My concern is people advocating for expensive and ineffectual strategies because it looks cool in a social media post instead of doing things that are actually useful. We have an insane amount of land to use. Do public transit, do utility-scale solar. Don’t do this nonsense.
Oof, I 100% feel you there. That is a huge problem and those 2 suggestions are critical things that need to be done more of. I’m 100% with you that pretending like these dinky little instillations are at the scale of what is needed is ridiculous.
However. I do think your overall frustration is coloring your perception of this solution a bit. I think you would be shocked at the efficiency possible from a distributed solar network like this.
Yes, a centralized utility scale solar in the “insane amount of usable land” is more efficient both resource-wise due to economies of scale and in generation due to things like sun-tracking. However, it has significantly more transmission losses and labor upkeep.
A distributed solar network’s goal is to reduce those transmission losses by having the generation at point of load and increase local independence/resiliency at the cost of some resource and generation efficiency. It is solving a slightly different problem and so has different weighting on the cost/benefit analysis.
Understanding more where you’re coming from; I get it. But projecting that frustration onto decent solutions to different problems in such a factually incorrect way is not helping.
My concern is people advocating for expensive and ineffectual strategies because it looks cool in a social media post instead of doing things that are actually useful. We have an insane amount of land to use. Do public transit, do utility-scale solar. Don’t do this nonsense.
Oof, I 100% feel you there. That is a huge problem and those 2 suggestions are critical things that need to be done more of. I’m 100% with you that pretending like these dinky little instillations are at the scale of what is needed is ridiculous.
However. I do think your overall frustration is coloring your perception of this solution a bit. I think you would be shocked at the efficiency possible from a distributed solar network like this.
Yes, a centralized utility scale solar in the “insane amount of usable land” is more efficient both resource-wise due to economies of scale and in generation due to things like sun-tracking. However, it has significantly more transmission losses and labor upkeep.
A distributed solar network’s goal is to reduce those transmission losses by having the generation at point of load and increase local independence/resiliency at the cost of some resource and generation efficiency. It is solving a slightly different problem and so has different weighting on the cost/benefit analysis.
Understanding more where you’re coming from; I get it. But projecting that frustration onto decent solutions to different problems in such a factually incorrect way is not helping.