https://cdn-ilcjnih.nitrocdn.com/BVTDJPZTUnfCKRkDQJDEvQcUwtA...
https://reneweconomy.com.au/battery-storage-is-dramatically-...
But making decisions on that data without understanding that current prices and near-term prices will be about half of that price will lead to bad decisions. And when thinking 5-10 years out, not taking the full exponential drop in battery and solar prices is beyond foolish.
We pay about $3/W for solar installation in the US, but Australia pays about $1/W.
For batteries, there's still a supply crunch and the only people getting really good prices are those people who buy in huge bulk or are willing to take a risk on a lesser known manufacturer. If you want well-proven brands the prices can still be very high for small purchases, and a solar installer is not going to want to take a risk with a new supplier.
These systems are not super complex, most technical people could figure them out fairly easily, and in fact off-grid disconnected systems are really easy to do. It's the grid tie that will kill you or first responders to your house, we have made the process of setting the whole thing up very expensive because nobody on the regulatory side has an incentive to make it straightforward and cheap. And since NEM3 killed solar in California, all the installers are barely scraping by and need to rely on very high margins on few projects.
I don't see how this can be true. I installed my own ground mount array, and the costs directly attributable to regulatory infrastructure were about US$35 (for the permit). It would have been no higher if I had added batteries. The material costs were completely comparable with AU, CAN and UK pricing.
Perhaps you're arguing that the certification and licensing regulations for paid installers drives the installation cost up (i.e. that labor costs for US solar installs are too expensive) ?
That may be true if your time is free, but for a company, they must deal with a permitting scheme for every county and city that they do business in. Additionally, unpredictable changes to rate structures will drastically change the demand for solar in areas year to year, and so the solar installers that survive are the ones who are well attuned to that change, and pounce on new markets that are suddenly opened up by new rate structures that make solar easy to finance or pay off quickly. That means that about $1/W of the $3/W that installers charge actually goes to customer acquisition costs.
Most areas do not have super onerous labor requirements for solar installers, and generally the contractor licensing part is quite reasonable. But perhaps insurance like workers comp and disability is a lot higher in the US than in Australia.
I'm surprised that US tariffs have not resulted in higher materials costs than in the other anglophone countries!
Your reply seems to indicate that "regulatory infrastructure" is not responsible for the bulk of the cost, but rather traditional concerns of for-profit business, in this case, the business of solar PV installation.
Just makes no sense why it should be that different. The units seem to cost similar prices in Europe to what we pay here in Australia so why is it so much more in North America? I assume part of it is that they are not quite as common but it still boggles the mind.
The curve on solar is gradually getting flatter, though. Lazard's last LCOE report even saw it increase, partly because of inflation.
Possibly you are only looking at prices inside the US, where anti-renewable-energy regulations drive the cost of solar energy through the roof.
Today the module cost is far from negligible (the article shows SEIA data showing that, even in the US, modules are a third of the cost of recent utility-scale solar) and it's only small because the other parts of the installation are badly lagging behind. If you need to heat or cool your house or train your neural networks, you really just need the energy those panels can provide, and somewhere to store it. Other balance-of-system costs like microinverters, racking, most wiring, transmission, design, civil engineering, land, installation labor, and regulatory approval are only useful as means to that end; they are not strictly necessary to receive the benefit.
If avoiding those forms of waste means you can get energy for a negligible cost, more and more people will find ways to do it.
How can you avoid them?
Well, you can avoid the cost of inverters by using low-voltage dc power, as off-grid enthusiasts, RV retirees, and Google data centers have been doing for decades. You can avoid racking by laying the panels on the ground, as the article mentions, or hanging them on an exterior wall of a house or an existing fence. These also avoid civil engineering and land and labor costs, and also falling off your roof. You can't avoid wiring but you can reduce its cost by using higher voltages (even low-voltage dc can use 48 volts instead of 12) and mounting the panels close to the point of use. You avoid transmission (and distribution) costs by siting the panels onsite instead of in a faraway solar farm. You avoid design costs by buying an off-the-shelf modular power system instead of paying someone to design a custom one. You avoid regulatory approval most obviously by breaking the law, probably more feasible in a slum apartment or an RV than in a utility-scale power plant, or by avoiding doing regulated things like connecting to the electrical grid or running 120VAC or 240VAC wiring.
This clearly points to a near future of ridiculously abundant energy, at what we would have previously considered a negligible cost.
This is staggering, even at its current level. €0.070/Wp at a nominal 15% capacity factor is €0.46/W; at a 5% interest rate, assuming no aging, that's €0.74 per gigajoule, or, in the quaint non-SI units more commonly used for trading energy, €0.0027/kWh†, €0.029 per liter of diesel, 10¢ per gallon of gasoline, or US$4.60 per barrel of oil. And it's pure, undiluted exergy; you incur no Carnot losses to use it to drive motors or train neural networks.
The current WTI oil price is US$68.20 per barrel of oil: https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/oil-price?ty.... That makes solar energy fourteen times cheaper than oil, or more than thirty times cheaper if you're using it for transport or electricity.
The US's current policy of imposing prohibitive import tariffs on solar panels is similar to the Arab oil embargo of 01973, but self-imposed, attempting to prolong the energy crisis that began at that time.
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† Not €0.27/kWh or even €0.027/kWh. €0.0027/kWh. 0.28¢/kWh.
You can avoid racking by installing them as the fence when you install a new fence.
I mean you don't literally, but the installation cost is a cost you were going to pay anyways.
