Costs of solar installation: dropping but still more than Europe & Japan

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has its second edition of their report Tracking the Sun on the costs of solar installation. Todd Woody at Green Inc. (and Green Wombat) writes:

The report found that the installed cost of residential and commercial photovoltaic systems in the United States dropped 30 percent over all from 1998 to 2008. But prices had become relatively stagnant from 2005-7, as demand spiked and solar module makers ramped up production.

The global economic meltdown, however, along with a resulting oversupply of modules, led the cost of installing a solar system last year to fall from $7.80 a watt to $7.50 a watt, though the actual cost to homeowners actually increased slightly as state incentives for installing solar arrays fell faster than module prices.
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And although California is by far the largest solar market in the United States with 81 percent of all installed photovoltaic systems, it isn’t the cheapest place to install small-scale solar.

That distinction goes to Arizona, where the installed cost of solar systems smaller than 10 kilowatts was $7.30 per watt compared to $8.20 in California.

The United States still has a way to go before matching European and Asian nations, both in terms of the number of solar systems and their cost.

The price of installing solar in Germany, for instance, is $6.10 a watt and $6.90 in Japan.

But the United States is catching up and is the third-largest solar market after Spain and Germany. In 2008, 5,948 megawatts of photovoltaic systems were installed worldwide, more than double the number from the previous year.

It's ridiculous of course that the US is third after two countries whose population is an order of magnitude smaller (Spain 40M, Germany 82M, US 300M). But such is the reality of how far behind the US is in areas it should be leading in.

The other interesting question is the impact forthcoming thin-film solar will have on costs. Locally, Nanosolar has been moving on production now with a new partnership with SunLink for mounting systems. However, the proximity between "production" and "shipping" remains vague.

Rafael @www.climateatbay.net