: Why don’t all buildings use solar panels on their roofs to generate electricity?
In: Technology
It’s expensive and it’s not that solar panels can just supply the building they are on with permanent power. When there’s no sun you need to draw power from the grid and when there’s a lot of sun all solar panels combined feed too much power to the grid, overloading it. The only way that having solar panels on all buildings can be sustainable is if we can reliably store the excess energy for when it’s needed (plus a robust infrastructure that can transport those peaks). Home batteries can do some of that balancing but overall are still too expensive and have insufficient capacity to efficiently store the excess. What we should have is some type of huge communal storage that can fill up on sunny days and that the grid can draw from on overcast days.
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