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.
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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
I was part of this IYCN road tour where we went across india finding solutions for climate change. At, Barefoot College, Tilonia, Rajasthan, India. We found out that they help people make and assemble these solar panels in the most effective and efficient manner.
There are people being trained from Bhutan, Malawi and other African countries also, in this Indian hamlet. These people were here with the sole objective to light up their villages, once the learn the know how. amazing cost effective idea.
They did not mention why the installation cost has gone down. One reason is fewer panels, mounting racks, and wiring runs are needed. Why? because the panel efficiency has gone up. So while increased efficiency has not lowered the cost of panels, it has lowered the cost of installations.