My favorite part of PV is that you can scale it to fit any power generating capacity, from a residential roof all the way up to a 50MW farm. It’s fairly linear, too, in terms of land usage and cost, which makes it easy to understand.
Yes, this is really the crucial thing about solar. It scales, in all directions, from small to large.
Production capacity is scaling too, though just barely at the edge of what we need. I really wish that governments would commit hard to decarbonization of the hydrogen market (including ammonia for fertilizer), through solar/wind + elctrolyzers. The only thing stopping further scaling of production capacity is the demand side of things. Having an extra 50-100 GW of solar production to decarbonize industry would really speed the climate transition. But until there's the guaranteed market for it, the market is going to develop very slowly until green hydrogen is cheaper than natural gas as an input.
Germany pushed solar along when it wasn't cheap, greatly accelerating the fall off solar prices. All governments should push industrial chemical process decarbonization together.
The other thing to is the massive redundancy with solar. Friend mine worked on installing a giant GE Gas Turbine for a power plant. They fired it up and it threw its blades. And it was down for 9 months. Doesn't really happen with solar.
This means PV can be installed with some level of sloppiness and inattention to detail that would be ruinous on a large integrated power plant, like a nuclear power plant. I bet this also reduces labor costs by reducing the level of training and expertise required.
50MW is a small scale solar generator these days. Bhadla Solar Park is 2.2GW, and there are plans being tossed around to go even larger. For example 10GW in northern Australia (Sun Cable).
