>The ROI of a large PV farm must be substantially better than a home scale install.
There are many benefits to letting homeowners do it. First of all you get a lot more solar deployed in much shorter time, because you mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to the effort immediately instead of having them wait for a solar plant. Homeowners pay for it, provide the area for it, hire and organize the workforce - small scale but "everywhere at once" so to speak.
The government/state/county doesn't need to wait for the land to be available, raise the money, build infrastructure to transfer electricity from a new large solar site to the consumers and so on. So for the "state" the ROI is better with home installs.
>responsibility for the climate crisis to consumers rather than industrial energy providers.
That's where the responsibility belongs through. Most of us drove fossil fuel cars for years, which is the largest single emission source. In democracies we could have voted for guys wanting gas to cost 50 bucks per gallon, or who would prohibit any more oil and gas to be traded. We didn't. We could have refused to travel for vacations, refused to buy goods shipped from overseas and so on - but we didn't. So this is on us.
This mostly seems to support my statement that the ROI is worse. You cannot discount the cost of the house entirely in the equation. Many people are not even home owners.
You may be right about the ROI in a strict sense, I just question why it matters.
A communal solar farm is not the same product as personal home solar anyway. When someone with surplus money decides to pay for their own solar it might be suboptimal ROI for them, but the rest of us get a little bit of solar benefits for 0 money.
And more importantly, solar starts replacing fossil fuels rightaway. No waiting for a communal, optimal ROI initiative to get started.
But of course, we should do those as well.
What other sense could I possibly mean it?
A home owner who puts PV on their home could instead have invested in a larger scale PV business and made more energy per dollar. By putting the panels on their home they have robbed us of electricity.
>By putting the panels on their home they have robbed us of electricity.
Most of the solar we have today exists because these "robbers" paid for it themselves, and got it done rightaway. We all benefit from it. Maybe you meant robber like Robin Hood? ;-)
Your idea seems to be that homeowners can somehow choose their ROI by adding solar to a central power plant instead of their homes.
But that's not the case, they can't do that. There's no checkbox that says "instead of having 20 solar panels on your roof we can add 25 to the central power plant" when you order solar for your home.
Utility solar and home solar is built from separate pools of money for different purposes, and I don't see how you can meaningfully compare ROI between them.
Edit: Also, money isn't the bottleneck so we're not missing out on anything. Every solar panel made is being mounted somewhere, there is no surplus being stored because we ran out of money.
> In democracies we could have voted for guys wanting gas to cost 50 bucks per gallon... So this is on us
Only kind of. The oil companies dusted off the old tobacco playbook. Democracies are unfortunately terribly vulnerable to well-funded liars.
Approximately 0% of voters vote to ban fossil fuel use in cars overnight (some want to phase it out over a decade or two). So do you think it's too late and voters rationally don't want to anymore, or that almost every voter is still believing lies promoted by oil companies? What are the lies?
The lies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...
The lies are all well known and well documented by the likes of Naomi Klein ("This Changes Everything") - go have a read