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.
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.