In many countries, people don’t have to imagine it.
A million and a half Germans have installed “balcony solar”—they simply went to the big-box store, bought a giant panel for a few hundred euros, hung it from their apartment railing, and produced up to a quarter of their household’s power needs. Other European countries have followed suit. Ditto Australia, where Saul Griffith, author of the new book
Plug In!, notes that permits can be had in a single day using a smartphone app—“the tradie [contractor] often does this for you. In Australia, it takes two or three days once you’ve made the decision to do it to get the system up and running.”
But not in America, where President Donald Trump and his Republican allies are pulling out all the stops to destroy renewable power. They’ve
shut down big offshore wind projects, they’re
limiting projects on public lands, and the “Big Beautiful Bill” not only
rolled back tax credits for large-scale renewable projects, it took
direct aim at precisely the kind of rooftop solar work that thousands of small contractors like EmPower produce. Upon news that the bill would phase out tax credits for residential solar by the end of 2025, the already depressed stock price of Sunrun, the country’s biggest residential solar provider, fell 40 percent;
PV Magazine, the industry trade journal,
headlined its story “U.S. Residential Solar on the Brink of Collapse.”