Land purchase and annual taxes add cost. To get to the scale of 1000 house, let's just pretend you need 100 acres. So where are you going to get that much land close to people so you cheaply transport it? Also, developers will make far more from that land near a suburban neighborhood than you can as a solar farm provider meaning you would have to overpay for the land. Most solar farms you see are in useless desert land. If solar farms were cheaper and more profitable than coal plants, the energy companies would have switched years ago.
The flip side is that people installing this on their house don't have this issue. They already own the land and pay the same taxes. They also gain some level of energy independence which is important to some people. Additionally, a lot of these were installed to take advantage of generous tax breaks or other discounts. That is why one of the big hopes of SolarCity was that new construction could come with panels built in and remove a lot of the installation costs. Eventually, we'll all probably have solar shingles and this all won't matter much.
So where are you going to get that much land close to people so you cheaply transport it?
Why would you need the land to be close to people? Electricity transmission losses over 100-200 miles are minuscule, and there's plenty of cheap land in the radius of 100-200 miles from literally any point in the US.
Land purchase and annual taxes add cost. To get to the scale of 1000 house, let's just pretend you need 100 acres. So where are you going to get that much land close to people so you cheaply transport it? Also, developers will make far more from that land near a suburban neighborhood than you can as a solar farm provider meaning you would have to overpay for the land. Most solar farms you see are in useless desert land. If solar farms were cheaper and more profitable than coal plants, the energy companies would have switched years ago.
The flip side is that people installing this on their house don't have this issue. They already own the land and pay the same taxes. They also gain some level of energy independence which is important to some people. Additionally, a lot of these were installed to take advantage of generous tax breaks or other discounts. That is why one of the big hopes of SolarCity was that new construction could come with panels built in and remove a lot of the installation costs. Eventually, we'll all probably have solar shingles and this all won't matter much.