Comment by antisthenes a day ago
> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
> protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
This is a hollywood meme.
The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall in line and become semi-official protective militia forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small communities if they don't want to starve.
Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.
There are a lot more of regular reasonable folks who own guns (approximately 134 million in USA) than those who have some kind of meme warlord fantasy.
Which is to say, normal people really don't like shooting each other, and they REALLY don't like being shot at, so most normal folks would eliminate the threat of crazy warlords first, then form some kind of organized militia group to repel small groups of raiders/thieves.
Any large group of raiders would very quickly fall victim to its own internal politics and lack of resources, because they don't produce anything. You can't have a group that's 100% raiders.
It's just not going to look like Mad Max, ever. Sorry to disappoint.
If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.