[solarpunk]

>We should be investing solar in lower income communities, as those people could really use cheaper utilities, and any saving they get would immediately go back into their communities.

Good news, these are called "community solar gardens" and they exist all around the USA, here's a large one based in Minneapolis: https://www.cooperativeenergyfutures.com/

[hedora]

Community net monitoring isn’t allowed in California.

Instead, PG&E let the grid fall apart, so now they’re charging crippling amounts of money to people that can’t afford solar.

On the one hand, with the help of subsidies, our house is off-grid capable, and our power bill is $0-50.

On the other hand, there’s a red-tagged neighborhood near by (they built homes despite not having power grid access), and they usually end up having a generator fire take out a few houses every couple of years.

Anyway, I really wish California had a second political party (not the GOP).

[renewiltord]

How is it crippling? My 1900 sq. ft. loft in SF cost like $100/mo most months. That’s 5 hours of minimum wage work here. Even the $200 it hit at peak is 10 hours of minimum wage work. That was with 4 people living in it.

[r00fus]

PG&E is a factor in net emigration out of CA. Agreed single-party-controlled states are full of inefficiency (aka corruption).

[entropicdrifter]

On the other hand, living in a purple state doesn't necessarily help with corruption either. I live in PA and we had billions "go missing" from our Department of Transportation over the course of over a little over a decade. Things have improved in the last like 6 years or so, but we had to get to the point where our bridges were crumbling and just having permanent detours setup around them first before people really got on a crusade about properly fixing our roads.

Josh Shapiro's done a bang-up job actually properly allocating the funds we managed to get from the big infrastructure bill, but that's been a major change from how things have been for the last 30 years I've lived here.

[selimthegrim]

Net metering?

[irq-1]

> CEF has financed and developed 6.9MW (~$16M) of low-income-accessible community solar arrays that ... offsets the utility bills of over 700 Minnesota households for the next 25 years

$16M for 700 homes = $22,857.14/home

That's not an investment, it's just charity by other means.

[solarpunk]

That number is in the ballpark of what it costs to install solar on a rooftop here in Minnesota.

The other part is these solar gardens don't stop paying for your electric bill if you move, so it's especially equitable for renters.

[ben_w]

6.9MW / 700 homes is 9.85 kW/home.

Two of these would do more than that (10.5 kW), for (at current exchange rates) $5934, or just over a quarter that price:

https://www.kaufland.de/product/512021383/?search_value=sola...

And even at that price, it's overlapping in price range with the non-solar equivalents.

The funny thing is, I grew up (in the UK) with news stories about how the latest computers were so expensive in the UK that it was cheaper to fly to NYC, buy one, and fly back with it, than to buy local — and now the US is having the same problem in reverse with PV (you might well be able to fit some of the much smaller flexible PV systems I've seen around here in Berlin into oversized luggage).

(Sure, I get that big projects aren't exactly the same as small ones… but usually that makes big things cheaper, not more expensive, even for home PV vs. park PV).

[vel0city]

That's just the panels. So, I buy a bunch of panels, they get dropped off by a truck, and then...? I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?

The price for installed solar in the US isn't high because of the panels. Its high because of the labor costs.

[ben_w]

> I'm going to use slave labor to assemble it all and wire it all up?

Well, the USA is one of the few places left that still uses that, so you could…

But even without that, the linked product is the kind of thing two untrained people can do 95% of the installation in an afternoon, with the rest being a trained professional checking the wires and doing the final connection to the grid.

If this was done in a place that already has nearby grid access:

8 h * {$25/h unskilled labour} + 0.5 h * {$50/h electrician} = $225 per one of those, assuming you're doing enough of them to hire at full time rates not contractor rates.

And that's a car port, it isn't designed for optimal installation time.

If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here, which is still cheap enough that you could do each of those on an entirely separate new not yet connected plot of clear land at domestic rates and still be cheaper than the quoted example in the USA.

[vel0city]

Electricians in my area charge a good bit more than $50/hr. More like $100/hr. And its not going to be for a half an hour, it'll be a few hours.

And that's a car port kit, its a lot simpler to install than installing on a roof of a potentially multi-story house with a steep incline.

It is also completely excluding an inverter and all the additional wiring materials needed to connect it to your house or the labor of modifying your home's wiring. Its literally just the panels and a frame. So add another ~$2k to your prices here, at least. So really more like $8k for materials.

> If they need to also add their own connection to a more remote grid, well I've seen quotes of €10k for stuff like that around here

Yes, they'll need to tie into the grid, so you're really comparing $18k to $22k and continuing to ignore a lot of labor costs.

Similar prices can be found for just buying panels here in the US as your example link. As someone who has actually looked at solar proposals for an installation on my home, it's not the cost of the panels that's keeping me away from it. It's how much people are wanting to charge to put the panels on my roof, and the fact I don't want to be doing that labor myself at the moment.

[solarpunk]

can one even get that german made solar kit in the usa?