Surely this doesn’t include installation or something? I have been quoted $1.50-$1.80/w installed.
The (relatively) high cost is most likely because of labor and (in my opinion) inflated hardware costs of battery and solar panels.
Labor is a massive expense and can't be discounted but one could imagine a solar panel "kit" that just includes the hardware that you can install yourself.
One could also imagine that the costs of labor being subsumed by a larger entity that can take advantage of economies of scale and provide solar energy like a "classic" energy company. I believe something like that is already happening in the region where I live (upstate New York, USA).
For places where labor might be cheaper, then total costs would also come closer to raw hardware costs.
Installing high-wattage DC lines without any training at all is a great way to get house fires.
Also, I haven't got whole lot of un-shaded roof space.
I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I wouldn't do it. I don't need yet another interested party when trying to sell my house eventually, and I don't want to scare off would-be buyers with potentially complicated contract terms.
> I don't understand why commercial solar isn't even bigger than it is - are they waiting for prices to come down, or what?
I think this is a really good question and I don't know the answer to it.
My not-very-well-informed opinion is that there are a confluence of factors involved:
* Infrastructure buildout, especially in the USA where the infrastructure projects take massive amounts of effort and the population is spread out over a large area of land, takes a lot of time, effort and money.
* The prices involved aren't as lucrative yet as they could be. When the price per MWh is 1/10 that of coal, then we'll see huge rollout (in my opinion).
* Adoption/rollout is happening but, in some places at least, there's government capture preventing widespread rollout/adoption (Pennsylvania?)
* Aging infrastructure prevents large scale energy injection at random points.
To the last point, here in New York state, I've heard one has to pay to first do a survey if the site where you want to build a solar array can actually inject that much more energy into the grid (at a cost of $10k+ or more) and even then, you're limited by what the aging energy infrastructure can support, capping the amount of energy available.
First off you need roofing skills, which 99% of homeowners have no idea how to do safely, often needs specialized equipment, and you run the risk of falling off and basically paralyzing yourself for life. Then you have the issue of having run conduit correctly, grounding everything to code, having disconnects installed in the right places, which is going to vary from state to state and even city to city based on what the laws are.
If you don't electrocute yourself, and manage to not fall off the roof and die, and somehow connect everything correctly, there is approximately 0% chance the local utility agrees to connect your system without a licensed electrician who is willing to vouch for the work you did.
A cursory look on YouTube gives many results [0] [1] [2].
There are fields of ground mounted solar panels in the country side where I live.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7t4hGBWLtxM