Comment by dyauspitr
1 day ago
Why do I keep getting $20k quotes to install it then in the US. We seem to be doing something incorrectly here. The underlying hardware seems cheap (through independent research) but the labor and add in fees seem to be making this expensive. At sub $10k prices for the panels + batteries I would get it yesterday.
From what I've heard from people who've done deep dives, most solar installers in the US are essentially financing scams. The component costs have come way down, it's still essentially screwing things into the roof + a few hours from an electrician.
The real money is convincing marks to take the financing for 20+ years.
If that were the only reason, you’d surely be able to find someone who undercut the bloated financed costs and do a straightforward labor and materials install. But no such cheaper options exist
> But no such cheaper options exist
None? Project Solar? The last time I seriously looked at doing rooftop panels, they were significantly cheaper than the door-to-door jerks.
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Depends on many factors. If installers are able to fully fill their available time and crews with jobs at the current price and expanding is limited by the availability of new crews high prices could be a stable equilibrium until a) more crews become available/techniques improve to speed up install times or b) demand relaxes and they need to drop their price to find sufficient customers.
There's also other factors like the overall cost being beyond people's willingness to save for when financing is available or the extra value that financed installs can provide the underwriters when they're bundled and sold as a stable income stream like houses were in the mid 00s.
"If it can be done cheaper someone will" is based on a lot of simplifications and assumptions about the market in question.
Unless there are enough marks for everyone to scam. Then the focus is to extract the money instead of investing in crushing the competition.
Not necessarily. There are little-known monopolies like the eyewear, travel agencies, and cargo fuel (there are many more!) where price fixing like this happens.
This makes me want to start a solar company.
AI can't take my job then.
One indicator is that third world countries can seem to afford it.
"But no such cheaper options exist"
Untrue, at Sunspark we sold to both individuals and companies. If you can install the stuff yourself, buying it direct from the manufacturer is ungodly cheap (~330w panels at $80 a piece when I worked there almost decade ago.)
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I call this "the capitalism fallacy": it doesn't exist in the (my) market, therefore it's not possible.
The fallacy is that there are infinite market opportunities but a finite supply of entrepeneurs/business/money to exploit them. Therefore, there are an infinite number of market opportunities that will get passed up for one reason or another.
No, the cash prices are insane too. I paid cash for my system.
This is a good question - there are fairly high imposed tariffs on solar in the US[0] but I think the labor is the big part. Over here in the UK, solar installation would cost about $12k dollars, so quite a bit cheaper, but still not below $10k.
One thing that isn't super obvious from the article is that a lot of it is talking about industry solar panels rather than rooftop. The overheads of installation etc get a lot smaller if you're installing a whole bunch at once.
This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory, so are similar to double glazing.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/overview-trade-and-polic...
> they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I would guess this varies by locale, and people usually assume the time value of money to be zero when they make the claim. In much of the US, I think the payback time is more realistically in the 15-20 year range, which means you really only want to install panels when you install a new roof. Otherwise the lifetime of the roof will happen before break even on the panels.
> This isn't to say that installing solar panels on your house is a bad idea - they normally pay for themselves after something like 10 years from memory
I am with you, this would be better on a town or regional basis instead of on everyone’s roof. Our houses already have wires going to them and I can’t imagine my particular roof or garage is the best place to put panels and batteries. But I understand it’s a political / administrative issue which may well be not solvable easily in many places.
Rooftop solar costs 3x more per watt than utility scale. The only reason it would pay off is that you're able to avoid grid maintenance costs built into per-kwh pricing.
Residential electricity pricing is 3x-4x wholesale pricing.
Which is gaming a particular kind of rate structure. They would not do nearly as well if grid maintenance charges were decoupled from consumption.
Rooftop solar (ideally with battery backup) allows you to be independent of the grid (yes, even if you're interconnected, if you do it properly), which means PG&E's garbage infrastructure can largely become irrelevant if your system is properly sized.
The regulatory overhead to grid-connect is a _significant_ portion of the price, both for the actual paperwork labor and because of the premium it imposes on the system components (you can't use inexpensive non-UL-listed panels)
Is this really a thing in the US? At least in Europe, rooftop solar like OP mentioned doesn't require grid-connection?
Only some states allow simple plug in roof top or balcony solar I believe. So depending on your area you might be required to do a grid hookup and lose access to it during outages.
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Net metering hasn’t been allowed in my county in more than two years so that can’t be it.
I suspect a huge chunk of that is labor costs rather than materials.
Labor costs even more in Australia, yet total systems are installed for about 1/3rd - 1/4th the cost of the US. It’s not labor.
It is labor. It's code. The amount of labor required to do an installation to code in the US is easily 50% more, if not more than that. Australia also has standardized streamlined racking that works on much higher percentage of roofs, the US has a lot more custom construction.
>Labor costs even more in Australia
This is really surprising to hear. Are you sure about that?
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For the same reason you don't have a small coal power plant in your backyard - scale matters.
This makes me think of the Franklin Pot Belly stove we had in the middle of the living room growing up and the coal bin in my back yard having to go out there on cold winter mornings to bring a bucket in.
Many private utilities in the US have fought against residential solar, and are seemingly motivated to act against it as something against their long term interests. In California the amount of Public Utilities Commisssion retrograde policy is ridiculous.
Just dont expect net metering and get yourself some batteries. They are cheap now.
Don't confuse grid solar with on-prem
On-prem has a problem of distributed labour costs.
On-prem might eventually become cheaper, but my guess is that won't happen any time soon.
For the time being, centralized and at-scale installation is where you can get much, much lower labour per watt costs.
I diy installed a 13kw ground mount with a 32kwh battery for $18,700 before the tax rebate last december. 6 year payback at my current rate of $0.12 kwh after the rebate. Its a complete no brainer at this point.
6 years to recoup your costs on a depreciating asset is maybe not such a good investment that it becomes a no brainer. It's an OK investment, but the money can probably be invested better.
If you want to look at a place that is comparable to (parts of) the US that manages to do things about 3-4x cheaper, look at Australia. They seem to have stumbled on something that works ridiculously well. You can get a quote and stuff installed in something like a few weeks at most. It's done right and efficiently without a lot of bullshit.
Other places (like the EU and especially the US) have regulatory problems around anything to do with energy. This is mostly about ass coverage resulting in a lot of pressure for certification, related fees, grid operators insisting on a lot of overhead, building codes requiring a lot of faffing about for the business of wiring together what is essentially plug and play stuff, etc.
If you have an off grid shed, providing power to it is cheap and easy because you have none of that. You buy the hardware on amazon or wherever. It arrives, you wire it up. Job done. And if you are smart you might let a qualified electrician do it right for you or at least check your work (so your shed doesn't burn down and nobody dies from electrical shocks). But fundamentally it's not that hard and this stuff is mostly pretty safe and easy to work with. Especially compared to the things people burn down their sheds with traditionally (e.g. generators).
There's a lot of optimization potential here and most of that is completely non technical.
Self-installable plug-in solar is coming: https://www.energysage.com/news/plug-in-balcony-solar-panels...
Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt. The cheapest residential solar options are community solar if your state and utility supports it, or a ground mount system.
The biggest cost components are sales and marketing expenses and similar soft costs. Some of this can be driven down if you collectively buy through something like https://solarunitedneighbors.org/
(have installed 100kw+ of residential solar, ama)
"Residential solar in the US is very expensive, $3-4/watt versus utility scale closer to $1/watt."
Yea, if you go to an installer instead of buying from the OEM and installing yourself. I likely made your panels at SunSpark (We made panels for everyone, Renogy, Juinko Solar, Samsung, etc.) They were sold for $80 at 330w - 4.125 watts per dollar, or a quarter per watt.
Solar isn't expensive - you are.
> Solar isn't expensive - you are.
I am not a commercial system installer, I am a hobbyist enthusiast who helps others install to avoid commercial installers and their costs. Volunteer labor for everything (racking, panels, electrical), volunteer electrician signs off for any AHJ (authority having jurisdiction) requirements.
Most people cannot install the equipment themselves, which leads to the residential costs I mention. Is it expensive? Price is what you pay, value is what you get. If you cannot find someone to install for free, and cannot do it yourself, the price is the price. You can either choose to pay market rate after getting multiple bids, or choose to go without.
US Dept of Energy: Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmarks - https://www.energy.gov/cmei/systems/solar-photovoltaic-syste...
Energy Sage: Solar panel cost in 2026 - https://www.energysage.com/local-data/solar-panel-cost/
(i am also a community outreach volunteer for https://www.gosolarapp.org for automating permitting and remote inspections across the US, which was incubated at NREL prior to being spun out as an independent non profit; this drives down permitting soft costs)
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How can the numbers ever work? $15k pays my electric bill for a decade. I get that it amortizes beyond that, but it's a heck of a sunk cost that just doesn't make sense IMO.
I have a cabin in the woods, an hour from my house, my choices are either install a couple of solar panels on the roof, or have no electricity.
I'm looking forward to installing a couple of panels on the roof next year. Having power to charge my phone, or laptop, won't take much capacity, I'm not going to use much power other than that, maybe some music but nothing like cooking/heating, or similar heavyweight usage. (I have a wood stove for heating, and gas/alcohol stoves for cooking, along with on-site water.)
Especially if a once-in-a-decade freak hailstorm can take it out…
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Because your electric bill goes up every year as the utility keeps asking for return on equity (assuming investor owned utility, math might be different if you're in an electric coop). A solar PV system will produce power for 25 years at a minimum at a fixed cost. Like a mortgage that is fixed versus rent that is not.
It's the equivalent of a bond investment with potential subsidies at the utility, state, and federal level (solar is no longer subsidized, but batteries still are).
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=411421
https://magnifina.com/articles/rooftop-solar-yield/
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From what I understand, the going price is AU$5K in Australia. (USD3500). A small portion of that is scale since solar roof is far more common in Australia, but most of it is "doing something incorrectly", as you suspect.
If you had this option in the United States, you would have people fighting in line to be first
Distributed solar is cute and it sometimes benefits some people but it is pointless for national policy to pursue it. As you pointed out, the cost structure of small distributed solar is dominated by office overhead, sales, management, insurance, litigation, etc etc.
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