In the US, once people buy houses, they generally do not move around that often since they do not want to lose the tax exemptions that come with it and cannot recover their costs of buying their house and the cost of selling their house until their house appreciates at least 25% That will not happen till 7 to ten years later. BY then, most people tend to stay until they have a different job or some event that necessitates the moving. People that move around that often tend to rent, not buy.Mort Walker wrote: Rooftop solar has lots of potential in India where people live in their houses for generations. In the US, people move quite frequently and investing in solar panels is questionable for home use where you may not be able to recover the initial cost.
On a personal note, I made sure of that I would stay in the house that I currently have for a long time. Once I made sure of that, getting solar was a no-brainer. I am waiting for the price of the battery to drop more so I can completely wean myself off from the grid for as long as I can. Right now, through net metering, I am still relying on the grid to provide with just under 20% of my electricity needs. Getting a 100kwh slow charging stable energy storage combined with a rapid charging/discharging 20kwh batter would be a couple years away as the cost of getting that system is around $50k ~$60k. It only makes economically sense if that system comes down to $10k which translates to needing the cost of energy storage to come down to $20/kwh. Right now Tesla has gotten the battery costs down to $100/kwh but it doesn't mean that we, as the consumers, will buy the batteries at $100/kwh. The way Tesla price the Powerwall2s and installation costs, we are effectively paying $570/kwh which translates to 5.5 ~5.7 times the actual cost of the battery. That means the actual cost of manufacturing the battery needs to come down to $20/kwh.