Full disclosure - I own stock in SolarCity and First Solar. I'm a solar booster. I'm all about renewable energy and think that individual power is great. I've also been following the issue closely enough to know that you've picked the wrong "Stuff." The issue is this: SolarCity makes money by selling power for A HELL OF A LOT MORE than the power company does. They do this with super-tiny capital expenditures and little-to-no regulation. They also get access to crazy-good financing: SolarCity gets to put a lien on your house when they put panels up. It has been pointed out that SolarCity is effectively a subprime lender. Now compare and contrast: First Solar doesn't put put panels on houses. They build 250MW at a time. They get to put liens on no one's houses. And they have to sell power at - wait for it - the wholesale rate. Which would probably be not that big a deal if there weren't a shit ton of money being poured into solar. And it probably wouldn't be a big deal if solar companies weren't having a hard time at the moment. And even then, it probably wouldn't have come to this if Tesla hadn't just received rapacious tax benefits from Nevada. So this is the part where Nevada's political players get back at Elon Musk, AKA SolarCity, to say "fuck you, we're no longer subsidizing your mortgage company and your battery company. The problem is individual customers are loath to invest in solar panels for their house because the up-front costs are crazy expensive and every solar player in the market is loath to subsidize solar panels for houses because the efficiencies are much greater for large installations. What we're watching is solar becoming a big enough market that major players are making political plays to protect their markets, nothing more. What it reveals, effectively, is that SolarCity can't compete on an even playing field with literally every other solar provider. 'cuz you know what? If First Solar got to sell power at the rates SolarCity gets, the citizens of Nevada would run them out of town on a rail.
Is that still the case though? Chinese solar panels have dropped the price enourmously in the last years. I found a quick price calculation and if you invest in solar panels here, an investment of arount 5k will pay itself back in seven years. And that's in cloudy, rainy Netherlands of all places: Note the different coloring gradients used. The best solar spots here are about on par with Seattle. Why, exactly, doesn't everyone buy a solar panel? Is electricity that cheap already? I honestly don't know.The problem is individual customers are loath to invest in solar panels for their house because the up-front costs are crazy expensive and every solar player in the market is loath to subsidize solar panels for houses because the efficiencies are much greater for large installations.
I think there are three questions here: 1. Is the upfront cost substantial (I suppose relative to a person's income and electricity costs)? 2. Is there a notable difference in costs between rooftop solar and utility solar (e.g. a field of panels)? 3. Is solar competitive against traditional energy? My full disclosure is I work in the electric utility industry, though not in generation. It's debatable how much of a horse I have in this. I suppose it depends how much one expects solar to directly impact utilities beyond generation. Question 2 is the easy one: it will always be cheaper to do the same thing a hundred times than to do a hundred unique designs. As panel costs come down, the balance of system (labor, wiring, inverter, permitting) becomes a greater portion of the cost. All of those costs will be lower at a single large site compared to an equal number of panels spread across many rooftops. Question 3 depends on policy. Netherlands seems to have a feed in tariff where renewables are paid above the wholesale price. In the US, tax credits are popular for utility scale, and net metering (paying the retail price) is popular for small scale (like rooftop solar). Is solar competitive with those incentives? Yes. Is it without? It depends. Where energy costs are high, it almost certainly is. Remote areas that import oil and diesel are good candidates (e.g. Hawaii) because solar offsets the expensive fuel. In areas that can access diverse resources, solar probably isn't competitive. The debate, then, is whether fuels like coal and natural gas are unfairly cheap because the cost of pollution and climate change isn't directly assigned to them. That isn't a simple discussion, and I don't have the answers. I skipped question 1 because I don't know how to answer it. I think the cost to a buyer depends on their access to credit and the payment mechanisms available to them.
The answer to Q1 is "yes" because regardless of credit access and payment mechanisms, there will always be an opportunity cost in locking up assets in capital expenditure. This is why banks can make money loaning money. There's a nasty gap between individual affordability and system adoption that needs to be plugged in order to launch solar as a truly mainstream technology. Letting companies like SolarCity offer leases to sell back electricity was a great way to do it. However, I can see why a state such as Nevada would wish to incentivize companies like FirstSolar and discourage companies like SolarCity. Put a panel on a million houses and you decrease the load on the system. Put a million panels out in the middle of the desert and you get to sell power to every surrounding state with less sunlight.
Let's run some numbers. Maybe we'll both learn something. So I don't know me solargis.info. I know me some PVWatts. And when I feed it my whole south roof covered in panels (which I'd have to cut down my trees to use 'cuz really, my roof is in shadow most of the day), I get that (A) I can generate about 13,000 kWh per year. (B)My system is a 12kW rig, it's gonna cost me (C)$36k to put up (including all incentives), and amortized over the life of the panels, I'm going to average (D) 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Which is not a good thing as SnoPUD charges me 8 cents. I've put down the capital expenditure of a nice car into a depreciating asset that essentially tacks the price of my neighbors onto my electrical bill. When I run the numbers for the same rig at my old house in sun-blasted North Hollywood, CA, I'm generating 19,000kWh per year. I'm going to average 3 cents per kilowatt hour. Which is great because LADWP hits me for 13 cents per kilowatt hour. So. Same system, same size, same install, Seattle it doubles my cost of electricity, LA it knocks it down by 80%. If I'm not mistaken, the smart move is to put panels on my old NoHo apartment and ship the electricity up to myself in Washington... (wikipedia) Figure transmission costs are somewhat fixed at 2% of the billable rate. This pretty much nukes goobster's allegation that it's the transport costs that killed SolarCity's lease profitability; in California, at least, the big problem was that LADWP had to buy a new bazillion dollar system in order to deal with net metering. I've bitched about it before; a buddy of mine has had solar panels in his garage for 27 months because LADWP can't deal with them. Be that as it may, it doesn't take long to recognize that the smart move (for the whole country, as opposed to individual consumers) is to put big-ass panels out where there's shitloads of sun and spray it everywhere. I'll also say this. You couldn't visit a home improvement store in Los Angeles witout seeing a SolarCity booth. They were everywhere. Employees whose entire job was to stand behind a desk on the floor of Home Depot in case someone wanted to hear about solar panels. And while I've visited more than my fair share of home improvement stores, I haven't seen a single rep from SolarCity up here.The cost of high voltage electricity transmission (as opposed to the costs of electric power distribution) is comparatively low, compared to all other costs arising in a consumer's electricity bill. In the UK, transmission costs are about 0.2p/kWh compared to a delivered domestic price of around 10p/kWh.
I've seen solar companies infiltrating department stores here, too. Even IKEA now has booths for solar power. But there's been a surge in big community solar farms - like one of the Dutch Wadden islands building a 6MW plant. Uncle of mine outfitted his entire farm with more solar power than he needed, so now he receives money from the energy company every month. I think that's half of the problem. Electricity here is around 18-25 eurocents ($0.20-$0.27). That's why it can pay itself back within a decade. The other half - holy shit, 12,000 kWh is insane. Average power usage here is around 4,000 kWh per household. The average U.S. household power consumption is 10,932.8 cents
Ha! Thanks for making me look at my Los Angeles power bill, because they owe me $150! In Los Angeles, with no AC and no heat, we burned about 16,000 kWh. I don't know what the penetration of natural gas is in Europe, but in most of the US, heating is not accomplished by electricity, which skews the numbers.
The apartment or the NoHo? Damn, are the faders power hungry or something? I just asked my parents, their small separated house uses around 2500 kWh a year. Heating (edit: and cooking) is through gas. Natural gas is the default here too, since it's been readily available for decades. Thanks, Carboniferous: (...well, it was readily available until the earthquakes started)
In the United States, the Commerce Department believes cheap solar panels are a threat (specifically, a threat to Solarworld AG, a German company with a factory in Oregon). Most solar panel imports are subject to a tax of 21%; some are taxed at 239%.Chinese solar panels have dropped the price enourmously in the last years.