Went to a photovoltaic open house.
A local solar company hosts them every week. They park a rep in the homeowner's driveway for a few hours with a table, laptop, and handouts, giving tours of the hardware and showing all the details. It's sort of like the Porsche dealer bringing a few cars to your neighborhood for static displays and a test drive.
As we chatted with the company rep, he mentioned that the homeowners were a nuclear engineer and his wife. I said "Hunh, that's odd, around here that usually means he's a Navy submariner." A few minutes later they wandered out and sure enough, it turns out he's USNA '99, working at COMSUBPAC, and even used to have a couple of my old billets (of course about 15-20 years later). We were all a bit weirded out by the coincidence but we ended up talking story for over an hour.
Maybe it's not weird after all... I wonder what the correlation is between "submarine nuclear engineer" and "solar geek".
Their PV panels are about twice the power density as ours, including nearly 19% efficiency compared to our 13%. Their mounting racks and roof flashings are orders of magnitude beyond what we did five years ago. Our array has almost paid for itself and will keep chugging along for a couple more decades, but now it's looking like a Commodore 64 alongside a Macbook.
We're still considering buying a used EV or plug-in hybrid in 4-5 years and recharging it from a PV system. We'd need to add another 3-4 kilowatts to our current 3.3 KW system, and the new panels would probably be the roof of a pergola on the south side of the house. (Shading the south wall as well as making electricity.) These newer panels mean that the pergola doesn't need to be very big after all. But if the pergola idea doesn't work out then we could just as easily replace the old panels and add a second inverter. Best of all, it looks more clear than ever that we'd be able to handle it DIY.