I know in florida you have janky laws stopping you, but below 10kw it's still relatively easy.

I have a friend who installed <10kw of solar panels and they're now 97% off-grid in hot, wet florida weather with an old low-seer AC, single-pane windows and poor roof insulation which is roughly 60% of the energy usage.

The reason they got it is actually not to save money or anything, but to have power when grid goes down after hurricanes.

I set it all up myself, and while it is not trivial, it's not difficult either.

Learning to put connectors on properly, size cables and put lugs on properly, learn about earthing and breakers...just one bit at a time.

I'm about to set up another system on the roof of an outbuilding to supply power for a water pump and irrigation where we grow food. This will be much easier and simpler since it will have only one 48V lithium battery, but I'll still use Victron stuff and connect it to a Cerbo so it can be monitored.

If I sold this place and bought somewhere on the grid, the first thing I'd do is cut the cord and set up my own system again.

In my native Netherlands I'd guess to see that peaking at ~south at say 15-30 degrees, with some lower peaks at east/west combos.

Curious to see what it would be in this dataset.

It would be cool to modify them to be per-capita, although I imagine adjusting arbitrary hexes for population density would be a real challenge.

For that matter, I'd be interested in details of how "a team of researchers including alumni from NOAA, NASA and the USGS" (from the previous article) actually collected the data.

The CSS styles seem to dynamically unload and reload while I’m reading it causing the margins to jump and the fonts change, I’ve never seen anything like this before. FWIW I’m on iOS using brave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility

Solar thermal can't really compete economically with photovoltaics.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256809986804138.html

I'm old enough to remember Carter putting them on WhiteHouse roof and they were thousands of dollars then (and less efficient)