this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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I heard the prices dropped a lot around 2012 too. Why are solar installations still rare?
In america the installation costs as much as or more than the panels. Until the install costs come down no one is going to do it.
About a third of the houses in my neighborhood have gone solar. My household was one of the first to do it about five years ago and every time I go for a walk I notice a new one that popped up. Our solar system payment is about half what our electric bill used to be and we make more electricity than we use every month of the year, even with charging a plug-in hybrid car. Far from “no one is going to do it.” I frankly don’t understand why more people don’t do it.
This is why I pay extra for my co-op to source it. Cheaper to build/maintain solar/wind farms
Keyword coop. People hate sharing here. It's like a "socialist threat" to their autonomy.
Weird, here we got 11kW solar panels with inverter and 7½ kW battery for USD $12900,-. Installation (starting monday next week) is USD $ 4300,- complete with panels, wiring, inverter and battery including authorized electrician to connect it.
Meaning installation is only a fourth the total price. So clearly the panels are way more expensive, and that is in Denmark, where skilled workers are among the highest paid in Europe. AND on a ceramic tiled roof, which is the most demanding and expensive to have it installed on.
This is a completely new solar panel installation, which should begin next week. so prices are as they are now here.
PS:
For the above prices the hardware needed for installation is included with the panels.But I think that's standard.
Insurance companies have a lot of bullshit rules in certain states about the roof(Florida) which drives up the costs to install.
That sucks, seems like an opening for an Insurance company to capture some market share. Unless of course it's all one big cartel.
Where I live, power companies successfully lobbied to charge a minimum fee to people using a grid-tied system (as opposed to off-grid). So now a bill that might have been lowered to $9.00 will cost the minimum fee of $30.00 (actual example). You might say, that $30.00 is still a very low power bill but how long will it take before that starts going up? They are also lobbying to buy power from homeowners for less than they charge homeowners. This was a huge turn-off for me considering the high cost of installation. When I asked the solar installer about off-grid installations, he said they weren't allowed to offer those. Not sure why but got the impression it was a government thing and not a company thing. Not sure.
It's a company thing. Government can't force you to pay for electricity if you don't want it.
However off grid setups are more complicated and require a different design philosophy, so most solar companies don't do them. You have to shop for companies that specialize in off-grid setups.
Prices for the batteries and panels themselves have dropped. Just not the cost to install them.
What a shame. Is there no competition among contractors or is it inherently expensive?
Lots of red tape, at least in the US. And lots of scammy contractors out there.
As the guy in charge of the red tape - there really isn't much.
Show that it's designed to be safely installed on the roof and that you have a licensed electrician doing the install.
Then submit to an inspection.
It takes 15 minutes to get a solar permit, and the whole thing videos like $250 in permitting - most of which is inspections.
But the contractor invoices $3,000 for permitting, so of course they're gonna say there's a bunch of red tape to justify it.
Depends on the area. They're trying to force every solar installer here to be a licensed electrician, including the guys who slap the panels.
And our local utility and government inspectors take months to come out to do an inspection. It requires one person from the company to sit at the site all day because you never know when they're actually going to show up. Or if they're going to show up.
That's weird.
Our insurance doesn't even allow our inspectors to climb on the roof. We make sure the electrician doingg the wiring is licensed and has liability insurance, and we inspect the electrical panels when they're done. The workers don't even have to be there, and neither does the homeowner if the panel is accessible from the street-side of the fence.
We actually prefer doing inspections without the contractors being there. It keeps them from trying to guide our inspectors away from their fuckups and prevents the contractors from trying to argue. We take pictures of the violations, upload them to the permit, and tell them to fix it.
If they don't, we eventually arrange it to be fixed by another electrician and file a claim against their insurance.
Because it takes months to get inspectors out, we wanted to do everything we could to avoid having them come out again. A lot of times I've saved a job by promising to do a spot fix and having the inspector swing back by later that day, or take pictures/video and send it to them.
We have 2 inspectors for all inspections (commercial and residential for all trades) who are also our building plan reviewers, building official, and City Arborist for one of the fastest-growing cities in the country (about 45k people now), and we can almost always make it next business day. We can do same day most of the time.
Sounds like you're working in a city that doesn't know how to manage resources.
Definitely true, when it comes to inspectors. But also they just didn't care.
The inspectors were good at their jobs, but they had no sense of urgency whatsoever.
The department was also critically understaffed. Probably still is. I've been out of the industry for 5 years.
Mine took weeks to get an inspector out, and the local permitting fees were thousands (yes, I called the city and county to verify). Then the utility apparently required their own inspection, which took another month, because their guys kept no-showing.
It's mostly just time consuming. It took 5 days to get the solar installed on our roof.
Seems like a huge project. Or a challenging roof layout.
21 panels and very simple layout. The longest part was building the frame to hold the panels. Installing the inverters etc. took a little time and our town is a little strict when it cones to construction. This is a very good installer which doesn't rush things just to move on to the next job.
They are not rare. It is the fastest growing energy production mode and is growing faster every year.
Residential installations lag behind the commercial due to installation costs, but they are blowing up as well. I can walk around my neighborhood and see a couple dozen homes with it.
It's also highly regional. The further south in the northern hemisphere the more common.
Here in Canada prices have stayed stubbornly high. It's the Canadian way.
I have panels that I bought for under $0.50/watt that they were clearing out at the local wholesaler years ago. Haven't been able to find anything even near that price range since, and I'm an electrician with access to wholesale pricing.
I have found some decent prices recently but they're all on full pallet lots. So you need to be a business dedicated to solar installs to get a fair price, and those businesses obviously don't pass the savings on as that's not the Canadian way.
Batteries are an even worse situation! If you live here and want storage, I hope you like lead-acid.
Have you looked into Lifepo4 batteries lately? Their capacity and deep cycle life are quite price competitive these days, even up here in Canada.
Not like lately lately, prices were so bad for so long. Got a supplier you could recommend?
I had hoped to start by building a pack for my small car using something like b-grade prismatics or good salvage cells from batteryhookup.com.
Currently running 8kWh of lead-acid which as we know might as well be around 3kWh usable. Going to lithium would really make a car out if it, but the car itself is a weird old thing and not worth much so I don't want to invest a ton into it.
For a medium to large house, one pallet of panels is a normal size for an install
UK its partly roof size/shape limiting the amount of panels you can get in the optimum location, partly the weather, and partly install costs.
If its going to take me 8 years at least to pay back vs. not having it I am not going to bother. Some people got lucky with lifetime buy back rates for the panels to the grid so they made bank of theirs with 50p a kwh ( and electric was around 24p a kwh to buy from the grid) but those rates got cut to like 4p a kwh, when even a cheap EV tarrif is like 9p a kwh
There are some finance deals available from the likes of Eon but its hardly high end gear, which I think is needed to make the most of the UK roofs and UK sun. Time you start paying interest on it, it becomes an even worse deal.
I would save more money by just having a battery installed and charging it on my EV tarrif overnight.