I'm not anti solar panel, I'm pro, lets do more solar panel research and advancement before bothering to install them, so we don't need to "upgrade" them as frequently as people upgrade their phones.
Solar panels are the
greatest they ever have been, not "just as the moment". It's not an instantaneous improvement, but it's still improvement each year. They will only get better with time, but they require the investment to make worthy. Maybe once these ones break, we'll have 50% efficient panels and replace them with 500 watt models / sq meter instead of 200 watt, like 30 years from now.
I guess you could argue with the trade war, it would be a bad time to buy, but I see constant deals on them less than $0.40 / watt (monocrystalline) and think "jesus, that's only like a couple years to offset my electricity bill", then I realize most of the cost is labor and converters (which is kinda dumb, because I run mostly DC heavy items... so... maybe I should just eliminate the step to AC back to DC). However; I digress.
There's a certain advantage to solar over coal. Once you set them, you can forget them. Coal you need someone loading up the hopper and mining... ya know, the coal.
The idea that solar panels are a toy is kinda silly. They're quite powerful and large installations are becoming more cost effective than other means of energy generation.
The last time I had planned on purchasing solar panels, commercially available, they were 17-20% efficient. Now, maybe 6 years later, they are more or less the same, though the price has decreased. $0.40/watt is absolutely a good price, there are a lot of additional costs that go along with solar setups, but I won't disagree, that under $1/watt is pretty nice. I'm not sure if you've looked into getting them yourself, I was considering purchasing solar panels, and was quoted around $70,000 for 5 KW from two or three companies after inverters, charge controllers, and installation. I have quite literally built a (small) nuclear reactors for less than that. Of course I now build solar panels myself for a fraction of that cost, but mostly for low power applications as I don't have a square meter of space to place solar panels.
Passive power is nice, but I do not think professionally installed solar panels are even slightly worth it at the moment. The projected, "These will pay themselves off in 20 years!" mentality doesn't factor in depreciation, degradation of their efficiency, the chance that a limb is going to fall and break them, and the amount of pissed off you'll be in 3 years when the same system costs half what it does now. Building your own isn't the most cost efficient either, but sometimes its nice for convenience sake. Though its also illegal to tie them into the grid, so I can only use mine for pranks and off site small machinery. 200 Watts, even 1 KW is a toy in my opinion. Consider what miners are using for electricity. If a $2,000 mining rig draws 4 KW of power, they'd need $20,000 worth of solar panels to offset it anyway.
Again, my point isn't to stop solar research or to call it pointless, in my opinion its just pointless at the moment. Many clean energies are produced for under 1 cent per kilowatt hour. Solar just can't compete with that for the time being. When we see $1/Watt installed, at 50% efficiency, I'll reevaluate.
Article published November 15th, 2018:
https://www.solarpowerauthority.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-install-solar-on-an-average-us-house/