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Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfi
by anonfordays 2y ago
Soon (if not already) the largest costs associated with solar installations will be the labor. It's expensive to get people on roofs and electricians to reconfigure panels, install transfer switches, etc. The equipment could be free and it would still cost thousands for the skilled trades to install.
- hkgjjgjfjfjfjf 2y ago[dead]
- BobaFloutist 2y agoI wonder to what extent we can make it unskilled, at least for a building with modern wiring. Plug-and-play solar panels and batteries sound scary, but not necessarily impossible to do safely.
- wongarsu 2y agoAnything involving roofs is difficult to do unskilled (at scale). You are working at height, potentially on a sloped surface, and have to worry about keeping the roof water tight. But if you put the panels basically anywhere else it becomes a lot more viable. Some houses come with a plug to connect your generator, you can do something similar to plug in your inverter. Then you can later decide to put up a solar fence or put solar panels on the balcony or whatever strikes your fancy
- jeffbee 2y agoWhy not just prefab a frame with the panels mounted and hang it on the point of the roof with a crane? Working on the roof can be eliminated or minimized.
- happyopossum 2y agoWind. Panels and their support need to be anchored to the roof, lest they become flying solar panels.
- ssl-3 2y agoEven if it works, that just trades some of the working-on-a-roof trade skills for (much more expensive) crane operator and rigging skills, while also adding the expense of the crane itself.
- red_trumpet 2y ago> Plug-and-play solar panels [...] sound scary But they already exist and are pretty popular in Germany to put on your balcony.
- Diederich 2y agoNeat, do you have a quick reference handy? Thanks!
- dzhiurgis 2y agoIt's pretty high voltage (500V DC) - you start to get arcing at this voltage.
- datacruncher01 2y agoI think eventually the hardware will be so cheap it'll make more sense to use them as solar fences. Reduce the cost to install and maintain by 3-4x easily. Or DIY for practically nothing.
- marssaxman 2y agoThere's an apartment building here in Seattle which has solar panels mounted flat on its west-facing wall (602 12th Ave). The panels were apparently cheap enough that they did not care about maximizing daylight exposure and simply installed them in the easiest place. Quite a change this is from what I remember when I had solar panels installed on my roof eleven years ago!
- oakesm9 2y agoThere’s an Undecided video on this exact topic https://youtu.be/LqizLQDi9BM?si=nnWVU-Espt7a6VDv https://youtu.be/LqizLQDi9BM?si=nnWVU-Espt7a6VDv
- gniv 2y agoThis is fantastic! Somehow I hadn't heard about vertically mounted solar panels until now but it sounds great. There are so many advantages to vertical mounts I would expect them to become the norm.
- xnx 2y ago
- mapt 2y agoThis has been the case for years now for pitched residential roofs - they stopped being competitive a long time ago. Thankfully, the impetus for residential roof solar was always more ideological than practical. There's plenty, PLENTY, of empty unused land within a 95% transmission efficiency (hundreds or even thousands of kilometers depending on tech) of the end user, for all non-island cases.
- rconti 2y agoYeah. When we bought our solar system, even knowing it was grid-tied, it felt like we'd somehow be generating our own power. As soon as we had it, and I looked at the tiering, time-of-use, etc, and I realized it's all an arbitrage game. I'm selling my roof space and fixed asset back to the power company, and buying power from them.
- ghaff 2y agoIf solar could reasonably double for me as a way of weathering a several day power outage in the winter, it would be more interesting. But I'm deeply suspicious of anything that has people out in front of Home Depot hard-selling something that often has complex financing schemes. I don't have huge power bills relative to lots of other home costs. So I'll pass.
- mapt 2y agoDIY doesn't come with those asterisks, and DIY with only-thermal power use & energy storage is on the simple side of things. "Help me heat in the winter" is basically the simplest use-case, because you can accomplish it with a south-facing solar fence and some resistors [or an inverter + space heater, or whatever]. Personally I like the idea of a three-season thermal mass store, a big tank of water or pile of sand that you dump heat into when it's sunny, and extract it at will the rest of the day/week.
- matharmin 2y agoThat depends on where you live. In my area, labor is cheap and the costs of panels, batteries and inverters came down significantly over the last 5 years. You can now break even on electricity costs for a residential pitched-roof installation in under 5 years. This is without any subsidies, without selling anything back to the grid. Utility-scale solar installations also make a lot of sense, but around here transmission capacity for that is still a massive issue. You can install more transmission capacity, but it's not cheap.
- jeffbee 2y agoResidential solar costs in the USA are already 50% sales and marketing, and most of the other half is labor.
- jandrese 2y agoThat and banking enough to cover the warranty for the next 30 years. Lots of early solar systems had reliability issues, especially the inverters, that make them expensive to maintain.
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoWhat if I just bought a field and laid them on the ground, over some plastic or something? Sure, I might be giving up some efficiency gains by not swiveling towards the sunlight or something, but I have to imagine there's a "plug and play" option possible here.
- Tade0 2y agoThere's precedent: https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-ground/ https://electrek.co/2022/12/12/texas-solar-farm-flat-on-the-... I think the efficiency figures are exaggerated, but the fact remains that such an installation requires less labour.
- ibeff 2y agoI wish JUST ONE PERSON in the comments would read the gosh darn article.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwup238 2y agoThat's already the case, even with commercial solar. There's a startup called Erthos [1] that has figured out that it's cheaper to just throw the panels on the ground, saving the labor and material cost for the supports. There was an HN thread on it a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33926683 [1] https://erthos.com/ https://erthos.com/
- jtbayly 2y agoThis and the parent comment are all addressed in the article.
- throwup238 2y agoTo be fair, no one’s ever accused me of reading the articles before commenting :-)
- nostrademons 2y agoThis is one of the forces driving the shift from rooftop solar to utility-scale installations. A residential installation needs guys up on a roof to install the panels, and then custom wiring for each house. A solar farm can use robots to install tens of thousands of panels cheaply. There are unfortunate side effects to this, even besides the attacks on net metering that have cut financial returns for existing solar customers. Distributed generation is more resilient. With a battery, you can keep your electricity during a power outage. Outages themselves are more isolated - with a VPP individual neighborhoods could keep power, while if a transmission line to a major solar farm goes down, a whole city could lose power. Large solar farms would be huge targets for warfare or sabotage, and wouldn't last very long at all. Transmission lines to them are vulnerable to natural disasters. Economically, large utilities have more market power and can capture their regulators, leading to higher prices and poor service for consumers. But the economic benefits of scale make it harder to justify putting panels on each individual home, when the same generation capacity can be built much cheaper at a solar farm.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe attack on net metering isn't unfortunate; what's unfortunate is that people thought net metering ever made any sense. It's free riding on services provided by the grid, forcing others (who don't have PV) to pay for cost of providing those services. As PV rolled out, the craziness of net metering became impossible to ignore. Of course, those feeding at this trough objected loudly, and some naively fell for those objections.
- mercutio2 2y agoI think it's reasonable to subsidize adoption of early-stage technology that's promising but doesn't pencil out yet, to kick-start the learning curve. Thanks largely to Germany for doing the lion's share of the early subsidies with solar! But you're of course correct that this is a giant subsidy, and unfortunately it was funded by other rate payers rather than a central government, which was a nutty system from the beginning.
- bee_rider 2y ago
- kragen 2y agothis is the main topic of the article; it describes where those costs come from and how they are being reduced
- energy123 2y agoOne of the YC companies is doing robotics for solar panels installation https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/charge-robotics
- DaoVeles 2y agoPretty much. There will be a bottom limit on the price of the panels, simply due to the logistics of moving materials, I mean there is a price of salt per ton that is almost entirely this. But everything else around solar such as inverters, cables, framing, labor, battery storage is where a large part of the cost now. Innovations in those areas will probably yield better cost reductions than the panels will nowadays. That is just wild to see!
- m463 2y agoI think it's more important to lower roadblocks as opposed to costs for solar. It seems australia removed a lot of roadblocks and solar is very popular.
- flakeoil 2y agoCorrect. And also the non-solar panel material. For example the aluminium support they use between the roof and the solar panels costs the same or more than the actual solar panels. When I asked for an offer two years ago the price of the solar panels was about 25% of the total cost. The aluminium frame was 25%, labor 30% and putting up the scaffold 20%. I hope thin film solar panels integrated in the actual roof material will become more common going forward as it removes the need for an aluminium frame, you get a new fresh roof, it's lighter, no holes are drilled in the roof etc.