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Context 1
... per commercial installation for permitting, inspection, and interconnection, processes . Tables Table 1. ...
Context 2
... average labor hours per installation were translated into cost per watt using assumptions about system size, labor class and proportional share of labor, and fully burdened labor rates. Table 1 depicts the labor class, share of labor, and wage assumptions used to calculate total labor costs for each soft- cost category (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2011). In addition, total annual expenditure data were collected for customer-acquisition costs in three categories: marketing and advertising, system design, and all other customer-acquisition costs. ...
Context 3
... that labor class and wage assumptions as well as labor hours affect labor costs. For example, labor class and wage assumptions make inspection-related labor more costly on an hourly basis than labor related to financial incentive application (Table 1). ...
Context 4
... most soft-cost categories examined, survey questions were in terms of average labor hours per system installed. For each installer surveyed, these responses were translated into units of dollars per watt based on the average system size of that particular installer and assumed labor rates (Table 1). For customer-acquisition costs, survey questions were, instead, in terms of annual dollar expenditures. ...
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... The fabrication cost of modules with efficiency ranging from 14 -21% (depending on Si, CdTe and CIGS) is less than $1/W (Group, 2014;Osborne, 2013). However, it is interesting to see that only 1% of the world's electricity is generated from photovoltaics, and there is a desire to bring down the cost below $0.5/W while having conversion efficiency greater than 25% (Ardani et al., 2012). This stimulates the research to develop a new generation of solar cells. ...
Buildings consume a large portion quantity of energy. In May 2010, the European Union (EU) reported that around 40% of their energy consumption was related to building sectors, which is similar to the proportion of 39% in the United States. In Australia, buildings count 20% of its total energy consumption. Experts across the globe have been working in the development of new technologies, which not only reduce the building energy consumption but also harness energy from renewable sources. Building integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) system is one of the most popular techniques towards constructing a net-zero energy building through the utilisation of solar energy. In this review, we focus on the BIPV applications in Australia, where BIPV has not been prevailed as widely as might be expected despite the high solar irradiation in the country. This paper discusses recent advancements in BIPV systems and challenges that Australia is facing in order to adopt this technology. In addition, the current carbon emission issues in Australia are presented to build awareness among people, which will contribute towards adopting this technology. A range of experimental and numerical studies have been reviewed to identify the effectiveness of BIPV on building performances. This study also reports on the sustainability and economic feasibility of BIPV systems in terms of energy payback time and economical payback time, respectively. Based on this review, it is argued that BIPV is technically and economically feasible for Australia and its implementation
might be started with solar roof tiles.
... Refs. [44][45][46][47][48][49][50] . Considering hardware costs are "fairly similar" across countries, soft cost profiles can be a key differentiator in installed costs [51] . ...
... Refs. [44][45][46][47][48][49]55] . The results point to a substantial potential in installation cost reduction as soft costs make up a significant share of total installed costs. ...
This chapter explores the possibility for cities to engage in network‐wide climate change strategies to attract capital market attention through capitalization of existing and currently unutilized rooftop real estate that is abundant in the urban environment. Termed “solar cities,” such strategies use city governance vehicles to catalyze public sector‐led, infrastructure‐scale design and investment of city‐wide photovoltaic (PV) technology deployment. The chapter introduces a multivariate analysis method for assessing solar city economics in the six cities: Amsterdam, London, Munich, New York City, Seoul, and Tokyo. The examination of solar city's practicality relies on three analytical tools: project finance analysis, regression analysis, and robustness tests. The chapter covers the project finance analysis of data to illustrate the relative impacts of market, finance, and policy portfolios in solar city economics. Using the regression analysis, the variables driving solar city viability are assessed.
... Likewise, less emphasis has been placed on the soft deployment costs 1 related to customer acquisition, technical and legal-administrative planning, installation work as well as the transaction costs associated with financing. Soft costs are significant in the cost structure of PV, and constitute 20-64% of residential and small commercial PV system prices [11][12][13][14]. To broaden and deepen our understanding of the cost dynamics of PV systems, we need to go beyond the scope of PV modules and develop assessments related to processes of PV deployment. ...
Previous studies about the trends and sources of PV soft cost reduction have only offered a limited understanding of systemic aspects that drive this development. Drawing on concepts of sectoral innovation system theory, this study analyzes the evolution of the German PV sectoral system since the early 1990s, focusing specifically on key processes associated with the deployment of building-sited PV systems. The findings from the analysis suggest that soft cost reductions have been the result of numerous processes, including demand and market expansion, interactions across various agents, knowledge generation and learning, diversity creation and selection, and development of the institutional context. This paper offers a novel application of the sectoral innovation system concept in order to investigate incremental innovations and associated cost reductions that occur in the deployment of new energy technologies. For policymakers and other practitioners, the study offers new insights on how to support various processes that can enable (soft) cost reductions.
... Likewise, less emphasis has been placed on the soft deployment costs 1 related to customer acquisition, technical and legal-administrative planning, installation work as well as the transaction costs associated with financing. Soft costs are significant in the cost structure of PV, and constitute 20-64% of residential and small commercial PV system prices [11][12][13][14]. To broaden and deepen our understanding of the cost dynamics of PV systems, we need to go beyond the scope of PV modules and develop assessments related to processes of PV deployment. ...
... Subsequently, installer surveys [e.g. 11,13], in-depth interviews with installers [e.g. 16], or direct observation of micro-stepssuch as via the time and motion methodology [47] provide the data to account for the cost and time needed to carry out these micro-steps. ...
... To analyze component costs and system prices for PV-plus-storage installed in the first quarter of 2016, we adapt NREL's component-and system-level modeling approach for standalone PV. Since 2010, NREL has benchmarked PV system prices for the residential, commercial, and utility-scale sectors (Goodrich et al. 2012, Ardani et al. 2012, Chung et al. 2015, Fu et al. 2016). Our methodology includes bottom-up accounting for all component and project-development costs incurred when installing residential systems, and it models the cash purchase price for such systems excluding the investment tax credit (ITC). ...
Behind-the-meter energy storage products have the potential to optimize the value of rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) systems while increasing the flexibility of electricity consumers and enhancing grid operations. However, significant cost and value barriers continue to hinder the large-scale deployment of PV-plus-storage systems. In this report, we fill a gap in the existing literature by providing detailed component- and system-level installed cost benchmarks for residential PV-plus-storage systems. We also examine other barriers to increased deployment of PV-plus-storage systems in the residential sector. The results are meant to help technology
manufacturers, installers, and other stakeholders identify cost-reduction opportunities and inform decision makers about regulatory, policy, and market characteristics that impede PV-plus-storage deployment.
... It is clear that the declining costs of solar modules have contributed to increases in the installed capacity of solar PV (EA 2008). Total hardware costs have dropped from $3.30 per watt to $1.83 per watt between 2010 and 2012, with current module prices at under $1.00 per watt [38,39]. Recent work is seeking to reduce costs further by targeting the ''soft costs " of solar installation such as labor, supply chain, permitting, and transaction costs. ...
... Recent work is seeking to reduce costs further by targeting the ''soft costs " of solar installation such as labor, supply chain, permitting, and transaction costs. Soft costs comprised approximately two-thirds of the total installed cost of $5.22 per watt in 2012 [38]. Additional reductions in cost to the end-user were available through tax incentives, subsidies , and rebates offered by governments and utilities [40,37]. ...
Residential energy markets in the United States are undergoing rapid change with increasing amounts of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems installed each year. This study examines the combined effect of electric rate structures and local environmental forcings on optimal solar home system size, ratepayer financials, utility financials, and electric grid ramp rate requirements for three urban regions in the United States. Techno-economic analyses are completed for Chicago, Phoenix, and Seattle and the results contrasted to provide both generalizable findings and site-specific findings. Various net metering scenarios and time-of-use rate schedules are investigated to evaluate the optimal solar PV capacity and battery storage in a typical residential home for each locality. The net residential load profile is created for a single home using BEopt and then scaled to assess technical and economic impacts to the utility for a market segment of 10,000 homes modeled in HOMER. Emphasis is given to intraday load profiles, ramp rate requirements, peak capacity requirements, load factor, revenue loss, and revenue recuperation as a function of the number of ratepayers with solar PV. Increases in solar PV penetration reduced the annual system load factor by an equivalent percentage yet had little to no impact on peak power requirements. Ramp rate requirements were largest for Chicago in October, Phoenix in July, and Seattle in January. Net metering on a monthly or annual basis had a negligible impact on optimal solar PV capacity, yet optimal solar PV capacity reduced by 20–50% if net metering was removed altogether. Technical and economic data are generated from simulations with solar penetration up to 100% of homes. For the scenario with 20% homes using solar PV, the utility would need a 16%, 24%, and 8% increase in time-of-use electricity rates ($/ kW h) across all ratepayers to recover lost revenue in Chicago, Phoenix, and Seattle, respectively. The $15 monthly connection fee would need to increase by 94%, 228%, or 50% across the same cities if time-of-use electricity rates were to remain unchanged. Batteries were found to be cost-effective in simulations without net metering and at cost reductions of at least 55%. Batteries were not cost-effective— even if they were free—when net metering was in effect. As expected, Phoenix had the most favorable economic scenario for residential solar PV, primarily due to the high solar insolation.
... As a consequence of PV hardware cost reductions, the importance of soft costs is increasing. Soft costs for PV deployment arise from processes related to customer acquisition, technical and legal-administrative planning and inspection, installation work, financing, etc. Soft costs now constitute 20-64% of turnkey residential and small commercial PV system prices [1][2][3][4]. Recent literature has focused on the mapping and benchmarking of soft costs [5,6] and their variations in different geographic contexts [4,[7][8][9][10][11]. ...
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... The initial capital costs of an agrivoltaic farm are highly variable based primarily on the variables that influence traditional PV system costs [56] such as: the relative maturity of the PV industry in a given location that determines the soft costs [57], capital costs of the PV modules and balance of system components that have been dropping substantially in all markets globally [58][59][60], access to financing mechanisms and the loan structures available [61][62][63], taxes and potential incentives [64]. These in turn along with the discount rate influence the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) [65]. ...
In order to meet global energy demands with clean renewable energy such as with solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, large surface areas are needed because of the relatively diffuse nature of solar energy. Much of this demand can be matched with aggressive building integrated PV and rooftop PV, but the remainder can be met with land-based PV farms. Using large tracts of land for solar farms will increase competition for land resources as food production demand and energy demand are both growing and vie for the limited land resources. This land competition is exacerbated by the increasing population. These coupled land challenges can be ameliorated using the concept of agrivoltaics or co-developing the same area of land for both solar PV power as well as for conventional agriculture. In this paper, the agrivoltaic experiments to date are reviewed and summarized. A coupled simulation model is developed for both PV production (PVSyst) and agricultural production (Simulateur mulTIdisciplinaire les Cultures Standard (STICS) crop model), to gauge the technical potential of scaling agrivoltaic systems. The results showed that the value of solar generated electricity coupled to shade-tolerant crop production created an over 30% increase in economic value from farms deploying agrivoltaic systems instead of conventional agriculture. Utilizing shade tolerant crops enables crop yield losses to be minimized and thus maintain crop price stability. In addition, this dual use of agricultural land can have a significant effect on national PV production. The results showed an increase in PV power between over 40 and 70 GW if lettuce cultivation alone is converted to agrivoltaic systems in the U.S. It is clear, further work is warranted in this area and that the outputs for different crops and geographic areas should be explored to ascertain the potential of agrivoltaic farming throughout the globe.
... Meanwhile, a small body of work has addressed the cost of interconnection directly (Sena et al. 2014, Navigant Consulting 2013. Finally, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has produced several reports analyzing PV non-hardware balance-of -system ("soft") costs, including the average labor hours required to complete the permitting, inspection, and interconnection process (Ardani et al. 2013, Friedman et al. 2013, Ardani et al. 2012.While these studies identify the interconnection process as a challenging aspect of project development and an important area for future research, they do not provide a data-driven, system-level examination of interconnection timelines across U.S. states. Our present analysis fills this gap in the literature by quantifying interconnection timelines for residential and small commercial PV systems installed across the United States between 2012 and 2014. ...
This report presents results from an analysis of distributed photovoltaic (PV) interconnection and deployment processes in the United States. Using data from more than 30,000 residential (up to 10 kilowatts) and small commercial (10–50 kilowatts) PV systems installed from 2012 to 2014, we assess the range in project completion timelines nationally (across 87 utilities in 16 states) and in five states with active solar markets (Arizona, California, New Jersey, New York, and Colorado).
... Non-hardware costs (or "soft costs") have thus become a larger percentage of total system costs, and more efforts have been made to understand and reduce them. In the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) soft cost benchmarking report (Ardani et al. 2012), 55%- 88% of benchmarked 2010 soft costs were categorized in the unsegmented category of "other soft costs," leaving a significant portion not well defined or understood. This report attempts to better quantify the "other soft costs" by focusing on financing, overhead, and profit for residential and commercial PV installations. ...
Previous work quantifying the non-hardware balance-of-system costs -- or soft costs -- associated with building a residential or commercial photovoltaic (PV) system has left a significant portion unsegmented in an 'other soft costs' category. This report attempts to better quantify the 'other soft costs' by focusing on the financing, overhead, and profit of residential and commercial PV installations for a specific business model. This report presents results from a bottom-up data-collection and analysis of the upfront costs associated with developing, constructing, and arranging third-party-financed residential and commercial PV systems. It quantifies the indirect corporate costs required to install distributed PV systems as well as the transactional costs associated with arranging third-party financing.
