There is no free lunch, and traditional solar installations don't usually have a lot of light missing the panels.
Traditional single axis tracking installations don't miss much light. These provide similar characteristics in space constrained areas, which are also closer to electricity consumers, potentially reducing transmission costs.
Fixed panels - common in denser areas, do miss a lot of light.
Also, what’s state of the art $/kwh for rooftop and “on the ground” solar? Is $0.05 good these days?
Easiest wins are code to require large commercial and industrial buildings to meet load requirements for future solar installs, parking lot canopies that are solar ready (or solar installed at time of canopy install), and in the case of residential, ground mount with low regulatory overhead and minimal to no shading.
Related:
NREL: Solar Installed System Cost Analysis - https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...
Cheap DIY solar fence design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45597198 - October 2025
Great comment from that thread on cost breakdown (Alaska): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45692595
which is puzzling to me, because most feasible rooftop solar needs close to zero prep work to be able to mount the panels on the roof. Ground mount needs either helical screws or concrete footings, both of which are relatively expensive in terms of either material and/or labor/time.
The kW per acre metric is pretty poor for solar, especially when you get out of sunny desert areas.
> The kW per acre metric is pretty poor for solar, especially when you get out of sunny desert areas.
The data says different. Broadly speaking, anywhere in the continental US is favorable for solar. The US gets more sunlight than Germany, and Germany has 101GW of solar capacity installed as of this comment (deploying ~2GW/month). You might need more panels near Canada, but panels and land are cheap, and demand for power is low due to limited population (caveats being PNW, served by hydro, and NE-ISO in New England, which is going to turn up a transmission line in December to bring 1.2GW of hydro from Québec).
For comparison, the US ag industry farms almost 60 million acres for soybean and corn biofuel, and that is far less cost and resource efficient than covering that land in solar PV.
Citations:
EIA: Where solar is found and used - https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/solar/where-solar-is-fou...
EIA: Solar and wind crush coal with 20% more power in 2025 - https://electrek.co/2025/09/24/eia-solar-and-wind-crush-coal... - September 24th, 2025
EIA: Utility-Scale Generation Units Planned to Come Online Septmeber 2025 - August 2026 - https://web.archive.org/web/20251029151054/https://www.eia.g...
interconnection.fyi: Active solar projects in queue - https://www.interconnection.fyi/?status=Active&type=Solar
Electricity Maps - https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/live/fifteen_minutes
Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45506365 - October 2025
A harmonized dataset of ground-mounted solar energy in the US with enhanced metadata - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05862-4 - September 29th, 2025
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45587816
This also factors heavily into where we use energy vs. where we produce it, and the associated losses. You can slot a GW of gas generation into ~350 acres anywhere. Solar you need ~5,000 acres with lots of sun. Combine this with the fact that the land where energy is used (population centers) is the land that is most expensive, and the difference becomes substantial. This also doesn't factor in energy storage costs, which is also necessary to reach parity with gas.
Also, don't take this as me attacking solar, I am a huge proponent, but there is a reality check needed so people can understand why we aren't paving the earth with panels despite constant headlines of "Solar is the cheapest energy". It's the cheapest energy when in an ideal location, and overwhelming majority of people in the US don't live in an ideal location.
This however doesn't really apply to non-gridscale generation. People can (and should) put panels on their roofs and batteries in their basement.
No dodge, solar won, and it is going to steamroll fossil fuels globally as battery storage deployment comes up to speed [9] [10].
> To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.
> Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa, where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.
[1] Gas-Turbine Crunch Threatens Demand Bonanza in Asia - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-10-07/gas-tu... | https://archive.today/z4Ixw - October 7th, 2025
[2] AI-Driven Demand for Gas Turbines Risks a New Energy Crunch - https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-bottlenecks-gas-turb... | https://archive.today/b8bhn - October 1st, 2025
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45746627 (Solar PV project timeline citations)
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569054 (Path 27 transmission citations)
[5] Solar, battery storage to lead new U.S. generating capacity additions in 2025 - https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586 - February 24th, 2025
[6] Solar+storage is so much farther along than you think - https://www.volts.wtf/p/solarstorage-is-so-much-farther-alon... - July 16th, 2025
[7] In Solar vs. Gas Matchup, It Was Energy Storage That Killed The Beast - https://cleantechnica.com/2025/03/02/in-solar-vs-gas-matchup... - March 2nd, 2025
[8] Solar electricity every hour of every day is here and it changes everything - https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/solar-electricity-e... - June 21st, 2025
[9] The exponential growth of solar power will change the world - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746617 - June 2024
[10] Global battery industry grows 83% in last five years, boosting deployment to over 300 GW - https://www.ess-news.com/2025/10/28/global-battery-industry-... - October 28th, 2025
So, when you say "well, they'll just build gas turbines instead," (in your comment I replied to) they cannot. There is no capacity, and no desire to increase capacity. They can barely build them already, and it would be pretty easy to make it harder to build them by finding points of fail to force to failure in their supply and labor chains. Smart money isn't going to invest in a technology that, from all indications, doesn't have longevity based on competing technologies. Existing gas turbine manufacturing is squeezing out the last of economic gains available before the industry shrinks further.
The White House’s Bet on Fossil Fuels Is Already Losing - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-10-28/white-... | https://archive.today/vpvch - October 28th, 2025
> US financial markets are favoring renewable energy over fossil fuels, with global investment for new renewable energy development reaching a record $386 billion during the first half of 2025.
> Revenue forecasts show a widening dichotomy between clean and dirty industries, with renewables expected to report 16% sales growth next year and 21% in 2027, while traditional energy companies report 1% and 6% sales growth.
> Global renewable power is forecast to increase by 4,600 gigawatts by the end of the decade, an amount equivalent to adding the generation capacity of China, the EU and Japan.
> Even as the US and European Union recently increased their reliance on coal, solar dethroned the fossil fuel mainstay last year, becoming the world’s most installed energy generation technology according to BloombergNEF’s 2025 Power Transition Trends report. “In 2015, solar power seemed far from overtaking coal, constrained both by scale and economics,” BloombergNEF said in report this month. Yet, within a decade, solar costs have fallen so dramatically that the dynamic has entirely reversed. Solar is now two times cheaper than the fossil fuel.” So-called green energy is the lowest-cost and quickest-to-deploy power generator in the US, even without incentives, according to Lazard Inc.
But I'm also not going to ignore the reality of the situation.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/us-gas-power-cap...
Going vertical doesn't magically increase capacity. It increases capacity for fixed surface area and if the surrounding surface area isn't needed.
> The funds are expected to help the startup scale its patented 3D solar towers that are designed to have high levels of energy density for space-constrained areas.
Third describes applications where this arrangement could be relevant:
> The product has applications for data centers, EV charging hubs, telecom towers, universities, and a range of industrial facilities, said Janta Power.
Clearly if land is cheap, traditional surface mount with no tracking is simpler and cheaper. This is targeting areas where land is at a premium but on-site capacity is still desired.
Which doesn't seem that excitingly new to me, but I don't know the industry that well. Has nobody tried vertical alignment before? Seems unlikely to me.
Something like this, but not so pronounced: /\/\/\/\
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DFJrLTusJc
https://www.solarpowerworldonline.com/2021/12/east-west-sola...
Seems largely based on the assumption that most people view PV installations as a strictly planar affair.
Does my neighbor who has solar on both slopes of his pitched roof have a geometrically novel "folded plate" configuration which increases capacity by employing the biomimetic strategy of diurnal heliotropism?
