Portugal hit 80% renewable electricity in January, saving €703 million on bills, securing the grid and spurring green projects—benefiting residents nationwide.
Yeah sorry but that’s completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.
Compared to grid-scale you have:
No economies of scale
Massive investments required to force utilities to upgrade transformers (here in Belgium it’s quite common in the summer that whole neighborhoods have their inverters shut off because the voltage is too high because the low-voltage grid simply wasn’t meant to flow in the other direction)
Horrendous fiscal incentives that reward the rich and punish the poor (who are forced to shoulder the distribution costs for the rich who are still using the grid but “offsetting” it with net metering).
Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).
If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn’t make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.
Yeah sorry but that’s completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.
Compared to grid-scale you have:
Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).
If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn’t make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.