Richard Swanson, founder of a major solar power company:
Solar panels now account for less than half of the cost of a solar panel system. For example, installers spend a lot of time and money designing each rooftop solar system. They need to have a certain number of panels in a row, all getting the same amount of sunlight. A bunch of companies are automating the process, some with the help of satellites. One of the most exciting things is microinverters [electronics that control solar panel power output] that allow you to stick solar panels anywhere on a roof—it’s almost plug and play.
Read the whole short interview.
The cost of permitting, specially in California, is prohibitive.
This is one of the progressive contradictions to heighten.
You can have environmentalism which creates prohibitive burdens and costs on building new projects and protects unused land, or you can have affordable renewable power installations, but you can’t have both.
That’s just like: you can have the highest union wage jobs build all your infrastructure, but then you can’t have plenty of affordable, state of the art infrastructure.
I like the car battery thing and this might shed light on teslas decision to open their patents. This seems like one of the few candidates for a psst paradigm game changer.
This is blue sky stuff, but Solar pv can use excess power to heat a thermal mass to very Hugh temperatures (and to freeze water). This be used for interseasonal thermal energy storage or could synergize with a concentrated solar Stirling engine system to produce electricity from stored energy.
I I’ve read that it costs thousands extra to carefully remove and reinstall the panels when you inevitably need roof work, and that the non-solar specialists – who tend to be much cheaper – won’t touch them. Those electric bill savings better be worth it.
We need a seemless solar roofing material. That’s it.
Apropos of nothing, this is one of those things I think about when people claim that the US is a “rich” society.
We can’t pull off roof solar panels because they’d be the most advanced, complex, non-plug-and-play, non-mass produced thing in the house. And they really aren’t that complicated.