Solar now ‘cheaper than grid electricity’ in every Chinese city

It's likely that you would need to get planning permission to put solar panels on the roof of a building. This generally requires you to be the owner.

Therefore it might not be best described as a market failure. It could be better described as a failure due to planning regulations that only give power to land-owners.

This is big problem in Europe, since as you point out: many people rent.

This isn't meant to be troll-y / snark-y, but if the USA factored out subsidies for Big Oil, and then added in the military costs associated with keeping the oil flowing, that would make solar look much more attractive.

Installing solar panels has become more and more uninteresting, at least in Germany.

In former times there were generous subsidies for installing solar panels: You got, I think, a fixed amount per kWh that you installed on your roof and you also got a better price for the electricity that you put back into the grid. In Germany it's called "Einspeisevergütung" if I remember correctly.

This program was limited though, and now you have to pay for the panels all yourself (or you get only a little bonus from the state) and the prices for "selling" into the grid have fallen drastically because there's just too much electricity on sunny days and its sold for negative values on the international electricity markets.

Installing new solar panels on your roof is now only interesting when you can use the electricity for yourself. That means charging EVs, filling battery-powered storage (also expensive and not subsidized, I think) or using the electricity around and in your house.

If you've got an older installation you might benefit from the old tariffs and get a little bit more money, but building new systems is rather uninteresting for private households.

With rising prices for electricity there will be new "motivation" for installing new solar systems on your house. But as already said, only for using the electricity for yourself.

Also a law was changed recently, so that renters can now install their own "balcony solar systems" (one panel for example) and feed that electricity right back into their grid through the wall outlet. This is only allowed with small systems though, so that you may produce enough energy for your household base load, but not make your meter turn backwards.

In the bigger picture all of this shows how Germany has, so far, failed to do a real switch to renewable energies or really take a step into that direction.

We got lots of solar systems and lots of wind turbines, but we are not able to store the produced electricity for later use. So lots of wind turbines are turned out of the wind, because there's an overproduction of electricity on windy days. And prices for solar generated electricity have dropped, as already mentioned.

Meanwhile the four large energy companies in Germany are doing what they want and are holding the government as hostage.

Chopping down woods without any need, because some coal-fired power stations needs to be run because we could otherwise lose 20.000 jobs all over Germany.

Nobody thinks about how many jobs we could create with a heavy switch and investment in renewable energies and storage solutions for energy.

After all, taking a step backwards it's kind of a sad situation.

This is the framing chosen by state propagandists.

From engineering standpoint it is not an easy task to balance random load that comes and goes from solar, centralized solar plants is one thing but panels on the roof is another. While electricity is abundant running the grid is not such an easy task as it may seem. So this might explain why there is such push back from utility companies against uncontrolled user solar devices connected to their grid.