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posted by takyon on Tuesday August 30 2016, @12:42AM   Printer-friendly
from the sun-is-waiting dept.

The Price of Solar Is Declining to Unprecedented Lows: Despite already low costs, the installed price of solar fell by 5 to 12 percent in 2015

The installed price of solar energy has declined significantly in recent years as policy and market forces have driven more and more solar installations.

Now, the latest data show that the continued decrease in solar prices is unlikely to slow down anytime soon, with total installed prices dropping by 5 percent for rooftop residential systems, and 12 percent for larger utility-scale solar farms. With solar already achieving record-low prices, the cost decline observed in 2015 indicates that the coming years will likely see utility-scale solar become cost competitive with conventional forms of electricity generation.  

A full analysis of the ongoing decline in solar prices can be found in two separate Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Reports: Tracking the Sun IX focuses on installed pricing trends in the distributed rooftop solar market while Utility-Scale Solar 2015 focuses on large-scale solar farms that sell bulk power to the grid.

[...] The installed cost includes everything needed to get a solar power system up and running: the panels, the power electronics, the mounting hardware, and the installation itself. The continued decline in total installed cost is noteworthy considering the fact that the price of the solar panels (or modules) themselves has remained relatively flat since 2012. This means that the decline in installed cost observed since 2012 was largely caused by a decline in the cost of the inverters that convert the DC power produced by solar panels to AC power for the grid and other "soft" costs such as customer acquisition, system design, installation, and permitting.

[...] Going forward, the declining price of solar across all categories demonstrated by the latest Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reports coupled with the extension of the federal renewable energy investment tax credit through 2019 should drive a continued expansion of the U.S. solar market and even more favorable economics in the next few years. It will certainly be interesting to see what kind of market dynamic develops as solar approaches the tipping point where it becomes more economical than conventional forms of electricity generation.


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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by Whoever on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:12AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:12AM (#395069) Journal

    Please get your facts straight.

    Its still the price of a new car. In round bald numbers its still 25K for a small rooftop.

    No, it's not. Most installed systems are 4-5kW. That size of system costs $15k-$18k. And there is a federal tax credit of 30% available, so the real cost is more like $10k - $12k.

    And you better have that roof redone while you are in the process, or you will have to tear up the solar to do it later.

    The cost of removing and re-mounting the solar panels is a small part of the overall cost. Most installers will commit to a fixed price to remove and replace the system in the event that root work is necessary some time after installation. This cost is usually about $500 to $1000.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by ledow on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:00AM

    by ledow (5567) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:00AM (#395128) Homepage

    So it's subsidised into profit by a tax credit.

    Ignoring that, it costs more than ten years of electricity would cost me (probably a lot more, I took the lower numbers I can't do the maths and convert currencies at the same time) to put the system in.

    And then I'd be limited to a system that can't get near half the current that my grid connection can handle as a matter of course (220v, 60A to the fuseboard, no conversion losses obviously).

    Now more interesting is that others mention the life of the panels but not the life of the storage. So we're not talking replacing batteries every year or so? So you're talking about maintaining a connection to the grid, therefore you're not really changing anything, are you? Except feeding back some power in need of serious voltage/current/phase conversion to be anywhere near useful.

    Or if we are talking about "off-grid" systems, then I have, say, 12 hours a day of sunlight on average over the year. So half the time I'm not actually getting 4-5KW. And with perfect storage, only half of that. Which brings me back to a point where if I boil a kettle, I could exhaust the system's current-supplying capacity and have to go to battery storage. Which needs replacement, maintenance and monitoring.

    We're not just talking "slap a panel on your roof", even at great expense and with tax breaks. We're talking a major drop in productivity of electrical supply to your house. That's part of the reasoning, of course, to make people green, but it's a hard sell.

    "Hey, your tax dollars are paying for everyone to do this, why don't you spend a lot of money in one hit to get an unreliable power supply that needs the national grid to be useful anyway and/or throw out half your electric kit because you won't be able to use it at the same time as anything else? It'll pay for itself in only 20 years (providing nothing goes wrong at all in that time and the subsidies still exist)!"

    Sounds like it's still a hard-sell to me, despite the objections.

    And, to be honest, this assumes you have the roofspace, the ownership (Mortgaged house? Hope the panel lease is on the mortgage if you didn't pay for it outright, as there's legal hassles in my country over people doing that and then trying to sell a leased-out-to-the-solar-company-for-20-years roof), the latitude, the sunlight, the right direction of house, the right angle of roof, electrical installers and companies willing to help (specialised installers, government-approved installations, electricity companies willing to modify your installation, etc.). If you don't, you still can't even achieve the above.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Whoever on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:28AM

      by Whoever (4524) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @05:28AM (#395147) Journal

      You seem to be rather confused.

      Firstly, unless you plan to go off-grid, you should not try to size a system to produce anywhere near your house's theoretical maximum grid load, or even your actual maximum grid load (my typical maximum load is typically about 4:00am, when my EV is charging at 7kW).

      1. Panels can pay off in as little as 5 years. This does depend on two factors: net energy metering and tax credits.
      2. It's stupid to ignore tax credits when considering your own situation. However, without the credits, payoff could still be in 8 years (easily during the warranty period of the system).
      3. Net energy metering is the key factor that determines viability. With net energy metering, batteries are not required. In California, current installations are guaranteed net energy metering for 20 years.
      4. Depending on the alignment of your roof, the time of peak output can match the time of peak demand quite well. A west-facing roof is better than a south facing roof, because, although total output is less, the time during which the panels produce electricity matches peak demand much better.

      I agree that a leased system can give problems down the road: re-financing or selling become more difficult.

      It's a hard sell because it is a big outlay and the alternatives (lease or power purchase agreement) have big disadvantages.

  • (Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:53AM

    by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @09:53AM (#395198) Journal

    >>Its still the price of a new car. In round bald numbers its still 25K for a small rooftop.
    >No, it's not. Most installed systems are 4-5kW. That size of system costs $15k-$18k.

    Just as an act of petty pedantry I was going to point out that $15-18k is still enough to buy a new car. Then I decided that I ought to do some fact checking first, since this was based on an in-my-head conversion of approximate UK prices into US dollars. I looked up some new car prices in the USA, and their corresponding prices in the UK, and it seems you colonials pay quite a bit more for your vehicles than we do. This is a refreshing change, since we Brits normally pay over the odds for most things.

    Cheapest new cars in the UK that I could find are the Dacia[1] Sandero at ~£6k, and various other small cars at ~£7k.
    Cheapest US new cars seem to come in at around $12.5k - $13k (Nissan Versa, Chevy Spark, Smart ForTwo.)
    At today's exchange rate, that's a significant difference.

    Is this some tax / regulation overhead that we don't pay, or is it simply that USians can't conceive of buying a car without a big engine, aircon and an automatic gearbox?

    A bit of googling suggests that you can get a car across the Atlantic for less than $2000 (that's just shipping, I'm sure there would be other expenses not accounted for here), so if you were in the market for a cheap new car, live on the US East coast (or live further west and want an excuse for a road trip) and don't mind waiting then I wondered if it would be worth buying a new vehicle in Western France, Spain or Portugal (since it will not only be even cheaper than the UK, but will also be LHD) and getting it shipped over.

    I decided to dig deeper and went as far as trying to compare like-for-like on a typical car using the car configurators on the Ford.com, Ford.co.uk and Ford.es websites. Basic Ford Focus with 1.0 Ecoboost engine and Automatic transmission:
    US $19130
    UK £18345 (~$24000)
    ES €15955 (~$17823)
    As you can see the results do not support the "UK is cheaper" premise above. Based on this sample size of one, the UK one is by far the most expensive, with the Euro price being the cheapest, but probably not quite cheap enough to justify transatlantic shipping costs. However this isn't exactly a high-end car, a more expensive vehicle might magnify the differences and make shipping worthwhile. Also Ford is a US company, I'd be interested to see if domestic brands are cheaper than imported ones even though all brands are manufactured on both continents. If anyone can be bothered to do a like-for-like comparison on a more expensive European vehicle, (say a BMW or Porsche) then maybe it would get interesting.

    [1] I suspect Across-the-ponders will be unfamiliar with the Dacia marque. The story is similar to that of Skoda: Originally an East-European Soviet brand renowned for cheap, crappy cars, it got bought out by a reputable west-european manufacturer (Renault in this case) and is now producing quality cars with low price tags.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:53PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @01:53PM (#395270)

      The US wouldn't let European cars in for sale.

    • (Score: 2) by Whoever on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:22PM

      by Whoever (4524) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @02:22PM (#395286) Journal

      You forgot that US prices do not include sales tax, which varies by state and city.

    • (Score: 2) by Zinho on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:55PM

      by Zinho (759) on Tuesday August 30 2016, @04:55PM (#395343)

      or is it simply that USians can't conceive of buying a car without a big engine, aircon and an automatic gearbox?

      This.

      bigger === better

      aircon is not optional unless you live in the far north (like Maine), or at very high altitude (like Colorado). Remember that the furthest south point in Great Britain is a higher latitude than essentially every point in the lower 48 states. Florida is entirely south of Morocco.

      and why in $DIETY's name does every manufacturer in the US assume that no-one wants to drive a standard transmission??? The excuse that "women don't like the distraction" is insulting to my wife, sisters, mother, and daughter who ALL DO IT JUST FINE and like it better than automatics.

      But yeah, you've got the U.S. figured out; no need to look much farther than this.

      --
      "Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @10:44PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 30 2016, @10:44PM (#395483)

      Taxes are extra, and they vary. Some places charge a few thousand $ to register the car. (Maryland is bad) Some places have a high sales tax; it could be around 10%.

      We have pretty severe driver-oriented passive safety requirements. Our assumption is that the driver is passed out and crashing into something solid, like a concrete bridge support, while driving at decently high speed.

      We have pretty severe emissions requirements. We require catalytic converters, even on small well-designed engines. For diesel, we require particulate filters and we effectively require (see VW scandal) urea injection.

      We have pretty severe fuel efficiency requirements. Normal drivers can't meet these with a manual gearbox. The new cars are coming with 8-speed automatics.