Solar canopies on parking lots
Is the precise reason there are not solar canopies everywhre because the cost of panels is not competitive with the value of the power they yield?<p>Something seems economically broken in the solar business. It should be an arbitrage that so many people pile into that panel prices plummet as fast as compute processing and RAM has. Economically, Moore&#x27;s law should also apply to solar panels, but the R&amp;D isn&#x27;t economical either.<p>Sure, the hard problem isn&#x27;t collection but transmission and storage, but again, what is the R&amp;D bottleneck? We could say the subsidies on fossil fuels means the competitiveness of solar is suppressed, but maybe we need some breakaway regions that make it viable, like a hundred solar Las Vegas&#x27;es that run on cryptocurrency chips signed by solar power producers, and govts can tolerate our autonomy in exchange for taking the risk on tech to create newly sustainable economies.<p>If you really want solar power, legalize gambling with a provably solar powered  cryptocurrency. I could build the first low powered rig in an afternoon, as it would be a panel hookup, a raspi, and the secret sauce would be the HSM that signed the tokens it produced. If someone stole the keys, you just fork and grandfather tokens produced before the compromise. If someone swapped their panel for grid power instead of solar to produce them, the sun is the ultimate open random number generator and by encoding bursts from it into the token, you could see whether a miner was producing consistently based on volume relative to the random stream from the sun.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the tech that is the problem, there&#x27;s something fishy about the economics, as these are solvable problems.