New Berkeley Lab Report: Tracking the Sun III: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the United States from 1998-2009

Authors Galen Barbose, Naïm Darghouth, and Ryan Wiser of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory announce the completion of a new Berkeley Lab report: “Tracking the Sun III: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the United States from 1998-2009.” This report provides a comprehensive summary of installed cost trends for grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States from 1998 through 2009, and provides preliminary cost trends for systems installed in 2010. The report, which updates two previous editions of the report series, is based on project-level data from approximately 78,000 residential and non-residential PV systems, totaling 874 MW of capacity and representing 70% of all grid-connected PV capacity installed in the United States through 2009. These data were provided by 27 PV incentive programs spanning 16 states. They find that average installed costs declined over time, from $10.8/W in 1998 to $7.5/W in 2009 (in real 2009 dollars per installed watt DC). Although wholesale module prices declined precipitously from 2008 to 2009, average installed costs remained flat over this period. However, preliminary cost data for 2010 suggests that a significant decline in average installed costs occurred in 2010. In addition to describing temporal trends, the report also describes trends in installed costs by system size; by component; between the United States, Germany, and Japan; among individual states; between customer-owned and third party-owned systems; and among customer types, applications, and technologies. The report also describes trends in financial incentive levels over time, by customer type and among states, and the associated impact of those trends on the net installed cost of PV for residential and commercial PV system owners after receipt of incentives. The report, along with a PowerPoint briefing and associated data file, can be downloaded from: http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/re-pubs.html

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New Berkeley Lab Report: Tracking the Sun III: The Installed Cost of Photovoltaics in the United States from 1998-2009

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