soft costs

Installed rooftop solar capacity globally is on track to increase 61% between 2021 and 2025 as policy support encourages deployment and homeowners look to mitigate high electricity prices.

Solar start-up Terabase Energy has closed a US$6 million Series A financing round, unveiling an aim to help drive down solar generation costs to below US$0.01/kWh by 2025.

JP Morgan’s majority-owned multinational independent power producer (IPP) Sonnedix has brought online a 38.7MW PV plant in southern Japan, while an analyst has said the country’s solar industry continues to target cost reductions to bring it in line with global levelised cost of energy (LCOE) figures.

The cost of solar technology is no longer a barrier to PV reaching grid parity in China, according to manufacturer LONGi.

A new initiative in the US will take aim at the country’s US$1 per Watt soft costs for residential solar.

The US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has highlighted continued PV system cost reductions in its latest quarterly report, ‘US Solar Photovoltaic System Cost Benchmark Q1 2016’.

The Fraunhofer USA Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) has demonstrated two plug and play solar systems at its 2016 Demo Day.

Everyone in the industry knows the price of solar continues to fall in most global sectors, inching closer to – or reaching – parity with other energy sources, both renewable and carbonaceous. But when a well-respected market researcher says prices are falling in real time in some regions, that attention-grabbing statement is not something one usually hears in any timeline.

The need for solar to find new ways of staying competitive in the US is increasing as a the pace of hardware cost reductions slows. Ben Willis looks at efforts going on to tackle some of the persistently high soft costs involved in US solar development