Genuine question. Have seen lots of videos of people putting just one or two solar panels in their garden, on a shed or even on a van and using tech called a grid-tie inverter to plum it into the mains electric. Its started to make me wonder if we should all do this. Just a few hundred watts each from a percentage of homes around the average town or city would surely make a dent into carbon, meaning less oil and gas were burnt.
Obviously there are people who cant afford the tech or the space, but from just looking online the inverter is a couple of hundred quid, a 2-300w solar panel is 150 quid each. Cables not much. Talking to an electrician friend most homes have fuses here that can take a maximum of 30-50amps (in and out), so if your set up is small its not going to blow the electrics out.
Thoughts?
The answer is a solid maybe. In a vacuum? Yes it would be helpful. But I see a world in which private power companies lobby the government to make this illegal, or put some fee or tax on it, or literally do anything possible to stop people from cheaply generating their own power. If everyone did this and cut their power usage from the power company by even 1% that would represent a significant chunk of lost revenue and they, being the capitalist assholes they are, would do literally everything in their power to stop that from happening. Punishing people for generating free sustainable power would make this completely unfeasible.
I know today they buy the extra power and resell it, so that might also be what they do...just act as a middleman to mark up the power we're generating for free to resell it to people who aren't generating it. Which is also a total bullshit move but is a best case scenario in a private power market