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t1_jc8xiwx wrote

Parking lots for damn sure. The others come with some complications.

Most houses are still not required to be built solar-ready. Solar installations add thousands of pounds a typical roof isn’t engineered to carry on top of the snow load. Deserts seem like a good place aside from the weathering they’d probably see from all the bloody sand.

Main take away is that we aren’t doing enough.

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t1_jc99ly1 wrote

Sandy deserts are the exception, not the rule. Most deserts are rocky and dry, with patches of sand that move around a usually somewhat geographically confined area.

Sandy deserts as movies and media portray them are called ergs.

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t1_jc8y4xd wrote

I am not saying every roof needs it, but many roofs can add it, as well as city buildings, big box stores...etc

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t1_jc954p2 wrote

Even if they are solar ready a lot of HOAs are against them because they think they are ugly.

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t1_jc9igmu wrote

If society would buy in to solar in general then larger grid scale installations make much more sense than distributed panels on housing. There are a lot of roofs to put solar panels on, but there is a whole lot more open land.

Grid scale installations are significantly cheaper to maintain/install, can actually be installed in optimized geometries and stop people getting all pissy about curb appeal.

I would be great if people could buy a few hundred square feet of solar panels in a solar farm rather than putting solar on a roof.

This is definitely not to say that adding solar to a roof is bad, it is just suboptimal.

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t1_jca3d2q wrote

I mean that depends on where you live. Over here in Germany we do not have open land.

The only way you are putting solar on open land is by removing farming areas or by cutting down forest.

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t1_jcb0w72 wrote

I understand Germany is dense, but you definitely have some open land. The threshold to make rooftop solar the most efficient approach is incredibly dense, pretty much constant dense urban sprawl for an entire nation. Solar installations can replace a field, but a single field can replace entire neighborhoods worth of rooftop solar.

The point I am making is that the distributed infrastructure required, awkward installation geometry and therefore overall inefficiency means that rooftop solar is about 50% less “useful” compared to the equivalent panels in a grid scale facility.

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