Solar is great....



....for small-scale, local grids, where "dark-time" storage is feasible (whether that's your Tesla PowerWall in the garage or a molten-salt setup for keeping the small town's lights on at night).

The massive solar farms that are being heavily subsidized to add day-only capacity to the larger grids.....hilariously inefficient.  There isn't remotely any "dark-time" storage capacity to keep that power flowing at night.



Good for your house.  Good for a small town.  Idiotic for large-scale generation (absent some as-yet-undemonstrated super-large-scale storage mechanism).

that sucks OP... sorry about that.

the worst part is that it's all bullshit that doesn't do a damn bit of good anyway, but it will change the way you're living forever

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If they get to a point where solar can supply more than the total grid demand at any point in the day-night cycle, then storage becomes a concern. Until that happens, there is no point storing anything.

Option's are great, and to have many options gives the best use for a set of parameters.

For land that has no local electric grid to connect to the option of having your own self sustaining power supply makes
a remote site possible to build on. Economical? Most likely not, however having different types to generate power gives
a better economical choice for different conditions.

I bought stock in a local power company over thirty years ago and have taken the dividend and have been rolling
over into more stock in that time. Thanks to my FIL talking to me about a life investment that WILL pay off at retirement
and a dividend that will be a considerable amount that we will probably never have to cash in the stock. And after my Wife
inherited power stock from the same utility that has now expanded into NG, solar and wind the stock has not been a
disappointment.

Two things that has worked for us is owning power and water co. stock. Two things that must be used by most
everyone. We thought that the covid would hurt the earnings of the stock as people would not be paying their
bills. However the opposite has happened and the stock has been a great performer. The downside is in the
future as the Nuclear plant will sunset and getting a permit to build another cell may never happen, but is certainly
needed in my opinion as the current one has been problem free. And coal fire has been an uphill battle also
even with pollution controls the feds have been making new rules as the plants have met the new rules the
fed makes new rules again before the upgrades are finished. Crazy

So, just for my luddite clarity, the vision here is:

1) Build enough solar power generation capability to match current power generation capability across the entire nation to support us during all hours. The common wisdom here is that it will take 21,250 square miles of just solar panels, of course you are going to want to maybe double that to cover the access roads, power substations and extra capacity we will need to ensure that we make power on cloudy days and account for power line transmission inefficiencies and other things.
2) Build out how ever many billion pounds of batteries that we will need then to power the entire united states at night.
3) De-commission all other, "non-green" power plants that have been sitting there running while we were building 42,500 square miles of solar panels and ensuring we have power through the entire process.
4) Don't forget to hire an army of people to maintain all that infrastructure we created, to clean the panels from dust/dirt/snow and to replace batteries/panels as necessary, there will be a measurable loss every year of both(1%, 5%, it'd just be a guess on my part) due to wind, hail and other acts of God in addition to plain old manufacturing defects, wear and a need to replace the panels on a rolling schedule to prevent them all coming up on their end of life all at once.

Side note: Every step of 1 and 2 will be insane profit to China as they own most of the rare earth mineral production in the world necessary to make panels and batteries. They have been positioning themselves on that front for at least a decade and are most likely behind all the push we see for things like the Paris accords and the green new deal.  We will obviously never be able to compete with them on the homefront pricewise with them using a healthy combination of currency manipulation and slave labor to make the prices most attractive (greasing palms sure doesn't hurt them either).

See I feel that it's ironic that I get called a luddite for wanting to use the power of splitting, or ideally fusing, atoms to make our energy by people that want to rely on warmed over ancient forms of power like wind and solar that man has been using to heat water and power mills for thousands of years instead.

Broken solar panels are still ugly. But you can't even see the panels if they are covered by kudzu.