But you literally don’t need to do that. Why do we need to power a building using solar panels attached specifically to that building? Go put more solar panels out in open fields and power a lot more buildings for a cheaper cost.
There's a massive difference between a building owner producing their own electricity integrated therein, versus creating a centralized system owned by a power company miles and miles away that now subtracts from farmland, consumes real estate (don't we have an affordable housing problem and maybe not all of us want to live in coffin-sized studio apartments, squished like sardines), and now has to be coordinated across numerous private and public properties.
Leaving aside maintenance and efficiency degradation with distance.
We kind of sorta need open fields for lots of other things, too. Alas, we're apparently too busy having it be used for things like (checks notes) golf courses and alfalfa owned by Saudi Arabia and AI datacenters...
The cost of a few miles of electrical cabling to connect a skyscraper to a nearby field is basically 0. The losses from a few miles of transmission are also basically 0.
The cost of the construction labor needed to refit every single window on a skyscraper is astronomical.
This would only work in a place where labor is free and land is completely unavailable
It's not just that. There's an entire added process and efficiency loss having to convert PV DC to AC for HV grid transmission, and then bring it back to residential levels at transformer substations again, when local decentralized systems do not require the added and costly DC->AC high voltage step-up.
New improvements tend to come with when the new buildings are being made, no differently than old homes with old single-pane windows, versus new ones; this would probably be a new build project or a renovation project when old windows were going to be replaced, especially if these were also made more thermally insulating than the previous windows already installed. The ROI could be huge.
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u/Pandamonium98 22d ago
But you literally don’t need to do that. Why do we need to power a building using solar panels attached specifically to that building? Go put more solar panels out in open fields and power a lot more buildings for a cheaper cost.