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The panels themselves are cheap and getting cheaper. However the mounting systems, solar charger controllers, and inverters are mostly not. The bulk of the co
by buckle8017 1y ago
The panels themselves are cheap and getting cheaper.
However the mounting systems, solar charger controllers, and inverters are mostly not.
The bulk of the cost of panels now isn't the panels themselves, but all the supporting infrastructure.
The seasonal variation can be as high as seven to one, so the total install has to be very very cheap to support a 700-1000% over build.
- dv_dt 1y agoThe last time this was discussed, someone mentioned you only needed as much inverter capacity that you wanted to process. So in winter all panels were hooked up but in summer some were disconnected or bypassed somehow? Though if you are on a grid that allows it, you might want to send summer power back into the grid for credits
- buckle8017 1y agoThere's basically two kinds of systems. Micro inverters or mppt with inverters. With micro inverters you cannot over provision the panels in a useful way, each panel or pair of panels has a micro inverter. The mppt plus inverter system you absolutely can do that... but it scales poorly. Shading of a single panel effects the entire string, so the more panels you add to over provision the worse that effect gets. So yes but actually no.
- dv_dt 1y agoIt seems like there should be some intermediary per panel smart bypass circuit for pairing up with mptt architecture for this to keep system cost down in these seasonal areas. Edit: turns out there are products for mptt strings called power optimizers that seem to help with this very thing I hypothesized.. at least one company offering them is SolarEdge
- buckle8017 1y agoThey're almost as expensive as per panel micro inverters. There's no free lunch here.