Why is solar more expensive in the U.S. than in other countries?
I&#x27;ve been working on how to bring the cost of solar down, at least for &quot;homeowner installed DIY&quot; systems in my area (legal, grid tie, permitted, inspected, etc), and I&#x27;m fairly certain the latest iteration of this will come in around the $1&#x2F;W range, pre-incentives.  That&#x27;s without labor costs, just raw material and wire costs, but it&#x27;s for a 21kW ground mount A-frame system with three string inverters, and a couple hundred foot of wire run through the ground between the panels and inverters.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how Australia does rapid shutdown (if they do), but Enphase and the requirement for per-panel shutdown devices on arrays in the US is responsible for a decent chunk of cost - somewhere on the order of $0.30&#x2F;kWh.  If you have lots of shading, microinverters are fine, but by NEC 2017, they&#x27;re basically <i>required</i> (or you have to have per-panel optimizers and shutdown boxes, which add about the same cost as just going to microinverters).  I don&#x27;t know the exact details of it, but everyone I&#x27;ve talked to in the solar industry seems to feel Enphase &quot;lobbied hard&quot; for this particular shutdown requirement, because it&#x27;s very much to their market advantage, even if it has no meaningful safety benefits in actual array failure conditions.<p>I hate to say &quot;Because installers think they can get people to pay,&quot; but I&#x27;ve also seen a lot of &quot;around the edges&quot; evidence that the sales commissions for solar are fairly obscene (couple grand, if not more), just &quot;tacked on&quot; to the price.  Hey, they&#x27;re interested in solar, dial the commission up, and make it look like they&#x27;ll save money!  Even if the assumptions embedded are simply wrong.<p>And then, of course, there&#x27;s the &quot;solar loan&quot; price inflation, in which your &quot;0.99% APR&quot; loan has a couple grand in fees up front, tacked onto the price.  You can often save quite a bit by asking for the &quot;cash price,&quot; but nobody does that out of the gate, because of <i>course</i> you want an expensive up front and low interest loan, right?  Who wouldn&#x27;t?  Oh, and those loan origination fees count as install cost for the purposes of the tax credit... ;)<p>There are a lot of things that go into it, but from my point of view, it really feels like it&#x27;s a lot of &quot;Because we can, and because we convince people to pay it&quot; going on with the installed costs.  When I can get, as a random low volume homeowner, the equipment to do solar for $1-$1.25&#x2F;W, I have to wonder about the prices installers charge.