/22/2026 at 3:38:37 PM

Yep, actively suppressing renewable efforts all the way down to shaming on a cultural level. It should be a net positive for Americans to adopt renewables - cheaper energy, more independence, good for the environment - but instead its viewed as silly or too unreliable when it isn't.

by TheGRS

4/22/2026 at 2:11:01 PM

With how backwards US policy is - this will be the major factor in the future.

Energy heavy use cases with little to no energy costs will lap western industries.

by notTooFarGone

4/22/2026 at 2:15:47 PM

Indeed, data centres for AI is a prime example of this where American grid is already starting to hit capacity.

by yogthos

4/22/2026 at 2:32:34 PM

True, though I think it's a little more nuanced. There's still capacity, but the AI boom is unearthing all the "cheap" power places in the grid and buying them up.

In order to keep growing, the US power grid is going to need big, coordinated projects. Solar, wind, transmission lines, and batteries.

I think with political interest from Dems who like renewables, and big business who need energy, there's will in the US to do it, but of course it's the US, so we'll do the right thing after every possible alternative has been exhausted.

by mekdoonggi

4/22/2026 at 2:39:27 PM

Even as it stands things are kinda grim. There's around 30% spare capacity, but you also need that for spikes like increased usage during events like heatwaves. You never want to saturate energy capacity completely.

I agree that eventually there's going to be no choice but to start investing in renewables. That's going to be the only way to meet the demand, and renewables are already becoming cheaper than fossil fuels. But it is going to take time. Building stuff in the physical world takes years, and that requires sustained commitment at the political level.

by yogthos

4/22/2026 at 3:38:40 PM

America basically did not add any net generating capacity in the first two decades of this century, instead treading water with repowering and efficiency. This was a mistake and now that we could use the energy everyone is acting like it's impossible to expand the grid at the same rate we expanded it in the 1980s.

In many ways this mirrors the way America walked into the housing crisis with its eyes closed.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 6:13:30 PM

I don’t understand how it could have realistically been different. In say 2001 how can you possibly make the case for very expensive grid expansion for future loads that haven’t been invented yet?

by dalyons

4/22/2026 at 6:34:54 PM

Thats fine. If we did not need it, then we didn't need to build it out using what was at the time more expensive technology. But in 2026 we should not be pretending that the rate at which the grid expanded in the 1980s was caused by alien technology transfers. We can easily repeat or exceed that expansion. Even the most outrageous predictions for IT loads do not exceed what we did in the 1980s.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 6:46:19 PM

absolutely agree with that. However, its not so much the capability, its the cost. In 2026 big projects cost a lot more, whos gunna pay for it? In the 80s we all paid for it, but we roughly all benefited as we got more and more electric capacity and day-to-day use cases. Today, it looks like we are all gunna pay for it, but only the datacenter owners are going to benefit. That model is broken.

by dalyons

4/22/2026 at 7:08:41 PM

Well, I don't think the evidence supports that. According to two recent LBNL reports consumer prices are lowest in states with huge demand increases (Texas), and highest in states with shrinking demand (California). The existence of large consumers tends to amortize the cost of grid updates.

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 8:23:05 PM

theres tons of news articles going around about how datacenter installs are causing large local rate spikes. for eg: https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers...

> That same Bloomberg analysis found that areas with high concentrations of data centers saw electricity prices jump 267 percent over the past five years.

> director of Harvard Law School’s Electricity Law Initiative and co-author of a March 2025 paper exploring how the public is funding Big Tech’s power-intensive facilities. “Utilities are building infrastructure, and then we all pay for it because that’s how the utility business model has always worked,” he says.

> Residential electricity costs are also rising because the rush of new hyperscale data centers wanting to draw power from the grid is spiking demand. That drives up prices for everyone, Peskoe says

by dalyons

4/22/2026 at 9:55:38 PM

There absolutely is a narrative out there, but it's mostly unfounded. Bloomberg ran a completely absurd article about how AI was causing voltage drops in Colorado. Totally insane stuff, some of their contributors are pushing an agenda.

This Dept. of Energy analysis, which was recently updated, makes a lot more sense. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104061902...

by jeffbee

4/22/2026 at 11:12:42 PM

Interesting. Though their conclusions are pretty weak:

> In some cases, spikes in load growth can result in significant, near-term retail price increases. Results from recent capacity auctions in the mid-Atlantic region prove this point, with sizable impacts on retail pricing beginning in 2025 (e.g., Howland, 2025). The duration of such impacts remains unclear, however, and will depend on the ability to build new cost-effective infrastructure to serve new loads. In other cases, utilities have argued that load growth will reduce average retail prices, consistent with our analysis of recent impacts (e.g., PG&E, 2025). Overall, our results cast doubt on the simple view that load growth will necessarily increase prices over the medium- to longer-term. Emerging evidence from 2025 suggests near-term impacts that can be either positive or negative; medium- to longer-term effects are uncertain.

Basically says “Maybe it makes retail more expensive, maybe it doesn’t”

And quite frankly I no longer fully trust the DoE. Politically captured by the trump administration, and directed to lie about renewables. Probably the folk writing this study are still trustworthy, but sadly I have a seed of doubt now.

by dalyons

4/22/2026 at 12:58:56 PM

Would be kinda interesting to see a histogram of the azimuths and/or tilt angles.

In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.

Curious to see what it would be in this dataset.

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 1:42:02 PM

I love that idea. I don't have time for anything elaborate today but I dropped two visualisations at the bottom of the post.

by marklit

4/22/2026 at 2:29:03 PM

I love the radial one, which looks like it was laid out as a "mirror tower" installation and then maybe converted to PV?

by pjc50

4/22/2026 at 1:59:25 PM

Thanks, interesting to see!

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 2:47:11 PM

> In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.

Folks are doing some interesting exploration of the pros and cons of different alignments, e.g.:

> When roof area is limited, the question becomes: What layout lets you install the most space-efficient solar capacity within budget on the available area? In those scenarios, an east–west (E–W) layout can outperform a south-facing layout. The South layout may be “better positioned”, but the E-W allows the installation of more panels in the same area.

* https://ases.org/east-west-vs-south-facing-solar-when-more-p...

Basically examining 'quality versus quantity', depending on what your location and roof allows.

by throw0101d

4/22/2026 at 3:01:36 PM

Yep, sounds all too familiar.

I installed a east/west facing set myself on our flat roof. Looking at dynamic power prices of the preceding year, multiplied by expected power output. Even wrote a simple space optimizer for this one time. But messed up some measurements so had to change on the fly anyways. The old adagium still holds: measure once and curse twice.

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 1:19:05 PM

It should be roughly correlated with latitude (the exceptions being panels on sloped roofs which will match the roof slope).

by dhosek

4/22/2026 at 1:57:54 PM

Tilt should correlate to latitude for panels with an azimuth due South.

For panels with east/west azimuth, the tilt should correlate with where the sun is at 7-8AM and 17-18PM, at least in my area.

((I think you have your concept of azimuth and tilt mixed up; I know I have when I was originally typing a different parent comment)

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 5:41:19 PM

I thought the thing to do these days is put them flat and as close together as practical. You lose a few points of efficiency but double the number of panels you can fit in a given area. And panels are so cheap that this trade-off makes perfect sense.

by rootusrootus

4/22/2026 at 6:34:39 PM

Can fit more if you tilt them a little bit. Also easier for maintenance/access, although they don't need much if at all beyond some cleaning.

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 2:10:21 PM

There's a helpful chart here, which happens to match your approximate latitude:

https://ratedpower.com/blog/solar-panel-orientation/

by Tade0

4/22/2026 at 2:16:12 PM

Thnx!

Seems to match my experience as well, I got a set of 12 south facing panels and a set of 12 split over east and west on my flat roof. The E/W start and end a bit before/after the south facing set.

by ragebol

4/22/2026 at 2:51:07 PM

Apprently there are a lot of innovations hitting market, perovskites left the lab, and tandem cells are above 30%

by jnpnj

4/22/2026 at 5:34:27 PM

And plugin solar is being roadblocked everywhere except Utah

by downrightmike

4/22/2026 at 12:59:48 PM

Pretty cool, although the heatmaps have a little of the "this is just a population density map" effect. https://xkcd.com/1138/

It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.

by showerst

4/22/2026 at 3:35:25 PM

I think the lack of concentration in some areas, particularly hubs in Texas and Florida, is actually pretty eye-opening. To me these areas should be very dense with panels from the cost/benefit alone.

by TheGRS

4/22/2026 at 10:25:11 PM

So there are a couple of issues here. First, there are a lot of panels in the Austin/San Antonio area, and if you live around here you see a lot of them.

Once you get outside of the larger cities panels, on houses in particular have nothing to do with costs, but instead a more deeply ingrained bias against them because the population is heavily propagandized to.

I have friends that have things like solar deer feeders and cameras and all kinds of other stand alone solar devices that won't put solar on their house "because panels are too polluting"

by pixl97

4/23/2026 at 6:04:53 PM

Exactly, the data backs up the cultural bias happening in these regions. Its not a matter of population density or cost/benefit, but a matter of virtue signaling (or lack of virtue signaling?). I think if people were making rational cost decisions installing these would be a no brainer, but they fear being ostracized from their groups.

by TheGRS

4/22/2026 at 1:27:14 PM

Something's wrong with xkcd's data if Portland doesn't rate a red dot on the furry porn map.

by noduerme

4/22/2026 at 3:20:48 PM

An analysis of panels per capita vs regional IQ would be an interesting signal. Panels are cash positive in less tan 5 years of their 40 year lifespan. There is hardly a better investment up until you cover your own usage.

by K0balt

4/22/2026 at 9:02:03 PM

The argument essentially breaks down to "smart people buy more solar panels, dumb people buy less solar panels". I think this argument is simplistic. I imagine the primary indicator of how many panels per capital a region will have are either the total amount of sunlight it receive, the total value of local incentives, or perhaps the regional cost of grid electricity.

My highest energy months are the ones with the least amount of sunlight, and my highest energy hours are during long nights, because my primary energy expenditure is my heat pump. This use case is common for people that live in colder climates, which is a large number of people. This causes me to require a much larger base kwh solar install and battery capacity than other homes in other environments.

If we assume a potential 8% ROI in the market, you would need to offset more than $100/mo in electricity usage for every $15,000 you spend in solar install before solar becomes a better investment. The numbers just don't crunch well for many of us.

by hx8

4/23/2026 at 4:24:05 PM

Makes sense. Local conditions are going to be a much stronger factor.

by K0balt

4/22/2026 at 5:52:36 PM

That is pretty optimistic. The calculators I've used online estimate my payback at 18 years and my lifetime savings at about $18K, with $32K out of pocket up front for the install. But my roof is 50% through the lifespan and I was told they would not warranty it against leaks due to panel mounts unless I first replaced the roof. That's $25K.

My next house will be my forever home, a little farther south than where I am now in the PNW, and on a big enough piece of land to use ground mount instead of roof mount. But right now, I cannot make the numbers work. I'd love having solar but I am not spending five digits of extra money just for the fun of it.

by rootusrootus

4/23/2026 at 4:36:36 PM

I think the problem is likely exactly what you describe, the high cost for most people to install the panels.

For some reason people treat roofs like black magic, and in some ways I can see that from a contractor perspective.

Since I’m looking at this from a different perspective (in house labor, we also do our own construction) for us it’s an absolute no-brainier. A 660watt panel which cost us $125 produces $200 of electricity in its first year of operation at local rates.after installation and support infrastructure our installed per panel cost is around $400, so on the third year we are cash positive.

I acknowledge that it’s not the same for many people, but this seems like it is in the same category as the fact that I can get an MRI from the exact same machine here for $150 (in an unsubsidised, for profit commercial imaging center) while the (imaging only) cost is $2700 in the USA for the same study. It seems like somebody is getting screwed.

by K0balt

4/22/2026 at 7:57:53 PM

If it was at all true there'd be companies out there offering to build you rooftop solar in exchange for x years of the generation value.

That that industry doesn't exist is pretty much proof that the numbers aren't what they think they are.

by ApolloFortyNine

4/22/2026 at 10:16:29 PM

That industry exists, it is called Purchase Power Agreements. The value of x is usually 20 or 25. It is typically lucrative for the company, not so much the homeowner.

by rootusrootus

4/23/2026 at 4:38:28 PM

This indicates to me that the payback for a homeowner is probably in the 7-10 year mark, if they weren’t somehow getting screwed over in the process.

by K0balt

4/22/2026 at 3:35:05 PM

Imagine believing in "regional IQ".

by jeffbee

4/23/2026 at 4:44:31 PM

I see you’ve never been to (pick one of many places where the social conditions are such that anyone who makes it to an age of agency with their brain fully intact is almost guaranteed to leave because it’s intolerable for anyone who actually thinks much) unfortunately, until you’ve lived in one of those places, it’s easy to imagine that people are the same everywhere. They are not. Social conditions are an extremely strong force in the intellectual development of humans.

To imagine that there are not regions that are comparatively intellectually impoverished is a comforting illusion, but unfortunately it is not reflective of the statistical reality nor the subjective experience of living in one of those places. Culture is very much regional, and cultural (social) factors (along with their physiological consequences) are by far the strongest factor in intellectual development.

by K0balt

4/23/2026 at 5:00:47 PM

Amazing how politicized panel use is obvious by these maps, as opposed to effectiveness.

by mbfg

4/22/2026 at 12:39:47 PM

It'd be nice if it described up front what kind of information is available per panel.

For that matter, I'd be interested in details of how "a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS" (from the previous article) actually collected the data.

by zahlman

4/22/2026 at 12:52:58 PM

You can read the (open access) paper here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4

In the abstract: “We use these newly compiled and delineated solar arrays and panel-rows to harmonize and independently estimate value-added attributes to existing datasets including installation year, azimuth, mount technology, panel-row area and dimensions, inter-row spacing, ground cover ratio, tilt, and installed capacity.“

by throwaway219450

4/22/2026 at 12:49:57 PM

I would like to know more detail as well.

by testrun

4/23/2026 at 11:15:36 AM

Epic DuckDB dive on 3.4M solar panels, Mark! Heatmaps + Ivanpah spot-on. Beast mode analysis.

by lucy_hnatchuk

4/22/2026 at 12:58:00 PM

look how cheap now, it's crazy

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html

I'm old enough to remember Carter putting them on WhiteHouse roof and they were thousands of dollars then (and less efficient)

by ck2

4/22/2026 at 1:38:45 PM

That's actually only cheap because of the free shipping - in Germany 450W panels are at about 55-60€ retail right now, for example. So a balcony set (2 panels for 1kW total, plus inverter) is about 150-200€, depending on the specific parts. Both exluding shipping, though.

Prices fell dramatically in the last few years, if I understood things correctly the high prices in the US are mostly due to tariffs.

by atwrk

4/22/2026 at 1:56:04 PM

That’s right. The current US president just reversed some of the previous administration’s Infrastructure Act which provided about 30% tax credit for installing solar.

by cyberge99

4/23/2026 at 2:04:35 AM

They were not photovoltaic solar panels, but solar water heating panels - i.e., running a ton of water pipes on the roof where they're perfectly placed to leak and potentially damage historically-significant artifacts. I'm not surprised they removed them when resurfacing the roof (not right when Reagan entered office, but in 1986).

George W. Bush actually installed solar water heating once again, but on the roof of a maintenance facility, which I didn't know about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House

by tmp10423288442

4/23/2026 at 2:37:16 AM

Yeah, you really don't want water getting on your roof.

by mitthrowaway2

4/23/2026 at 2:45:43 AM

Kind of a shallow point that ignores glaring implication that it would have been the piping, in/out/relief et al passing through the roof that would have been the issue, causing water to enter and travel.

by defrost

4/22/2026 at 1:23:31 PM

And Reagan taking them down.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/03/22/jiimmy-ca...

>It was pretty symbolic back in 1979, too. The symbolism depended on what you thought of Carter and his policies. For some, the panels were a much-needed acknowledgment that America had to wean itself from fossil fuel, explore alternative energy sources and help save the planet. For others, they were in the same category as Carter’s virtue-signaling cardigan. Of course, critics moaned, Carter would put solar panels on the White House.

>The panels came down in 1986 when the White House roof was undergoing repairs. Ronald Reagan did not have them replaced. Of course, Reagan wouldn’t put solar panels on the White House.

What is the story behind Reagan taking down the solar panels installed by Carter? Was it symbolic of a new, less enthusiastic approach to clean energy?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4w4ww/what_...

Solar power at the White House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_at_the_White_House

>On June 20, 1979, 32 solar water heating panels were placed on the roof of the West Wing. The panels were made by InterTechnology/Solar Corp. from Warrenton, Virginia and installed by Hector Guevara of Alternate Energy Industries Corp.[2] At the dedication ceremony for the panels, President Carter said, "In the year 2000 this solar water heater behind me, which is being dedicated today, will still be here supplying cheap, efficient energy... A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people".[1]

The whole installation cost $35,000 in 1979 (about $160,000 now).

https://books.google.nl/books?id=e9dlzwL4Ck4C&dq=solar+white...

by DonHopkins

4/22/2026 at 1:10:25 PM

The link isn't available here. Can you share the specs and price of that panel?

by saidinesh5

4/22/2026 at 1:21:57 PM

I'm in the US and it's showing a 100W panel for USD 37.21 (free shipping, including tariffs but not state/local taxes).

Also the panels Carter installed were solar water heaters - in 1979 solar photovoltaics were just starting to expand beyond satellites and cost like $40/watt.

by daemonologist

4/22/2026 at 1:39:53 PM

it's actually $33 because there's a $4 coupon available to everyone on the page

and if you buy 2 at a time there are multiple 10% codes available

so it's $67 USD for 200watts

100watt 18volt 5amp panels that can be put in series or parallel

for $33 each, it's crazy

by ck2

4/22/2026 at 1:19:51 PM

100W 18V for $37 and change.

by dhosek

4/22/2026 at 1:20:48 PM

If we can get balcony solar in the US that will be a huge game changer.

by dhosek

4/22/2026 at 2:28:14 PM

Unless it's not allowed in your lease nothing is stopping you, go for it.

by driverdan

4/22/2026 at 2:25:22 PM

It's legal in a few states already including Colorado and Utah - with more coming.

by fred_is_fred

4/22/2026 at 1:55:13 PM

Subtropical latitudes in continental US markets, you're looking at like $2/yr/sq ft of value for the power output.

I'd want solar panels for like $5/sq ft installed, expecting 10 years of life.

It's going to cost $1000 minimum to install, so the panels need to cost $2/sq ft x 300 sq ft to make this worth it. $1000 to install 300 sq ft + inverter and electrical panel upgrades seems light but might be reasonable we'll go with it.

Larger than a balcony, but maybe in the realm of possibility for a roof.

Right now solar panels cost what? $10 per square foot? Have they reached the physical limit of economic production/storage/transportation at $10 per sq ft or can it go lower?

(Let's not get into battery micro-storage economics).

by engineer_22

4/23/2026 at 4:23:18 PM

When you consider your other option is a whole house generator which sits idle 99.99% of the time, requires regular maintenance, vs the fact that a solar / battery setup is providing resiliency AND lowering your power bill every month, it seems like solar / bat is a no brainer.

Your money, your choices, but I know which one I'm doing when I get a single family home.

by wing-_-nuts

4/24/2026 at 12:23:26 AM

False dilemma. There are other options.

by engineer_22

4/24/2026 at 4:07:47 AM

Such as? I've looked into the options, you can either get a whole house generator, which suffers from all the issues I described, or get a solar setup. I suppose if you lived by a stream you might be able to hook up a microturbine for hydro but that's very situational.

Cost is not the highest deciding factor for me. The resiliency renewables grant you would be worth it even at a premium

by wing-_-nuts

4/22/2026 at 1:19:06 PM

$37.21 for a 100 watt panel with free shipping. I'm not sure if that is before or after 50% tariffs and/or the 10% "fentanyl" extra tariff that was announced a few days after Ross Ulbricht's pardon for running the world's largest opiates-by-mail operation.

by cma

4/22/2026 at 1:34:37 PM

You can buy brand new in bulk in the US for roughly the same $/watt.

I bought 30 375w Canadian Solar panels 2 years ago and paid $0.41/watt (~$4536 for the whole package)

My mounting equipment actually cost more than the panels (~$4600). And the permitting process cost nearly as much as the panels (permit cost + architectural drawing + structural engineer stamp + electrician stamp).

It's crazy how cheap solar panels themselves are getting. They're going to win on the energy front - period. Especially now that battery tech actually seems to be moving again. I vividly remember one of my robotics professors in undergrad ranting about how frustrated he was with battery tech in ~2007, but LFP and sodium batteries are both pretty huge steps forward.

by horsawlarway

4/22/2026 at 1:46:51 PM

Another data point: my entire system in Switzerland cost me 1.3CHF/Watt including a 20kWh battery and 5000 CHF of scaffolding costs (needed because of our local OSHA equivalent laws when installing panels on a tilted roof).

It has become ridiculously cheap indeed.

by tribaal

4/22/2026 at 2:00:39 PM

What's the cost of power in Confoederatio Helvetica?

by engineer_22

4/22/2026 at 1:58:56 PM

How much does power and grid delivery cost in Canada to make this economical? You're into this for $15,000 what is your payback period? Are there other ameliorating criteria for success?

by engineer_22

4/22/2026 at 2:16:30 PM

I'm actually in GA (Canadian Solar is the panel manufacturer - CSI). Power is cheap in my region, and I was in ~$30k after all costs including the battery storage (LFP).

It covers 95+% of the my usage, and I use a fair chunk of power. My payback period will be almost exactly 120 months (10 years) if my power costs remained the same as they did at estimation time.

But they won't. We're already seeing relatively large rate increases (GA power has "locked" rates but conveniently has a floating "fuel charge" which is currently more than the base rate per watt...).

I expect it to take 6 to 8 years to entirely recoup costs. It helps that I did the install myself, so I avoided contractor markup. Quotes from contractors for a similar install were running ~60k+ which felt (and was) insane, although STILL profitable over the lifespan of the install.

Panels should then last another 20+ years after repayment with only minor maintenance.

It's shocking how easily they pay for themselves right now, assuming you get decent sun on your property.

by horsawlarway

4/23/2026 at 1:28:43 PM

That sounds like a reasonable investment I appreciate you walking me through it, thanks.

I'm in New York state, power here is still relatively cheap, $0.2/kwh delivered, low solar insolation angle and snow cover during highest demand months should strongly disincentize solar here. Some homeowners took the plunge when rebates and incentives were at their peak but those are starting to phase out.

We're still seeing a high rate of industrial solar being placed in ag zones. New York has some of the most fertile soil in the country, and supplies significant ag resources to the northeast. cSi cells are liable to leach lead into ag soil and watersheds, and solid waste disposal are looming problems without regulatory structure in New York. I'm afraid that in my home state we're going to see a net negative impact from solar.

The state is now pushing local municipalities to site grid scale BESS systems. This works because storage doesn't need to be close to demand, so they're being pushed into poor rural communities. The problem is local fire departments are undertrained and under equipped to deal with emergencies at BESS sites. It's inevitable we'll see an uncontained fire in upstate New York and the consequences will be difficult to manage.

This all may sound like gripe. But I'm genuinely curious about the economics of solar because at the end of the day it's the determining factor in the cost benefit analysis.

by engineer_22

4/23/2026 at 2:05:09 PM

Peer reviewed studies show leaching is not apparent (https://journals.ub.uni-koeln.de/index.php/JNRD/article/view...)

Modern production no longer includes lead (lead free solder).

For comparison... a single tank of leaded gasoline could hold more lead (1.1g/gallon) than a solar panel and unlike solar panels where the lead is insoluble and stable... burning the gasoline aerosolized the lead. So does burning coal (another significant source of lead contamination...).

Basically - I'd worry a hell of a lot more about lead pipes, lead paint, lead coal ash, and lead av gas before I worried about lead in panels. Lead solder is used in a wide variety of products still, but it's usually not considered a contamination risk.

---

Look - all forms of power generation have risks and downsides. Solar does outstandingly well compared to basically everything else we've got. It also happens to be cheaper to deploy, and it's still getting cheaper.

If I were rural and had to pick between an ESS system with LFP batteries and a coal plant... I'd pick the batteries EVERY DAMN TIME. Hell - I'd probably pick an LFP ESS system over a new golf course in terms of my own safety...

by horsawlarway

4/24/2026 at 12:36:28 AM

By the way I'm not a pilot, painter, or plumber, and there are zero coal fired power plants in New York. But I do eat food.

You might also eat food.

If so, you should consider what policies protect your food from contamination.

by engineer_22

4/24/2026 at 12:37:44 PM

Yes, today there are zero coal plants (although one that uses it as an alternative generation means still).

Funny that we've managed that over the last ~10 years... it's almost like some other power sources are magically replacing the harm that they'd do?

because there were plenty of them ~2010, I'm aware of at least 8, I'll list them

- Samuel A. Carlson Electric Generating Station (still uses coal as alternate fuel today)

- Fort Drum (converted from coal in 2013)

- Kodak Park (converted from coal in 2018)

- Westover 8 (coal, retired in 2011)

- Hickling Power Station (coal, retired in 2000, so I didn't count this as one of the 8)

- Cayuga 1, 2, IC1, and IC2 (coal, retired in 2019)

- Dunkirk Generating Station (coal, retired 2016)

- Huntley Generating Station (coal, retired 2016)

- Somerset (coal, retired 2020)

Almost like... installing alternative power means we can remove really, really nasty sources? And hey, NY isn't as strong a contender for solar as it is wind. But the economics of wind are a lot harder in more places, and solar is still gaining ground (47% decrease in installation costs measured in NY over the last decade).

And I'm aware a lot of this is a shift to natural gas, it's cheap and flexible, so we're bridging old plants to ng as we ramp up alternatives.

Maybe you should consider what it is you're looking for in policies instead?

by horsawlarway

4/24/2026 at 12:12:42 AM

Frankly, the US EPA has established there is no safe level of lead exposure. Lead is bioaccumulative. To be placing lead containing materials in prime ag land should be considered seriously and with a sober mind.

I spoke to a colleague today who works closely with rural communities on emerging issues like industrial solar. He says he is recommending his clients to require baseline soil testing and annual soil testing to confirm hazardous materials are not being released to the environment. He said his clients have not seen elevated lead levels, but the concern is warranted. He also recommends 30 year decommissioning bonds be established prior to construction and $50,000 highway bonds for damage to road surface. Bottom line, serious people are requiring serious commitments from solar developers.

by engineer_22

4/24/2026 at 12:19:37 PM

Look - I agree with you that concern is appropriate.

I disagree strongly with you when you start making claims like

> cSi cells are liable to leach lead into ag soil and watersheds, and solid waste disposal are looming problems without regulatory structure in New York. I'm afraid that in my home state we're going to see a net negative impact from solar.

I think you're no longer making a real argument based on facts and data at this point, you're making an emotional appeal that supports your existing bias. You're taking any negative, exhaustively focusing on it with exclusion of facts about alternative power generation means, and then declaring solar bad.

But I think the blunt reality is that basically every other form of power generation we have has negatives that outweigh those of solar (often by fairly incredible margins when we look at generation costs alongside those negative externalities).

So if you really think that moving batteries once for installation is more harmful to road surfaces than a never ending stream of fuel tankers that weigh up near 100k lbs... or that solar is worse than fracking for natural gas, or pollution from coal, or the environmental destruction and waterway damage from hydro... Well, then we don't agree. Period.

And sadly for you... solar has the benefit of being much cheaper to install and maintain. So the economics mean it's coming.

by horsawlarway

4/22/2026 at 2:11:18 PM

I got $7.6kw installed in BC , Canada. Fully installed for $13k. Minus $5k grant, and the $8 is on a 10 year interest free loan.

Power is 13c kWh, guranteed to go up min of 5% a year.

So now instead of paying $1000 a year in power, I put that on the loan which will be gone in 7 years. The 20 years of $1000 a year free money.

I’ve had the system almost two years, they’re noticeably cheaper now. System makes 7.2Mwh per calendar year in a tight valley where it snows a ton.

by testing22321

4/23/2026 at 1:39:51 PM

Do you have to curtail your demand or purchase grid power during dark snowy winter months?

by engineer_22

4/23/2026 at 5:49:45 PM

It’s a grid tie system, and we get one for one credit.

So during the summer we rack up credits and have a negative bill (power company owes us money) then use it all up and a little more during winter.

by testing22321

4/24/2026 at 12:15:28 AM

Wow that's great, you're getting treated like royalty!

by engineer_22

4/22/2026 at 1:21:26 PM

Heck even if that’s pre-tariff it’s cheap enough that it could be an impulse buy.

by dhosek

4/22/2026 at 1:40:53 PM

it's from a US warehouse so there are no tariffs (or they've already been paid/included)

by ck2

4/23/2026 at 2:55:25 AM

Maybe all towers in NYC should have a few on the roof

by m8ven

4/22/2026 at 3:26:02 PM

Does anyone else experience very strange styling behavior while scrolling through this article?

The CSS styles seem to dynamically unload and reload while I’m reading it causing the margins to jump and the fonts change, I’ve never seen anything like this before. FWIW I’m on iOS using brave.

by Zenbit_UX

4/22/2026 at 2:31:56 PM

The odd looking circular example shown is not solar PV. It is the Ivanpah solar thermal generating station, and those are mirrors rather than solar panels, or modules.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.

by scblock

4/23/2026 at 12:38:06 AM

> Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.

PV is cheap up front and maintains cost advantage in the time scale of a few decades, and obviously scale down much better than solar towers. PV also wins by being viable in more places, and not requiring local specialized labor. Once you extend the timescale to a hundred years or so, solar towers end up quite a bit cheaper (where they're actually viable).

Batteries, inverters, and the propensity for solar fields to completely rebuild themselves long before the panels die really compounds running-costs. This isn't apparent until you expand the time scales, and only once we're looking at solar fields with parity to a solar tower (60+MW). We're talking hundreds of acres of panels, and a massive battery farm. Even though solar towers require more motors, more regular cleaning, and complex refurbishment, they also produce a very large amount of power relative to their size.

Rebuilding a PV field costs a lot more than refurbishing a solar tower obviously. If solar plants ever get over rebuilding themselves from scratch every 20 years, or if battery tech ever gets better longevity, this might no longer hold.

by ux266478

4/22/2026 at 2:39:56 PM

I think they are shutting it down. It had the nasty habit of frying birds that ventured too close to it. And that particular valley actually is far more cloudy then what you would expect for the desert near Las Vegas.

by vondur

4/22/2026 at 2:50:26 PM

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll update the post.

by marklit

4/22/2026 at 5:35:31 PM

scheduled to shut down two of its three units in 2026

by downrightmike

4/23/2026 at 2:32:29 AM

Beautiful methods. Very nice.

by dogscatstrees

4/22/2026 at 7:13:47 PM

now do china

by sciencesama

4/22/2026 at 8:42:12 PM

Does solar make sense without government subsidies yet?

by RyanShook

4/22/2026 at 10:48:39 PM

Had down for years. Only nuclear, coal and oil that require heavy amounts of subsidies.

by hdgvhicv

4/22/2026 at 11:36:33 PM

Yes, it's cheap

by Chilko

4/22/2026 at 6:20:18 PM

'My systems C drive' amd Ubuntu. Os directly a turnoff

by celpgoescheeew