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On Tuesday, the Department of Energy (DOE) announced that utility-grade solar panels have hit cost targets set for 2020, three years ahead of schedule. Those targets reflect around $1 per watt and 6¢ per kilowatt-hour in Kansas City, the department's mid-range yardstick for solar panel cost per unit of energy produced (New York is considered the high-cost end, and Phoenix, Arizona, which has much more sunlight than most other major cities in the country, reflects the low-cost end).
Those prices don't include an Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which makes solar panels even cheaper. The Energy Department said that the cost per watt was assessed in terms of total installed system costs for developers. That means the number is based on "the sales price paid to the installer; therefore, it includes profit in the cost of the hardware," according to a department presentation (PDF).
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a DOE-funded lab that assesses solar panel cost, wrote that, compared to the first quarter in 2016, the first quarter in 2017 saw a 29-percent decline in installed cost for utility-scale solar, which was attributed to lower photovoltaic module and inverter prices, better panel efficiency, and reduced labor costs. Despite the plummeting costs for utility-scale solar, costs for commercial and residential solar panels have not fallen quite as quickly—just 15 percent and 6 percent, respectively.
It seems there are still big gains to be made in the installed costs of residential panels.
(Score: 2) by steveha on Wednesday September 20 2017, @01:46AM
I'm not impressed by the four links. None of them made the case that Telsa loses money on each car sold. Instead, they took Telsa's losses and divided by the number of cars sold and then reported that number. A company spending huge money on factories and Supercharger expansion is spending more than it takes in, and when it's selling premium cars the volume isn't high, so you get a big number divided by a small number and you get the impressive "loses $4000 per car". Hogwash. When they were first working on developing the Roadster and hadn't sold any yet, all they had were losses and 0 cars, so why not say "loses $(ZeroDivisionError) per car"?
If you can find a teardown that prices out all the parts and shows that a Telsa Model S actually costs more to make than the selling cost, that would be more interesting, but the analyses I have seen say that Tesla is making about a 30% margin on the Model S. In other words Tesla makes tens of thousands of dollars on each car.
If they can fill all the half-million preorders for the Model 3 in a reasonable amount of time, Tesla will be very solidly profitable. If they screw that up and lose the preorders and good will, they are hosed.
By the way, the government tax incentives have helped Tesla, but Tesla is doing a huge amount of work to bootstrap not just their own factory operations but a whole infrastructure to support them (dealers, chargers, staff, etc.) The tax incentives were put into place to help companies get off the ground. One of the reasons that gasoline cars don't need tax breaks is that they can go even to small towns and find gasoline for sale, while Tesla has to do everything itself. US tax breaks and loans don't always work out -- Google "Solyndra" -- but in this case they did work out as intended.
Perhaps if you are rich enough to have a garage or a forecourt where you can plug in for the night.
Very common in the USA, not only for the rich. And, Tesla is putting Superchargers in cities [tesla.com] to solve the problem for people who don't have a garage.
It is just another headache and hassle to remember to do before I go to bed at night, every night.
Okay, electric cars aren't for you then. I plug in my phone every night; I don't think it's such a big deal to plug in my car as well.