The outage has apparently been resolved as of an hour ago or so. Trains are starting to roll again, how ever long it’ll take to get back to whatever is called “normal” these days.

No we don’t need both for everyone. Those that can and want to do full rooftop overproduce significantly for their own needs. Even with significant battery capacity, they can easily supply quite a few neighbors.

The balcony solar still significantly reduces your power demand from the grid. But you’re still connected to the grid. There’s also winter where solar does basically nothing. It’s not every individuals responsibility to be completely self sufficient (even though it would be nice). It’s much more efficient to have centralized per generation of any type (water, solar, wind, possibly buffers like battery). That’s what we have the grid for. We just need the coal plants to be turned off and replaced with sensible alternatives.

Private solar is nice, and any power you didn’t need to transport is also nice. But having reliable and renewable grid is non-negotiable.

The extremely low barrier to entry makes this not stupid. It’s what gets it done. While this sounds less efficient, and I’m terms of power generated per panel it is, it is actually more efficient in money terms. You do not need professionals to install it in places that legally requires scaffolding to be rigged up first. For “real” a solar install, the price of the panels is actually a relatively minor point, as the majority of the price is made up of all the other requirements and labor costs.

This leads to the fact that this has the shortest return of investment time of basically all options and basically no administrative overhead either as it’s exempt from all that. For reference, the RoI for this is usually a year or two. A full solar roof install is 8+ years. This isn’t exactly close. It’s also extremely fast, and lowers electricity costs immediately.