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by JshWright 2250 days ago
That's already a thing, they just skip the intermediate steps and run the water through black pipes in a sunny spot.
1 comments

Black pipes are great, it would make some interesting calculations to compare:

Pipes vs. PV taking heat pump characteristics into account, whose efficiency depends on climate. Installation costs, maintenance costs. The Pipes compete for real estate space against the PV, so if pipes are more efficient, does it off set the lost electricity (that would be more expensive, but cheaper than from the grid, but only when it's sunny and you can use the appliances at that time, unless you have a battery which is more capex, so does the interest/repayments on that cost get offset by using electric 24/7). Etc. Etc.

It might need some ML to figure out the best solution. And by ML I mean linear regression.