Comments by "Paul Aiello" (@paul1979uk2000) on "How Offshore Solar Could be the Future of Energy" video.

  1. There's potential in offshore solar, but I have a feeling that the more advanced solar gets, the more on sites it's going to be deployed, in fact, there's already talks about how many could go gridless over the next decade, and as renewable and battery tech continues to get better, it's likely a lot more will want to do that to cut out the middle men and reduce cost. So I'm not saying there's no use for solar offshore, but I suspect the future is going to be more on-site as the tech continues to get better and a big reason I think that will happen is because it's really expensive to maintain the grid network. But for me, I think we need a hybrid approach of both solar and wind power with much better and cheaper battery tech for it to really work, especially when it comes to more consistent energy generating. On the plus side, it looks like solar is starting to be adopted in areas like car parks and farming, which there is a lot of untapped land that would be ideal for use and just like solar on the water, in can serve multiple purposes, at car parks, it would be ideal for charging EV cars, it's also much closer to building infrastructure, so should be easier to tie it into the energy network, on farming, apparently it seems to work well for protecting crops from too much sunlight. When you throw in that solar is developing in such a way that it can be used almost anywhere, I doubt space for deployment is going to be an issue and I think longer term it's going to make a lot more sense to deploy close or on-site for where the energy is being used, something that can actually be done now, but there are a few hurdles needed to overcome before that can be used widespread, which likely as solar and battery tech gets better, it's going to be a lot more viable for a lot more of us.
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