Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is “soft costs”, and labor is included in it, but it’s a pretty small fraction of it. The “other” soft costs are the big thing–stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.
Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn’t even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.
Yeah, community solar parks are really the best because they remove a whole lot of these soft costs.
These soft costs include:
bureaucracy (you need 1 permit instead of 100 permits),
nobody needs to climb on a roof,
shipping many panels at once to the installation site is much more efficient than only shipping 5-8 modules at a time
additionally, any kind of fixed-cost complexity is spread over a bigger field. i.e., you should add circuit breakers to make sure the solar panels don’t feed into the grid when the energy prices are already negative.
adding that breaker has a fixed and constant price. adding one breaker to a large park is more efficient than adding 100 breakers into a 100 households.
Thanks. There’s way too many people who don’t see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
My numbers were wrong:
www.nrel.gov/solar/…/solar-installed-system-cost
Hardware costs (module, inverters, etc.) are about half the price of the installed residential cost. The rest is “soft costs”, and labor is included in it, but it’s a pretty small fraction of it. The “other” soft costs are the big thing–stuff like permitting and planning and sales taxes. Better efficiency might somewhat lower it, but not a lot.
Notice that when things get to utility-scale, those soft costs shrink a lot. The best way to do solar is in large fields of racks, and it isn’t even close. The solution to this is community solar, where you and your neighbors go in on a field. Some states ban this, and that should change.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
Yeah, community solar parks are really the best because they remove a whole lot of these soft costs.
These soft costs include:
additionally, any kind of fixed-cost complexity is spread over a bigger field. i.e., you should add circuit breakers to make sure the solar panels don’t feed into the grid when the energy prices are already negative.
adding that breaker has a fixed and constant price. adding one breaker to a large park is more efficient than adding 100 breakers into a 100 households.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Thanks. There’s way too many people who don’t see the problems with rooftop residential solar. Commercial/industrial rooftop can work out, but fields are the cheapest electricity you can get.