Cost of solar installations dropping

Sept. 16, 2011 - upi.com

BERKELEY, Calif., Sept. 16 (UPI) -- The cost of solar systems in the United States has declined significantly in the last two years with the drop in photovoltaic module prices, a report says.

An annual cost-tracking report released by the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said the average installed cost of residential and commercial PV systems completed in 2010 fell by roughly 17 percent from the year before, a Berkeley Lab release said Thursday.

The decrease is due in large part to a dramatic reduction in the price of the modules, researchers said.

"Wholesale PV module prices have fallen precipitously since about 2008, and those upstream cost reductions have made their way through to consumers," Galen Barbose of the lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division said.

Non-module costs, such as installation labor, marketing, overhead and the other components of the systems, also fell for residential and commercial PV systems in 2010, the report said.

"The drop in non-module costs is especially important," Berkeley scientist Ryan Wiser said, "as those are the costs that can be most readily influenced by solar policies aimed at accelerating deployment and removing market barriers, as opposed to research and development programs that are also aimed at reducing module costs."

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