An appropriately sized solar and battery storage system can power you home indefinitely during prolonged power outages. Where as generator will eventually run out of fuel.
Do you actually have any hands on knowledge with what "appropriately sized" is, or are you just handwaving here based on "Oh, yeah, solar and battery will let you run grid down indefinitely" theory? Your sentiment is exceedingly common among people who've never dealt with the realities of an off-grid power system.
I can give you some concrete data on that, at least where we live. My office has a 5kW nameplate system, in what started as an attempt to do exactly what you're talking about, and on a bad day, will generate less than 1kWh in the winter (inversions, so heavy thick clouds, often fog, no wind that I could use as an alternative). My office idles at about 2kWh/day, with the inverter idle draw, internet and property network radios, monitoring hardware, etc. If I'm actually working in there, I need 3.5kWh if I don't use any heat (or use propane heat), and a bit more for electrical heating (I've got a heated foot pad that helps a ton without having to heat the whole space up). My ~10kWh battery bank handles most of the year just fine, but to run through winter without a generator, I'd need closer to 50kWh (it's always cold when these happen, so effective capacity is rather lower than nameplate). I guarantee the 4-5 gallons a winter I run through my generator during those weeks is less impact, across the board, than a large battery bank that only gets significantly cycled a few times a year would be.
My house system is 15.9kW nameplate. Worst generation so far this year was 2.5kWh on one of those nasty winter inversion days. Idle draw on the house (pure electric house, local well, and most of our transportation energy comes from electric as well) is 12-15kWh/day from things like freezers (and Dishy, that Starlink terminal is power hungry and probably could stand a timer on it), plus whatever we use. Before you say, "Install a bigger system, yours is obviously undersized," it's produced 21MWh this year so far, on a home power consumption of about 16MWh. It
is rather oversized already.
If you'd like to do the math from that and figure out how many hundreds of kWh we need to run those loads indefinitely grid down, you're welcome to, but a generator is an awful lot better solution than the sort of radically oversized solar one would need around here for year-round running. I also can't interconnect that much solar to the grid (we have a 25kVA transformer which limits, under local power company policies, us to 25kW nameplate panel), etc. Even my original system design, with 100kWh or so of lead, had a generator inlet port to handle extended winter running. It's just not feasible without it, in most climates.
It's a cute sentiment. It's just entirely wrong, in practice, for almost all areas. And it involves spending tens or hundreds of thousands of extra dollars compared to a generator.
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