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gulgin t1_jc9igmu wrote

Reply to comment by starmartyr in Researchers: Floating solar panels could provide over a third of global electricity by TurretLauncher

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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Mad_Moodin 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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gulgin 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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