I would however like feedback on the assumptions of 5 % / year increase in retail electricity prices and 5 % / year decrease in
PV system prices.
With
PV system prices plummeting, including a 30 - percent drop in 2009 alone, the German government announced in mid-2010 that in order to control costs and bring support levels in line with market conditions, it would reduce tariff rates further than the annual cuts originally stipulated by law.
By pv magazine's own calculations The combination of solar, steel and aluminum tariffs could add $ 0.13 per watt to
PV system prices, an increase of roughly 4 - 13 % depending on the scale of the system.
The report examined various other drivers for
PV system pricing, including system size and configuration (rooftop versus ground - mounted), location by state, whether a system is owned by the site host or by a third party, and whether the host is a for - profit commercial or tax - exempt entity.
Not exact matches
Much of the downward
price pressure for installed
PV systems came from a reduction in «soft costs» and did not result from lower module
prices, which have been mostly stable since 2012, according to the analysis.
Galen Barbose, a research scientist with LBNL's Electricity Markets and Policy Group and the report's lead author, said in a statement that the findings mark the fifth consecutive year of significant
price reductions for distributed
PV systems in the United States.
Hawaii has a small population, but its strong solar resources and high electricity
prices make rooftop solar
PV systems economically attractive.
Secures a guaranteed buyer for all of the electricity produced from the
PV system at agreed - upon
prices that allows the company to ensure a sufficient return on its investment.
That per - watt
price is comparable to the cost of solar photovoltaic (
PV)
systems, and these smaller wind turbines may be suitable for owners who, because of shading or for other reasons, can not install a
PV system.
The alternative is to rely on a combination of storage and smart grid
pricing to adapt our current electricity
system to one driven mostly by wind and solar
PV, with hydro and limited amounts of gas as the dispatchable sources.
Reductions in
PV module and
system prices have confirmed the elasticity of
PV demand though well designed and implemented government subsidy programs remain crucial for rapid
PV deployment and market growth.
A past survey of over 200,000
PV installations in the United States concluded that installation costs (including everything but the
price of the panels) dropped by 38 percent for
systems producing 10 kW or less.
Commercial microgrid
PV systems still charge
prices for power that are quite high.
However, for space - constrained roofs and small installations where
PV modules make up a small portion of total
system prices, higher efficiency products often pay for themselves.
Solar subsidies in Japan and Germany, as well as solar setasides in domestic state legislation, are based on legislators» assumption that the
price for solar
PV systems will decline to competitive levels as economies are achieved in manufacturing.
Beginning in 2008, however, global module
prices began a steep downward trajectory, and those module
price reductions were the driving force behind the decline in total
system prices for
PV from 2008 through 2012.
First of all, there are wide variations in
prices from project to project, especially in residential
PV: «Among the residential
systems installed in 2015, roughly 20 % of
systems were
priced below $ 3.3 / W (the 20 percentile value), while 20 % were
priced above $ 5.0 / W (80th percentile).»
Assuming retail electricity costs will increase 5 % / year (conservative due to the grid investments being made and the Qld increases have been 11.37 % & 5.38 % for 2008 & 2009 with another 14 % mooted for 2010) and
PV prices will drop 5 % / year, I calculate retail grid parity arriving in Qld as soon as 2012 for a 3kW residential
system.
For the first time, in late 2011, factory-gate
prices for crystalline - silicon (c - Si)
PV modules fell below the $ 1.00 / W mark; moving towards the benchmark of $ 1.00 / W installed cost for
PV systems, which is often regarded in the
PV industry as marking the achievement of grid parity for
PV.
In spite of the fact that
PV has come down in
price, the
price per KWH of energy produced for DIY
PV systems is much greater than the cost per KWH of energy for DIY solar thermal
systems.
So, one clear message here is that even though
PV systems have come down in
price, doing conservation and efficiency changes is FAR more cost effective than
PV — at least in our case.
And the RO has loaded up consumers with much higher
prices per kW and kWh than under the German FiT
system - even though the latter also included support for much more
PV.
The report, Selling into the Sun:
Price Premium Analysis of a Multi-State Dataset of
PV Homes, found that premiums for a typical residential
PV system averaged around $ 15,000.
The team analyzed nearly 22,000 sales of homes, almost 4,000 of which contain had installed
PV systems, in eight states from 1999 to 2013 for what Berkeley Lab said was «the most authoritative estimates to date of
price premiums for U.S. homes with
PV systems.»