I thought that was the point of paying so much for solar? To be OFF the grid?
No going off-grid is a substantially larger investment than most people can afford. To be off grid you have to be able to make enough electricity even on cloudy, short winter days. That means your system must be massively oversized for your needs during most of the year. You also need adequate batteries to store energy for overnight.
Instead people get enough solar to offset some or all of the electricity they use - but on average over time. So they produce a ton during the day and then draw from grid at night.
Correct, but that also comes to the main reason why paying people for roof solar isn’t sustainable in the long term.
As solar panels keeps getting cheaper, more and more people will put solar on their roof. Since they get paid / reimbursed for feeding power back into the grid. And they don’t need a battery because they can just draw from the grid. This causes two problems:
- During the day far more power is produced than needed, since everyone has solar on the roofs
- During the night there is a lot of power draw from the grid, which cannot come from all the available roof solar.
Paying people for their roof solar is a good strategy short-term, but as more and more people have solar on the roof you cannot really keep doing that.
That is not the point. Solar provides most of your power and if you need additional power you can easily get additional power from the grid. That power can come from other people that have solar connected to the grid or other sources. It allows people to not have to spend huge amounts of money on batteries while providing power for themselves and others.
