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US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

reneweconomy.com.au

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Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#61

Post by Dylan16807 »

Iv wrote: post #31
nwah1 wrote: post #18

Solar panels are a semiconductor technology, and as such follow Moore's Law, and have been for decades. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/smaller-chea...

No. Moore's law talks about miniaturization that leads to better performance and about the fact that when it was first pronounced, no significant roadblocks seemed to exist for 20 years. The improvements in solar panel tech do not depend on such a straightforward route. There is no process that you can simply iterate through to reproduce the last performance gain.

Yes, it's very much about miniaturization, not processing exponential amounts of surface area per dollar. Cost per wafer has been steadily increasing. http://techreport.com/r.x/broadwell-14nm/transistor-costs.jp...

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#62

Post by intopieces »

Tsagadai wrote: post #46
s0rce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there. It probably does have an impact but at this point unless population declines or energy use dramatically decreases I think we need to focus on minimizing human impact on the environment and not stopping everything that isn't completely harmless.

Do those same people get sad when they see arable land being used for food production or large cities from space? They probably need a reality check on their understanding of humanity. We have always been modifying the environment to suit our needs, every species does this.

>We have always been modifying the environment to suit our needs, every species does this.

Humans have only been farming for the past 11,500ish years, while Homo sapiens have been around for more than 200,000 years. Humans modifying the environment to a significant extent is rather new in our timeline.

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#63

Post by pfarnsworth »

s0rce wrote: post #32
redwood wrote: post #8

Flying recently from Phoenix to San Jose I was amazed by the size of the solar arrays I saw in the desert. I wasn't sure that that was what they were; but I found some of them on Google maps satellite after and confirmed it (cool time we live it). Good news is that there's so much more room to build more!!! Edit here if anyone's curious: https://goo.gl/maps/SjzWw9b2dSH2 Edit 2 - as an aside, when I first saw, I could…

Sadly, there appears to be many environmentalists and conservation people against large desert solar arrays claiming it threatens habitat of whatever lives there. It probably does have an impact but at this point unless population declines or energy use dramatically decreases I think we need to focus on minimizing human impact on the environment and not stopping everything that isn't completely harmless.

I would replace "many" with "some". The problem we have is that there are many types of environmentalists, each with their own agenda. Just because a faction of environmentalists consider the desert solar array bad, doesn't mean that all do. In fact I would wager a guess that most think that it's worth it, considering how much pollution it's saving.

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#64

Post by kbenson »

sounds wrote: post #29
bagacrap wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So from 16 to 17, the total cost aside from modules went up?

I haven't collected the hard numbers for what is presented on page vi of https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf , but soft costs appear to have swollen to take up most of the cost savings from reduced module prices. In other words, yep.

Which from an outsider perspective could have been companies recouping on bets made (discounts offered) in 2016 to grow their brand recognition, etc. It's hard to draw too strong a conclusion from data for for so few years, where costs change so much, and the outlier is the most recent year (which is also incomplete). It's also possible that the actual business costs from year-over-year operation are finally becoming well known, and the installation costs are finally reflecting items that weren't correctly priced in earlier (botched installation fixed, warranty repairs, etc).

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#65

Post by icefox »

sbov wrote: post #50
icefox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got solar several years ago I watched as the various installers wasted a ton of time selling to me. It was clear that all the steps between when I was interested and when I gave the go ahead to start the install were extremely expensive in the big picture and in the long term the winners of residential installation would be those that will be able to drive that cost down and or spread that cost out to as many…

Here in SoCal, I have to fight off door to door solar salesman at least once per month. It's really annoying.

For what it is worth I do to. It is amusing to get to tell them I already have solar at which point they look up and then walk away. But think about it... What kind of margin pays to have someone walk door to door? That is the kind of waste that the system has not yet rung out and why residential costs don't seem to be going down as much as they should. As long as all of the installers don't drive their costs down they all get to enjoy growing profits!

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#66

Post by shostack »

wyattk wrote: post #59

Many of the comments seem to be focusing on the initial install costs and missing a big point here. Solar can save a lot of money and even make a nontrivial amount of money for the owner. As you would expect, there a lot of factors that go into how much an array would save/produce (generation, storage, etc.), but a regulatory factor that changes everything is rate structures. Rate structures are far from a standard t…

What's the best way for an interested prospective solar customer to get informed so as to not get ripped off? This seems to be a situation with significant information asymmetry between the consumer and the seller.

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#67

Post by extrapickles »

D_Alex wrote: post #30
sounds wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation-adjusted residential costs according to nrel.gov are shown in the chart on page vi of https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf The raw costs, not adjusted for inflation: Q1 2014: $4.52/W total for $1.03/W modules [0] Q1 2015: $3.09/Wdc total for $0.70/Wdc modules [1] Q1 2016: $2.93/Wdc total for $0.63/Wdc modules [2] Q1 2017: $2.80/Wdc total for $0.35/Wdc modules [3] Conclusion: Even if the modules cost…

Based on the Australian experience, the next wave of price declines for residential solar will indeed come from balance-of-system cost declines, increased installation efficiency and lower profits. Current costs in Australia are about A$ 1.70 /pk-W (~US$1.35), pre-subsidies, split roughly into 35% modules, 10% inverter, 10% mounting system, 10% other hardware (cabling, switchboard etc), 10% installation and 25% "vend…

Most of the northern states don't have much sunlight and have cheap enough power to make it not worth it.

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#68

Post by fastbeef »

extrapickles wrote: post #67
D_Alex wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the Australian experience, the next wave of price declines for residential solar will indeed come from balance-of-system cost declines, increased installation efficiency and lower profits. Current costs in Australia are about A$ 1.70 /pk-W (~US$1.35), pre-subsidies, split roughly into 35% modules, 10% inverter, 10% mounting system, 10% other hardware (cabling, switchboard etc), 10% installation and 25% "vend…

Most of the northern states don't have much sunlight and have cheap enough power to make it not worth it.

A common misconception. Even in northern Sweden, which is above the arctic circle, you can still generate ~80% of the energy that Southern Europe generates.

Re: US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

#69

Post by shandor »

fastbeef wrote: post #68
extrapickles wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the northern states don't have much sunlight and have cheap enough power to make it not worth it.

A common misconception. Even in northern Sweden, which is above the arctic circle, you can still generate ~80% of the energy that Southern Europe generates.

This is fascinating if true. Do you gave any sources, I'd be really interested in reading more on the matter.
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