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from the power-to-the-people['s-homes] dept.
Residential solar is cheap, but can it get cheaper? Paths to $0.05 per kWh
The price of solar panels has fallen far and fast. But the Energy Department (DOE) wants to bring those costs down even further, especially for residential homes. After all, studies have shown that if every inch of useable rooftop in the US had solar panels on it, the panels could provide about 40 percent of the nation's power demand. Right now, the DOE's goal is residential solar that costs 5ยข per kilowatt-hour by 2030.
In a new report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), researchers mapped out some possible pathways to that goal. Notably, the biggest barriers to cost reduction appear to be the stubborn "soft costs" of solar installation. Those soft costs include supply chain costs, labor costs, and sales and marketing costs that aren't related to the physical production of solar cells at a factory.
NREL wrote: "Because the 2030 target likely will not be achieved under business-as-usual trends, we examine two key market segments that demonstrate significant opportunities for cost savings and market growth: installing PV at the time of roof replacement and installing PV as part of the new home construction process."
The report mapped out two "visionary" pathways (as well as two "less-aggressive' pathways) to achieving those cost reductions within the roof replacement and new home construction markets. The result? The only way NREL found it could achieve the "visionary" cost reductions was by assuming that solar installers would start selling low-cost solar-integrated roof tiles before 2030, "which could significantly reduce supply chain, installation labor, and permitting costs."
[...] [It's] not just Tesla working on this: the Colorado-based lab cites CertainTeed's solar shingle product and GAF's solar panels as examples of products breaking the divide between roof and solar panel installation.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday February 22 2018, @03:28PM
I don't see how washing machines enter into this discussion.
Why not? That was the other giant thing that was part of this new tariff. It's just like the stupid tariff on VCRs back in the 80s: all the VCRs were made in Japan by the time the tariff was enacted, so all it did was double the price of VCRs for consumers.
The import tax simply recoups the tax break.
Now that most of the stuff is made in China, it's closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, and ends up just encouraging people to NOT install solar systems. Remember, the whole point of a tax is to punish something, and make people do less of it: a cigarette tax encourages people to not smoke, a gas tax encourages people to drive less, etc. If you want less of something, you slap a tax on it. Not that this is a bad thing in all situations (smoking is very bad, causing huge public health costs, for instance), but that's what taxes do. We should be taxing coal, not solar, even if we have to buy our solar panels from China because we were too stupid to do things well here.