ziggy - It seems to make more sense to install these on a municipal, or neighborhood level. One plant feeding 1,000 homes over the installed grid, versus 1,000 installations, each requiring climbing on a roof, customization to get mounting brackets at the correct angle, aesthetic issues, and the need for a licensed electrician for each install. From nanosolar:
Municipal Solar Power Plants Goal for Nanosolar
Nanosolar - Articles
 Quote:
At Nanosolar, we believe very much that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, in particular from municipal solar power plants of 2-10MW in size. These are rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding power directly into the municipal electricity grid.
A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes - that’s acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. Similar for a 10MW plant for a city with 5,000 homes: This would require five such lots.
Solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground in solar power plants so that grass and flowers can continue to grow in between and below the panels, protecting the local ecosystem. Care is taken that rainwater can flow in between adjoining panels to nourish the flowers and organisms below.
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Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency.
While rooftops are surely a good application too for solar panels, it is a business that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is fundamentally always a somewhat more expensive proposition.
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