Seeing fewer rooftop solar installations when I visit my home state (Texas) than I see in the one I live in (Bavaria) is a trip. Yes, I know that electricity is far cheaper there than here, but as much electricity as air conditioning eats, and as big as those roofs are (panels are cheap; it's the system that's expensive), it should balance out.

Anecdotally, a ton of solar has gone up in the last four years here in Germany, both rooftop and, increasingly, in what were likely canola fields for biodiesel along highways - at first driven by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the need to reduce natural gas consumption, but now by how absolutely cheap those panels are. Too bad they're not being made here...

My favorite installation so far: a large field in SW Germany, with the panels high enough for cattle to wander and grass to grow under them. The cattle were almost all under those panels, munching away - it was a hot day.

My 65yo parents installed Solar panels on the roof of their house in a Tier 2 city in the poor parts of India. So did pretty much most of their neighbours.

So i would have to disagree. We are significantly far ahead from the initial “idea”.

Some of our neighbours had home solar, wind, and battery storage in the 1990s.

They had a huge specially-made array of lead acid batteries, a backup wood-fired stove for cooking when their power went out, a refrigeration setup where they had to child-lock the fridge during an outage so visitors wouldn't open it and spoil their milk, and no grid connection (which wouldn't have easily allowed residential exports until the late 90s anyway). They also had no cooling other than a fan and windows, and wood heating.

It's honestly pretty impressive how far we've come. Particularly in Australia, where we're world leaders in home solar capacity but are lagging behind in utility-scale renewables, it's really breathtaking to see the country go from 44kWh to 1880kWh per capita capacity in 15 years based mostly off incentivised rooftop solar.

We're getting there: California does[1] require solar installation on many new builds, and has followed Australia in doing automatic permit processing[2] to streamline installation. It's possible to pay around $20k for an average home, and in as little as one week have 100% of your power bill covered by solar.

[1] https://www.greenlancer.com/post/california-solar-mandate

[2] https://www.energy.ca.gov/programs-and-topics/programs/calif...

Sorry to disagree, but we are not just closer, we’ve been there for a while.

You can go out and buy solar panels to cover your roof for a few thousand dollars/pounds/euros. You could definitely not do that in 1999.

Barely any closer? I can see it on every fourth roof in western Slovak village.