Solar soft cost ontology: a review of solar soft costs

Abstract

The continued deployment of renewable energy is critical to the energy transition necessary for climate change mitigation. Since cost is one of the primary drivers of solar adoption, we must continue to reduce the cost of solar to hasten the transition to clean energy. Currently, solar soft costs account for 52%-70% of the cost of an installed residential solar photovoltaic (PV) system in the U.S. These costs are persistent and an increasing share of the costs, since hardware costs continue to decline. The consensus on a definition of soft costs is 'non-hardware costs', but defining something by what it is not does not tell us what it is, which makes it difficult to study and understand. To this end, we developed the solar soft cost ontology (SSCO) to provide a comprehensive view of the complex and variable knowledge domain of solar soft costs. We identify the main categories of solar soft costs, how they relate to each other, how that knowledge is created, shared, and acquired, and the relevant actors in the solar soft cost knowledge ecosystem. Developed by coding a corpus of nearly 130 academic articles, the resulting ontology in web ontology language (OWL) includes 136 classes and 87 properties. The SSCO can facilitate and enhance knowledge transfer of research findings and best practices within and between stakeholder communities, including researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, that seek to address solar soft costs. We conclude with a discussion of potential applications and use cases for the SSCO among this diverse stakeholder community.

Topic Taxonomy and Metadata to Support Renewable Energy Digitalisation

“…The same types of studies can be found for photovoltaics, where taxonomies have been proposed for both cost and maintenance analysis. In the first group-cost-it is possible to mention the works carried out at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) [15,16] for cost benchmarking and [17] focused on soft costs for Photovoltaics (PV). The second group, maintenance, presents a detailed breakdown of aspects related to photovoltaic energy that have been developed in [18] and the Trust PV project [19], to analyse the risk and maintenance aspects in the whole PV value chain.…”