Hot Hot Heat: U.S. Solar Costs Going Down

According to a new study conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, The average installed costs for photovoltaic cells (in real 2007 dollars) went down from $10.50-per-watt in 1998, to $7.60-per-watt in 2007.

What’s most amazing about this report is that it appears to validate a whole slew of state and local solar initiatives. The researchers found that—despite the many, many reported advances to solar cell efficiency—most of the savings during this nine year period came from reductions to installation and external hardware costs.

In fact, the savings in terms of cost of labor, marketing, overhead, inverters and balance of systems were met in most cases with reciprocal reductions to the direct cash incentives provided by states and local municipalities. As the authors told the EETimes, “This suggests that state and local PV deployment programs—which likely have a greater impact on non-module costs than on module prices—have been at least somewhat successful in spurring cost reductions.”

For the curious, their study—which examined 37,000 grid-connected PV systems installed in the U.S. from 1998 to 2007—is available as a free PDF ["Tracking the Sun: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the U.S. from 1998-2007" High-Res PDF | Low-Res PDF].

Unfortunate punchline: The EETimes is also reporting that solar analysts at VLSI Research Inc. are expecting the photovoltaic market to slow to down to 8% growth in 2009.

Photo Credit: U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons