alt Hacker NewsThe article seems to be mostly about grid scale solar. Of course an increasing amount is private or domestic solar installed on e.g. building roofs or wherever there is space.
When cost drops low enough, any surface with any exposure to sunlight is in scope for installing solar on if it can yield more energy than the cost of installing solar on it. It stops being about what is the most efficient and starts being about if the surface is good enough to provide a decent return on investment. Maximizing that ROI is complex but it boils down to getting more value out of the installation than goes in.
Solar doesn't even have to be in panel form. Some office buildings now have windows that double for solar generation. A thin transparent coating does the job. There are roof tiles that double as solar panels. Aptera makes electric cars with integrated solar panels. These are curved glass panels that are manufactured to fit the profile of the roof and hood. It's also possible to print organic solar cells directly on plastic rolls. No glass involved. Or panels. Those are less efficient but you can integrate them on all sorts of surfaces. A lot of that stuff is still emerging technology. But especially organic solar printed on plastic rolls could end up being very cheap to produce. And very light.
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“When cost drops low enough, any surface with any exposure to sunlight is in scope for installing solar on if it can yield more energy than the cost of installing solar on it.”
I don’t see the logic? As panel prices drop, installation costs start dominating overall cost of energy produced and so economic pressures will be on simpler and simpler PV installations. Laying a panel almost flat on the ground amongst thousands of others will be a cheaper process - both initially and in terms of ongoing maintenance - than anything that involves sending workers up ladders or cherrypickers attaching and wiring a panel onto the side of a building.
So grid scale will start to dominate over domestic or “novelty” (e.g. floating panels on reservoirs) and simpler and simpler approaches to installation (like removing tracking) will become attractive.
These effects are already apparent. Basically the opposite of what you’re predicting?
Grid scale solar benefits from bifacial cells in a vertical orientation just as much as home scale solar - it dramatically improves winter production and extends the production of the spring/fall day a few hours earlier and a few hours later.
Domestic solar is a rapidly decreasing fraction of total solar deployments [1]. Not because it is not growing exponentially, but because grid-scale is much more exponential with no signs of that changing.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42591918