Are Rooftop Solar Panels the Solution to America’s Growing Energy Crisis?

For years, Dan Harrison’s home in the western hills of Los Angeles would lose power when it was hot, when it rained or when it was very cold — sometimes the outages would stretch longer than 10 hours.

So, he took matters into his own hands.

Over the last six years, he has bought rooftop solar panels and batteries. Now, his house often helps keep the lights on across his neighborhood, near the University of California, Los Angeles.

Outside Mr. Harrison’s home.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

U.S. electric grids are increasingly under strain and utility companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on upgrades — expenses that are driving up electric bills. At the same time, power-hungry data centers, electric vehicles and heat pumps are increasing demand for electricity.

But adding new sources of power isn’t easy. Turbines for natural gas plants are scarce. Large wind and solar projects and the transmission lines to connect them to cities are often stymied by local opposition. New nuclear reactors are years away.

One solution is to install more rooftop solar panels and batteries. Each such system is small, but collections of them can act like small power plants by supplying electricity to the grid when demand surges on, say, summer afternoons.

Note: Units are in watt-hours.

“This is a customer-led way to improve lives,” said Mary Powell, a former utility executive who is now the chief executive of Sunrun, the nation’s largest rooftop solar and home battery company.

But not everybody buys that idea. President Trump has criticized solar and wind energy as unreliable while championing fossil fuels. Congress is ending tax benefits for solar, and the administration is scrapping a $7 billion program that helped low-income families install rooftop panels.

It’s not just Republicans who have targeted such energy systems.

Mr. Harrison outside his four-bedroom Los Angeles home.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

To better understand rooftop solar and batteries, The New York Times examined a year’s worth of daily data from Mr. Harrison’s system.

Annually, he sends more power to the electric grid than he takes from it. From July 2024 through June 2025, his system produced around 13,700 kilowatt-hours of solar energy and sent over two-thirds of that to the electric grid. He drew under 4,000 kilowatt-hours from the grid during that same period.

Mr. Harrison earns credits for the electricity he sends to the grid that offset the power he uses from the system. That means he pays nothing to the utility company for energy. But because the credits can only offset his energy use, he is not paid for sending more to the grid than taking from it.

All told, he is saving about $3,600 a year — the amount he used to pay in utility bills before his system was installed.

Almost three dozen panels blanket Mr. Harrison’s roof and begin producing electricity after dawn. In the early hours, all of that energy, plus some from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, feed his appliances and lights.

As the sun gets brighter, the panels start generating more power than Mr. Harrison, 55, an entertainment television executive, and his wife and daughters can use. Some automatically goes into three batteries.

The three batteries that help power the Harrison home.

Mark Abramson for The New York Times

Electricity from his panels also flows onto the utility’s power lines.

Like water running down a hill, the energy moves along the path of least resistance, meaning it goes to his neighbors.

A few dozen panels on several roofs can provide a lot of power.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory concluded in a 2016 report that rooftop systems could theoretically provide almost half of the electricity that residents in many states use over a year and as much as 74 percent in sunny California.

Rooftop systems can be installed relatively quickly, and they generate energy that doesn’t travel far.

The downside is that installing rooftop panels costs more per kilowatt of energy than putting panels in open land.

Whether rooftop solar is good for U.S. energy systems depends on how those trade-offs are analyzed, said Severin Borenstein, the faculty director at the Haas School of Business’s Energy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

“The question is how do we meet growing demand” for electricity, Mr. Borenstein said. “How much will demand grow and how much will it create a strain on the grid. How fast can you build out grid-scale solar, which is, and not open to debate, cheaper?”

Ms. Powell noted that the more than 130,000 systems enrolled in Sunrun’s distributed power plant program have enough capacity to keep the electricity flowing to 480,000 homes.