The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has published a landmark report extensively detailing component and system-level cost breakdowns for residential PV solar systems equipped with energy storage.
The decreasing cost of solar systems has been well documented over the last several years, with increased innovation and decreasing manufacturing costs combining to make solar PV a competitive and economic choice for residents and utilities across the United States, and in fact the world. As such, the costs attributed to the development of residential and utility-scale solar projects has been well defined for some time — even though that figure keeps decreasing.
However, in the same way that technological innovation and manufacturing has helped to lower the costs of solar PV projects, the same catalysts have acted on energy storage technology. As a result, the attractiveness and economic viability of energy storage systems has increased dramatically over the last year or two, to the point where energy storage options are more and more frequently being considered to run in tandem with solar systems.
Researchers from the US Department of Energy (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have therefore published what is currently the most detailed component- and system-level cost breakdowns for residential solar PV equipped with energy storage. The report, Installed Cost Benchmarks and Deployment Barriers for Residential Solar Photovoltaics with Energy Storage: Q1 2016, also serves to quantify the previously unknown or uncertain soft costs for combined solar PV and energy storage.
“There is rapidly growing interest in pairing distributed PV with storage, but there’s a lack of publicly available cost data and analysis,” said Kristen Ardani, lead author of the report and a solar technology markets and policy analyst at NREL. “By expanding NREL’s well-established component- and system-level cost modeling methodology for solar PV technologies to PV-plus-storage systems, this report is the first in a series of benchmark reports that will document progress in cost reductions for the emerging PV-plus-storage market over time.”
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