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Who cares?

The panels themselves are basically free.

The mounting system and the inverter are the expensive part.



You need fewer mounting systems if the production per panel is higher. It's one of the major things you can do to reduce costs, panel efficiency gains mean you need to mount fewer panels.

If 20% more power is produced per panel, you need 5/6 as many panels your project is straight up 16% cheaper.

If anything, your statement about the panels being free and the balance of system and installation cost being expensive make efficiency improvements even more impactful.

The main historical issue with perovskite cells is damage and lifetime, which again directly relate to how many times you need to do these big capital investments. If they last twice as long you need to deal with half as much installation and mounting work over the lifetime.


And labour.. I just got an offer to cover two houses next to each other and the scaffolding is 15k CHF.


Even if the panels were 2x the efficiency, it wouldn't make renting the scaffolding, or getting workers on site any cheaper.


we have a """problem""" of physical labor being too expensive. I put it in question marks as I have no solution (I don't want to rob people of their primary income source), but it's really getting out of hand.

I had two spigots installed on an already there pipe, on two ends. 1100 chf. material cost was 400, the rest is labor at 125/h.

So I just tend to learn a lot of this stuff from YouTube, but obviously I do a lot worse job than someone doing this for years as a living.


This isn't 20% cheaper—it's 20% more efficient. Do they require 20% mounting systems or inverters? If not, you're getting more power without increasing the spending, regardless of which part is the expensive part.

I'd totally believe that more power requires more expensive inverters, but on its own, your comment doesn't make sense.


These solar panels are probably much more expensive than the standard Mono-Si ones right now, they lack scale of production.


Sure, but the GP's premise was that the panels were effectively free.

I agree that they're sure to have a price premium, and reliability will need testing...


I'm pretty sure he was talking about the standard mono-SI ones, so (in his opinion) having 20% more efficiency doesn't matter much.


Mounting system doesn't have to be very expensive. But the mounting labor is. Which is why the mounting hardware does end up costing a lot, because anything to save labor time is usually a good tradeoff.


Inverters are also very cheap nowadays. The most expensive part of a solar installation is labour.


But real estate is not free.

I’d love to swap out my panels for 20% more in the same space if it’s practical.


Really, you're going to spend many thousands to generate slightly more power?


Real estate isn't free, but it's a small (often very small) part of the cost of installing PV.




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