I’ve always kind of wanted to do this. How much does it cost? Is it practical?
What if you had a large plot of land, and stuck panels throughout it?
Though if you had a large plot of land you could also do wind power… Hmm… Well wind is more of a vertical space requirement, and solar is more of a horizontal, so maybe you could do both. I dunno.

Best answer:

Answer by ioerr
It’s not real complicated, but it is expensive. Mainly because of the cost of photovoltaic cells.

You can make solar air heaters very easily and very cheaply. And solar water heaters aren’t prohibitively expensive.

But photovoltaic arrays are very expensive for the power they create. You can look them up on Ebay and elsewhere and very quickly get an idea. And those systems also require a battery bank, to save power for when the sun isn’t shining, and an inverter to turn it to AC for actual use, unless you want to set up a 12v DC system.

In a lot of places you can skip the battery banks and instead use your array in conjunction with the public utilitiy’s grid, using the public grid when the array is not producing. In some places you can sell excess output from the array back to the grid.

Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!