I fully agree. In cities and places with a grid, fossil fuels will absolutely dominate, while rural grids/independent homeowners could use solar. However, I do think the cost of acquiring such panels could be prohibitively expensive for some rural homeowners.
That being said, free electricity is free electricity. There are so many use cases for distributed small power systems, particularly in rural areas. I would bet that early solar could have found widespread use while yes, fossil fuels would still have dominated.
SimplePhysics@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Yes, but in 1909 they didn’t have a grid yet.
rbesfe@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
It’s not free though, solar panels back then would be prohibitively expensive to get any amount of useful power out of them
PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Coal required someone to dig the mine, build the railroad and powerplant, not to mention build the electricity infrastructure. That was a huge expense and made a lot of people rich.
We do t have a cost information to judge these by, but the infrastructure costs were certainly far lower for solar panels.