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Even today the cost of installing solar is dominated by the labor costs, not the panel costs. The panel costs have been collapsing for years now, but full syst
by jandrese 3y ago
Even today the cost of installing solar is dominated by the labor costs, not the panel costs. The panel costs have been collapsing for years now, but full system costs have been steady or even rising.
Some of this is people (usually required to by the installers) choosing expensive solutions like microinverters or optimizers that add a high fixed cost to each panel, even though both technologies offer very little utility to the customer. The old talks about how one shaded panel would take an entire array out are out of date and just plain wrong these days. The other is that some of the costs like permitting and interconnection are just as hard or even harder as they always were, especially as power companies get nervous about the number of people installing solar panels.
- balderdash 3y agoI’m not sure I’d say dominated (PV is still 40-60% of the installed cost of a utility scale plant), but your def on that labor, power electronics etc. have eaten much of the gains of cheaper/efficient PV
- jandrese 3y agoTo be clear I was talking about rooftop solar.
- thinkcontext 3y agoWhy when it's such a small part of the market?
- sbierwagen 3y ago>expensive solutions like microinverters Enphase IQ7-60 is $85 on Amazon right now.
- jandrese 3y agoAdding $85 to each $250 panel is a significant cost increase.
- jcalvinowens 3y ago> choosing expensive solutions like microinverters [...] that add a high fixed cost to each panel, even though both technologies offer very little utility to the customer. I have to disagree with you there... they're not that expensive, and they eliminate the most common single point of failure in the system. When I installed mine last year, I got quotes from every major supplier: I paid a roughly 10% premium for panels with microinverters over a traditional system. We're talking about extending the time it takes for panels that will work for 20+ years to pay for themselves by a few months, in exchange for a massive increase in redundancy: that was an obvious decision from my point of view.