Re: Solar Panels Cost of Ownership

confusion:

The price of a system is quoted in $/Watt; that's a capital cost for the hardware. Your system is rated at 2500W and you spent $12,500 or $4.80/Watt.  That's less than the retail price of an installed system, that's why I concluded that you did some of the work yourselves.  Kudos!

The price for energy is quoted in $/kWh; that's got a time component.  A system can generate only a finite amount of energy over its 'quoted' 20 year lifetime.  That lets us compute a projected cost of energy for a fixed period of time.

If your system makes 10kWh per day (2500W times 4 hours) times 365 days per year for 20 years then it will have generated 73,000 kWh.  Divide the $12,500 by the 73,000 kWh and you get $0.171/kWh...  That's your cost of energy for 20 years.  Seventeen cents per kilowatt hour...

The good news is that 20 years from the date you installed the system you'll still be "paying" the same price for your electricity.  Who knows what your neighbors will be paying?  Maybe .35, .40,  a $1.00 per kWh...

Now the whole ROI thing gets really complicated because everyone has a different situation; taxes, incentives, rebates, availability of capital, lifestyle, expected inflation, yada yada yada.  That's why I look at the "worst case" for my own product line.

And I have mentioned we're doing concentrating solar-thermal electric power.  I haven't named the company, only the process.  It's a scaled down version of the Solar-One, SEGS, and Saguaro type of facilities in the Nevada desert.  Parabolic troughs collect/concentrate sunlight, makes steam, turns a generator, makes electricity.

We're focusing our attention on commercial buildings, I want to do residential but the reality is it's hard to be cost effective on a system that small.  Each trough is 20+ feet long, and one bi-panel covers ~320 sq ft. 

Our target price is $3/W installed for systems in the 50kW to 500kW range.  If you do the same math as I did above that works out to $0.102/kWh

$600,000 /  ( 200kW * 4hr/d * 365d/y * 20yr) = 0.10273$/kWh (a dime)

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For a $6B nuke generating 600MW for 40 years the raw cost of energy based on capital equipment is:

  6B$ / 600MW * 24h * 365d/y * 40yr =  $0.0285$/kWh (less than 3 cents)

 Naturally the O&M is higher, and there is fuel & cleanup to consider... but I'm trying to keep it apples to apples.

This as the other huge part of the confusion.  A coal plant costs even less to build, but considerably more to operate.  So much more that most of the price of coal electricity is the cost of the coal.

You have to believe me when I say I'm all for solar power, and If I had the means, I'd give my right arm to remove coal & oil burners and replace them with solar, but the money people just won't swallow that pill.  The other issue is that solar operates 4 maybe 6 hours per day... Storage is still way too expensive.

One more piece of bad news... My computations for solar are considered too optimistic by some.  Go to the SolarBuzz website and look at their comprehensive estimates for the cost of solar electricity...  It's enough to make you cry, $0.40, $0.50 or more / kWh...

The only negative light I'm trying to cast is that the investor community is mostly stuck in neutral when it comes to looking at the long term picture.  They want to know the here and now, they want to make their profit and get out.  The look you in the eye and say:  "I could take the money I'd spend on your system, put it in the bank, and pay the electric bill forever."  And in the current economic climate they are correct... shortsighted, but correct.

We both know better! I'm trying to get folks outside of the green community to notice that there is some real benefit to thinking long term.

Whether you like the nuclear issue or not, the economics favor it.  Could the subsidies be better applied? I think so!  The law says the utilities don't have to figure  in the cost of 10,000 years of storage for nuclear waste so they don't do it.

There is so much to be done, and economics are the driving force.