Understanding Solar Energy

People often point to how electric motors revolutionized industrial productivity, but not until about 30 years after their introduction. Because that's when factories were redesigned around the flow of products instead of the flow of line shaft power, using small electric motors at every workstation instead of just powering the line shaft with a big one. You might have pointed out at the time that electric motors had a negligible cost compared to the factories they were installed in, but from that you should have concluded that huge changes were in the works, not that further reductions in motor costs were unimportant.

Today the module cost is far from negligible (the article shows SEIA data showing that, even in the US, modules are a third of the cost of recent utility-scale solar) and it's only small because the other parts of the installation are badly lagging behind. If you need to heat or cool your house or train your neural networks, you really just need the energy those panels can provide, and somewhere to store it. Other balance-of-system costs like microinverters, racking, most wiring, transmission, design, civil engineering, land, installation labor, and regulatory approval are only useful as means to that end; they are not strictly necessary to receive the benefit.

If avoiding those forms of waste means you can get energy for a negligible cost, more and more people will find ways to do it.

How can you avoid them?

Well, you can avoid the cost of inverters by using low-voltage dc power, as off-grid enthusiasts, RV retirees, and Google data centers have been doing for decades. You can avoid racking by laying the panels on the ground, as the article mentions, or hanging them on an exterior wall of a house or an existing fence. These also avoid civil engineering and land and labor costs, and also falling off your roof. You can't avoid wiring but you can reduce its cost by using higher voltages (even low-voltage dc can use 48 volts instead of 12) and mounting the panels close to the point of use. You avoid transmission (and distribution) costs by siting the panels onsite instead of in a faraway solar farm. You avoid design costs by buying an off-the-shelf modular power system instead of paying someone to design a custom one. You avoid regulatory approval most obviously by breaking the law, probably more feasible in a slum apartment or an RV than in a utility-scale power plant, or by avoiding doing regulated things like connecting to the electrical grid or running 120VAC or 240VAC wiring.

This clearly points to a near future of ridiculously abundant energy, at what we would have previously considered a negligible cost.

> hanging them on an exterior wall of a house or an existing fence

You can avoid racking by installing them as the fence when you install a new fence.

I mean you don't literally, but the installation cost is a cost you were going to pay anyways.

Maybe so. It might depend on the winds in your area.