Soft Benefit Over Utility for Rooftop Solar Power

Solar Power at the Utility scale provides the cheapest electricity in history. Even in the electricity market, however, the cheapest does not always imply the highest. Rooftop Solar Power has a number of significant advantages. It also doesn’t compete with utility-scale solar except in a few complex or policy-related ways. Rooftop solar power competes with grid-provided retail electricity rather than serving as a major new power source for a Utility or corporation.

However, if lawmakers want to incentivize or mandate renewable energy to deal with those social problems, they should think twice about whether or not rooftop Solar Power should be given extra weight. Any self-respecting policymaker should enjoy creating jobs — or, more precisely, policies that generate jobs.

Rooftop solar power generates approximately 30 times more jobs per million dollars invested than utility-scale Solar Power, as John Farrell pointed out this week. Hundreds of thousands of new jobs could be created in an area. For rooftop solar versus other large-scale power ventures, the storey is close, if not better.

Furthermore, as we all know, rooftop systems are gradually being combined with home energy storage systems, resulting in even more job opportunities. Tesla, in reality, is now only installing solar panels with Powerwalls, as CEO Elon Musk recently said (energy storage systems). It no longer instals solar panels on their own. Given that Tesla is one of the country’s largest  installers and appears to sell the cheapest rooftop Solar Power systems (per watt), this will result in a lot of additional hardware installation — and thus additional employment.