Logistically, would it not be better to install solar panels in a remote location with more optimal conditions than we might have at home? Electricity has no need, in most cases, for onsite production. Why couldn’t I buy 3,000 sq. ft of solar panels in the desert and have my own meter monitoring my plot? They would be much cheaper to install and maintain if done on large solar farms, which I imagine already exist. Would it be the same as buying shares of stock in a solar-producing company? I have a feeling it might be a little better deal.
Maybe I’m missing the point of having one’s own solar panels, but isn’t ownership of the panels a burden that’s outweighed by the benefits of the power being generated at the point of use? If I’m reliant on the grid no matter what, why would I want to own any particular solar panels at the other end? It’s not like solar panels are getting more expensive and I need to lock in a good price today.
Well, there is still some cost to transport it. You need to install the power lines and maintain them, and there is some loss of power over long distances, for various physical reasons.
I suspect that there’s always going to be some incremental improvement from increasing your economy of scale, and those incremental improvements would inevitably put you closer and closer to the case where you are just buying shares in a solar-producing company. Like, you start with the panels on your house. Then you put them in some better place out in the desert, where a bunch of people who had the same thought as you also put them. Then you pool power with all of those other people, so you can sometimes use power when they aren’t, and vice-versa, to smooth out the load. Then you pay together for the needed maintenance, so one guy can drive out to the site in a truck and maintain all of the panels in one trip. Then instead of each person owning a specific set of panels, everyone jointly owns all of the panels, so you’re less exposed to risk (if a charging buffalo knocks over one set of panels, or a sandstorm scratches them up, or something, everyone takes a small loss, instead of just one owner taking a big loss).
Depending on how the company is set up, they might make it look like you own one particular set of panels, so they can show you a livecam feed of “your panels” and so on and make it feel like your involvement is more personal. Sort of like how charities that support children in the Third World say that you’re sponsoring some specific child, even though all of the donations are pooled for all of the children, and the more photogenic ones might get “sponsored” multiple times each. But under the cover, it’d probably still actually just be a collective ownership of everything, like shares in any other company.
Do you already own the desert land on which you plan on placing the solar panels? If so, and you have a way of getting the generated electricity to where you need it, sure, sounds like a great plan.
I’d say it’s less true for solar than for wind. Distributed generation with solar is very effective. Roofs are generally unused space, so throwing up a few panels where it’s convenient is a productive use of otherwise unproductive real estate. They don’t create localized pollution like generators, or require large new structures like windmills.
Some utility companies offer the option of buying from large solar or wind facilities. For example, with Xcel I can buy solar credits, and then my electricity comes from a large solar or wind farm instead of a coal or gas plant. Originally that kind of made sense, in that I paid a premium to get solar electricity, but then solar got cheaper than gas production, so they ran out of solar credits, and you had to get on a years long wait list for the option to buy them.
So yeah, centralizing production to optimal locations makes sense, but it is also not practical with our current energy system. I can decide to spend money and put solar on my roof now, and use solar now. I cannot force grid scale changes that let me use a giant solar farm in the desert.
In a different timeline, with different politicians in power there would have been the necessary incentives and pressure for grid upgrades allowing large solar and wind farms.
I own 80 acres of high desert in ENE Arizona. My house is in Phoenix. I suspect that running cables the 200 miles from the property to the house would cost many hundreds of millions of dollars. Or, I could tie into the local grid, which would mean entering into some type of contract with SRP, and all the red tape that entails. Or, I could just buy “green” power from my local utility and be done with it.
A version of this is community solar, where multiple households join together to buy a nearby small solar farm. Though usually it’s within the same general vicinity, not thousands of miles away. Depending on the particular setup, it may or may not directly offset your energy bill — as in giving you credits to use with your utility — or it may just be a straight-up financial return.
Alternatives include community choice aggregation, purchase power agreements, renewable energy credits, etc. The EPA (while it still exists…) actually has a good page outlining many ways of purchasing green energy: Green Power Supply Options | US EPA
At the end of the day, money is fungible. If you want to invest in green energy, there’s a thousand ways to do it, with different ROIs.
Energy itself is less fungible, since there isn’t one big mega-grid but at least 3 in the US, and then numerous generation, transmission, and distribution companies within them — so it becomes quite the nightmarish exercise in bureaucratic metering and tracking and billing, even if the electrical connections are physically there.
Unless you’re a multi-millionaire, any sort of green energy project you can start on your own (or join into) is unlikely to beat investments in other markets. Solar is so cheap and the market is so inefficient (due to various factors) that it’s really only profitable at gigantic scale or with huge markups (like in the residential market). If you buy a few dozen panels in the desert somewhere and try it to sell it to the nearest utility, you’re almost guaranteed to lose money.
It seems to me (working on and off in the industry) that most of the profit isn’t actually in the solar installations themselves, but in the various financial instruments tied to the market… there’s a lot of manipulation and greenwashing mixed with shuffling of regulatory renewables credits leading to a lot of arbitrage opportunities. But they really cloud the actual underlying production and usage.
As another example, the company I previously worked for was (and is) a solar equipment manufacturer, of inverters and batteries and controllers and such, but even they are starting to more and more trying to “virtual power plant” provider, where they can aggregate the combined output of a few hundred thousand solar-installed homes, resell their output on the electricity spot market, and then share some of the profit with homeowners. It takes that sort of scale to be able to have meaningful margins on the open market. It’s not something an individual homeowner or small-time investor can easily do.
Edit: 3000 sq ft is, what, maybe 60-70 kW of solar? It’s not nothing, but also far smaller than the typical megawatt-scale solar farms utilities actually care about. Maybe enough for a local offset of some factory/hospital/casino etc., but unlikely to be a significant investment source, especially if you have to run all the logistics yourself (as opposed to outsourcing it to an established solar generation company).
That is really the hole point. Suppose a leased 1/4 acre of land in the desert at 100.00% per month. And then I leased 8,000 sq ft of solar panels to put on it. And then sold my electricity directly to the grid. how many middlemen are eliminated?
I don’t know the actual numbers, sorry.
It depends on your scale and jurisdiction. There’s a lot of different regulation by state and utility, and for different levels of generation. If this is a serious consideration instead of a hypothetical, you’d have to look up the rules for your specific utility for the specific scale you’re considering. It’s very different when you’re generating a few kW vs a few hundred kW vs a few MW, and it will also be completely different from state to state and utility to utility.
And even then it’s not as simple as “here’s some land, I’ll plop down a hundred grand to get some solar panels”… there’s a LOT of non-trivial permitting and red tape before a commercial entity is allowed to sell power to a utility. You might actually want a middleman to help you navigate that part. (No utility is going to want to bother with the fluctuations of a small power plant directly sold to them like that. A middleman would help aggregate your small plant with a hundred other small ones to approximate something of utility scale.)
How are you getting that power to the grid?
One place this does seem to work, at least occasionally, is for farmers and ranchers. The general term is agrivoltaics. This is all based on things I’ve heard on Marketplace.
The land is already an existing business expense, whether owned outright, mortgaged, or leased. The shade provided by the solar is beneficial to growing the plants or animals, so the panels increase the productivity of their existing business. Selling the electricity is just gravy on top of all of that.
Here is a recent story about a small farm doing this. They make more selling the electricity than if they just raised and sold hay on the land.
Shade for cattle on the plains is a real issue. Be a good secondary purpose that could pay for the shade structure.
Maybe I could invent something new like “ copper wire”
Farmers often enter into deals with utilities to make some extra money by renting out some of their land for wind turbines. The revenue for the wind power often is more than the money made by just grazing or growing crops. I haven’t heard of them doing the same with solar farms, but maybe a case could be made.
Maybe you could tell us how far away this “grid” is from your proposed installation in the desert, how you plan to pay for access though other people’s lands with your installed wire to the grid, how much wire you plan to buy…and how you plan to get access to this grid from the power company in the first place.
Maybe solar power should be viewed as public infrastructure. I wonder how much it costs to actually produce a solar panel and what the total markup is by the time it reaches the customer.
This is a very good guide on the selling of solar power back, and why it is a misnomer to refer to it that way: How To Sell Electricity Back To The Grid: Complete 2025 Guide
Also cell phone towers.
I looked into buying my own panels. They were cheap, but installing them and getting the approvals to connect to the grid were expensive.
Out here we have expensive utility rates plus I have a hot tub, an EV and an all house heat pump. My bills for a month where I use the heat a lot are around $400/month. I’ve gotten quotes for solar and it still makes no financial sense especially now that the tax incentives are gone.