I can't- the solar company I talked to said there's too much shade on my roof for too much of the day, there's no way to place the panels to make financial sense before the panels need to be replaced.
It seemed a bit odd, because my roof is fully lit up, but only for a few hours a day- one half is covered most of the morning, and the other half most of the evening.
Sadly, it's not even really nice trees, just gigantic cottonwoods that litter leaves and twigs and sticky leaf pods like crazy.
Wait a couple years and check again. With micro inverters you can deal better with partial shade. They're probably right that it makes no financial sense now, but that changes over time.
The problem with solar is that unlit panels behave like a diode and no current flows. Chain together a lit and unlit panel and you get nothing. Put the inverter ahead of the interconnects and that's not a problem.
The problem with rooftop solar in the US is that the install cost is so high. Even if the panels were free, there are many areas where you'd be looking at 15+ year payback, which is a bad investment.
I'd love to do solar, but the only way I can make the numbers work is if I DIY'd the full install.
What makes the install cost high? Where I live in Australia, 44% of houses have rooftop solar and installations seem to be done in a fraction of a day. Seems like a pretty efficient process where they bolt racks to the roofing iron and then attach panels to the racks, wire it up, etc.
Your 5-10k range installs will be $10-20,000 AFTER the tax credit, which might be a little higher now than when that graphic was put together.
Of course, this doesn't account for things like needing to re-do existing electrical work to get affected areas up to code, or if you need to replace the shingles on your roof while you're at it because it's typically recommended to do both at the same time if you're going to add solar.
Then again, you may also have the problem of ensuring your roof will withstand the extra weight, depending on the system. Most people are probably fine here, but for older houses in snowy climates it's worth thinking about as well.
I've looked into solar for my house. Aside from not getting enough sun throughout the day due to tree shade, there's also the problem that every solar calculator available wants to pretend that energy prices are going to go up 5% a year. Well, I've lived at my current house for 5 years and they haven't gone up once. The real payback for me is 20 years, if I'm lucky, even without the trees in the way.
Wow. That's quite remarkable. 7kW here was under US$4,000 including inverter, panels, installation and accounting for government rebates (some sort of credit system that the energy company handles by buying your credits off you, AFAIK). That was installed onto typical industrial metal roofing sheets - not sure of the name of it. Similar price at home installed onto corrugated iron which is very common in Australia.
Assuming you want net metering, you’d need controls in place for grid safety and such and all the permits and inspections which take time and cost money.
I imagine all that is pretty standard here also - South Australia isn't exactly without regulation or seemingly high labour costs. I used the same company at the office building and then at home, and each was painless. Approve an easy quote and then everything is later installed on a particular day. Both were in the 5-10kW range.
At the office building, the estimated payback was all of two years.
They can, but you need a suitable equipment- thicker wires, at a minimum. Wiring in parallel means the voltage is the same regardless of the number of panels, but the current sums up- so your inverter and/ or controller will need to be rated appropriately.
If you want to play that game, a sizeable part of the tree population is just going to migrate north/south.
The more immediate problem with climate change isn't that there won't be enough places to live/farm, it's that it's all going to move causing destabilization of societies.
The long term effects of running out of arable land are a considerable distance in the future.
Yes, I know but I can't make the whole list of climate change consequences for humans under each commment so I try to alert people on a part that seems relevant. Me being dark is not me trying to play a game. I have not mentioned arable land at all. If you don't see the problem of tree populations dying out I don't know what to tell you. Trees take time to grow and we need them to store carbon. But, fine, I concede to your point, we'll start killing other/get authoritarian states well before we run out of food. Somehow that does not make me feel better.
Also your framing of the question *you* are bringing up is weird. Climate change will make for climate conditions that will make agriculture *harder* in general, I don't think your model of "Oh well we'll go to cold places that have become warmer" is really relevant and by the way arable land is already a resource some states are competing for.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how we'll ever run out of arable land. The Earth has been warmer than now, in the distant past: there were times when the poles were not frozen over. Of course, this means the sea level was higher than now, so melting all the glaciers means a lot of our cities (and probably most of Florida) will be underwater, and it isn't so easy to pick up a city and move it to higher ground. A warmer Earth probably means more deserts, but there should still be arable land, in places that are currently cold tundra perhaps.
The end-end-end game is Venus-like conditions on Earth. I find that pretty unlikely though considering that population would be so reduced significantly much before that and industry would be effectively stopped. As long as any biology survives, they'd likely eventually be able to reverse the changes.
I don't see how. As I said before, the Earth has been hotter than it is now. We're currently in an ice age, and coming out of it: that's why we have ice on the poles. The Earth was never like Venus, and never will be; the thing that humans are doing now is burning a bunch of carbon that was stored in prehistoric times. Back then, it was all in plants in the biosphere, when the Earth was warmer than now.
I have mixed feelings about this. My neighbor cut down their tree, and now my living room enjoys a lot more sun throughout the day, and my yard has a lot less trash to cleanup.
My neighbor shields much of my house from the sun. We had issues when his branches started touching my roof, but we made sure it was trimmed in a way to still give us the shade it has all these years.
In the meantime my neighbor at my last house wanted me to limb up the conifer trees past my roofline so that he didn't get needles on his car.
One that wouldn't work. Two, those trees would have fallen on his house in ten to fifteen years because his house was east of the trees, and 'lions tail' tree pruning creates a giant lever arm and the roots will lose that battle in the first wind storm after a rain storm. That pattern had just played out ten years prior all over town. Big pruned Doug Firs falling onto people's houses.
What you want is to be able to be able to walk under a tree with your arms over your head and not hit branches. No more, no less.
I think an interesting way of doing this would be to have tree-like solar panels. they would be somewhat wasteful in some ways, but would organically gather solar energy at a variety of times from a variety of directions. They could also provide a % of light through in all directions to give partial shade and coexist with trees.
