Tracking the Sun: Installed Price Trends for Distributed Photovoltaic Systems in the United States - 2018 Edition

Abstract

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)'s annual Tracking the Sun report summarizes installed prices and other trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States. 1 The present report focuses on systems installed through year-end 2017, with preliminary trends for the first half of 2018. As in years past, the primary emphasis is on describing changes in installed prices over time and variation in pricing across projects. New to this year, however, is an expanded discussion of other project characteristics in the large underlying data sample. Future editions will include more of such material, beyond the report's traditional focus on installed pricing. Installed pricing trends presented within this report derive primarily from project-level data reported to state agencies and utilities that administer PV incentive programs, solar renewable energy credit (SREC) registration systems, or interconnection processes. Refer to the text box to the right for several key notes about the data. In total, data were collected and cleaned for more than 1.3 million individual PV systems, representing 81% of U.S. residential and non-residential PV systems installed through 2017. A public version of this dataset is available at trackingthesun.lbl.gov. The analysis of installed pricing trends in this report is based on a subset of roughly 770,000 systems with available installed price data.

Financial Impacts of Net-Metered Distributed PV on a Prototypical Western Utility’s Shareholders and Ratepayers

“…In 2018, there was a 7% increase in residential distributed solar photovoltaic (DPV) deployment [1]. Such large increases in the deployment of DPV in the U.S. over the previous 5-7 years has been attributed to significant declines in equipment costs [2], state and federal tax credits, and electric utility net-energy metering (NEM) compensation programs [3]. NEM is a billing mechanism that credits customers with distributed generation systems for any electricity they export to the grid [4].…”

Developing Cost Functions for Estimating Solar Photovoltaic System Installed and Life Cycle Costs Using Historical Quote Data

“…Solar photovoltaic system installations (PV) for residential homes have expanded significantly since 2010. Analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) finds that total installations per year in the United States increased from less than 50 000 in 2010 to over 350 000 in 2016 [1]. The data indicates a dip in 2017, but still over 300 000 new systems were installed.…”

“…A key driver of the growing deployment of residential PV systems has been the decrease in the installed cost to a homeowner. The reported national average installed cost of residential PV systems has decreased from nearly $10/W in 2008 to ~$3.70/W in 2017 [1]. The average cost has decreased due to reductions in costs for all cost categories (PV panels, inverters, balance of systems (BoS), and "soft costs" such as customer acquisition and margins) as well as economies of scale from larger median array installations (grown from ~4.2 kWDC in 2008 to 6.3 kWDC in 2017) and improved technology such as higher median efficiency panels (grown from 14 % in 2008 to 17% in 2017).…”

“…Although this national trend is important, the decision to install a PV system is specific factors related to a homeowner's location. Barbose, Darghouth, LaCommare, Millstein and Rand (1) shows that the average installed cost across 19 states in 2017 ranges from $2.60/W to $4.50/W. Similarly, EnergySage (4) shows the average quoted price for 12 states ranging from $2.72/W to $3.43/W in the second half of 2018.…”

Impact of Wind, Solar, and Other Factors on Wholesale Power Prices: An Historical Analysis—2008 through 2017

“…This report assesses the degree to which growth in VRE has influenced wholesale power market prices in the United States-focusing on wholesale power energy prices, and principally on the 2008 to 2017 period. Wind and solar power capacity have both grown rapidly, motivated by declining costs (Wiser and Bolinger 2018;Bolinger and Seel 2018;Barbose and Darghouth 2018) as well as State and Federal policy. 1 The unique characteristics of these generation resources, meanwhile, also mean that they may have unique impacts on wholesale pricing patterns.…”