The other thing that would happen that no one talks about is that electricity rates would skyrocket because the power company wasn't making enough money. This is exactly what happened in Ontario, Canada. People started conserving and it caused rates to go up. Same thing happened with water in California (at least the Bay Area). People started conserving better, so to reward us, they raised water rates.
So all this study actually did was estimate roof coverage in Switzerland using a new method?<p>The figure is pretty easy to estimate anyway, but they used the <i>Machine Learning</i> OMG method?<p>> What if half of Switzerland's rooftops produced electricity?<p>What would be interesting if someone did some work and actually worked this out, no?<p>How would infrastructure change?
What backups would be needed?
Could surplus, if any, be used for anything?
Could you connect to other countries in new ways?
How would employment be effected?
Supply chains for materials?
Reflected and absorbed energy would change city heat sinks how?
Would smog change at all?
Someone did a calculation for Singapore: <a href="https://medium.com/sausheong/estimate-the-solar-output-of-your-rooftop-with-google-maps-725e4f636f14" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/sausheong/estimate-the-solar-output-of-yo...</a><p>His conclusion: 'This is about 7.3 TWh or 11.5% of the 63.4 TWh of expected Singapore’s electricity consumption in 2030'<p>He also made an interesting tool to calc easily the output of solar panels on your rooftop: <a href="https://sausheong.github.io/solarest/" rel="nofollow">https://sausheong.github.io/solarest/</a><p>The only thing missing there is an easy way to get the average sunpower for some place in the world. I made a small app to calc that from the nasa website but unfortunately did not yet have time to put it online
What if we just build another nuclear plant instead? Lets just go China or South Korea to build one for us. Or even better plan on some next Gen designs that are gone be coming out in the next 10ish years.