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Thanks for the link. Two issues I see missing from NREL's analysis: land use and distribution. I don't see a cost attributed to land in there. It's free for r

Thanks for the link. Two issues I see missing from NREL's analysis: land use and distribution. I don't see a cost attributed to land in there. It's free for residential because it's already put to use, but not so for utility-scale and probably hard to estimate broadly. Environmental impacts of that land use should also be accounted for in addition to direct land acquisition cost and/or leasing. Solar generation does not have land impacts when placed on a roof. That land is already "disrupted" and therefore allocated for human use. Either way, labor is now the dominant piece of the cost for residential, and it's obvious that one-off small jobs in high-price metros are more expensive than a crew operating in rural areas. An accounting looking strictly and materials + labor is going to heavily favor utilities, but it doesn't capture the full picture.

pfdietz 3y ago
Last I checked in West Texas, the cost of land was < 2% of the total cost of installing a solar field. This was for land at $1200/acre.
- beembeem 3y ago
  Yes, you cherry-picked an under-regulated market with cheap land. Not to mention that cheap land is usually further from metro areas and thus requires more distribution costs. Either way, as I mentioned land acquisition cost does not fully encapsulate the environmental costs of covering large tracts of natural land with panels.
  - pfdietz 3y ago
    I looked in online real estate sites recently and found $1000/acre land within a few hours of NY City. Land is quite cheap. I hope you are spending your time attacking farming, which uses orders of magnitude more land than PV (and will even in a PV-powered world) and delivers orders of magnitude less economic value per unit of land.