Market Research - A great way to procastinate

So the DOE turns out to have about half its money tied up in keeping our nukes going and safe(ish.) Yikes. They get raked over the coals (oh see what I did there? :^) ) about being green cheerleaders and a great deal of their freedom to move is hemmed in by all that incumbent energy. OK off the soap box.

And on to the thrilling subject of Soft Costs in PV installations. YAY market studies! YAY NREL!

From a very fresh  study of Soft Costs of PV installations carried out in 2010 by NREL:

Including assumed permitting fees, in 2010 the average soft costs benchmarked in this analysis total $1.50/W for residential systems (ranging from $0.66/W to $1.66/W between the 20th and 80th percentiles). For commercial systems, the median 2010 benchmarked soft costs (including assumed permitting fees) are $0.99/W for systems smaller than 250 kW (ranging from $0.51/W to $1.45/W between the 20th and 80th percentiles) and $0.25/W for systems larger than 250 kW (ranging from $0.17/W to $0.78/W between the 20th and 80th percentiles). Additional soft costs not benchmarked in the present analysis (e.g., installer profit, overhead, financing, and contracting) are significant and would add to these figures. The survey results provide a benchmark for measuring—and helping to accelerate—progress over the next decade toward achieving the DOE SunShot Initiative’s soft-cost-reduction targets.
We conclude that the selected non-hardware business processes add considerable cost to U.S. PV systems, constituting 23% of residential PV system price, 17% of small commercial system price, and 5% of large commercial system price (in 2010). These processes present significant opportunities for further cost reductions and labor-productivity gains.

Further on:

"Average installer expenditures on customer-acquisition activities totaled $0.67/W for a typical 5 kW residential PV installation: $0.11/W for system design, $0.33/W for marketing and advertising, and $0.23/W for all other customer-acquisition costs."

Our takeaway? Every one has got to think about ways to speed up the process. Permitting. Customer education. Finance prep. Project management. The whole thing.  Even negotiating the rebates and incentives imparts a cost. Lots of these are figured on a per kW basis (and segmented Residential/Commercial) but I'm still digging for which costs are better understood as a per project basis.

These numbers are a test of your glass half empty vs half full sense.  Seems like there are plenty of places for smart people. Take a look and see what you make of these two studies from NREL:

Photovoltaic (PV) Pricing Trends: Historical, Recent, and Near-Term Projections
and
Benchmarking Non-Hardware Balance of System (Soft) Costs for U.S. Photovoltaic Systems Using a Data-Driven Analysis from PV Installer Survey Results

Going into orbit?

You will want to pack these:

Entech's Stretched Lens!

Super clever deploying of just the bits that do work. Since there is no windloading and only micro gravity... the designers are challenged to rethink what is and is not needed. This seems to have slimmed things down to the barest of minimums.

take a look:

Smart, no?

What is wrong with this picture? CONTEST!

Seriously... check this out:

it is from the blog at solfocus...

I get that it is a big installation and every thing seems to be working... Maybe they are not actually tilting accurately at the time of the photo but I'm thinking of something WAY bigger.

First reader to 1) leave a comment below and 2) recap in an email, to me what is so wrong with this picture of a solar collector array... gets a prize. The prize? I mail you, express mail anywhere in the USofA a batch of chocolate chip cookies or gingerbread cookies if you are allergic to chocolate. Butter allergy folks get my condolences as a prize...

There are two answers IF you look at the map below and consider the campus more broadly... now that I look at it.... SO TWO PRIZES.

And yes, if you come up with a third smart concern... there will be more cookies.

Side note:

Funny thing... if you go to Google Maps (say for a different view) The pictures of that site were taken before and after the installation of the SolFocus gear. The near pictures are older and the far pictures are newer. So you can see the site prep for the array and then the array just by zooming back and forth! Confusing but neat.

Check it out while it lasts (the links that is, they keep updating the photos so this before and after trick is just for now but very worth a look.)

(you might need to scroll around a bit to see the silver rectangles even the pool comes and goes!)

View Larger Map



You might have to search for Crafton Hills College Campus Drive in Google Maps to see this...

I'm still working away... found a report again you'd like

This report (link is to a PDF) is a good look at the troubles that come with plain Fresnel Array concentrators. There might be some subtle differences for Cassegrain collectors... but all these high concentration operations have some serious consequences on the expense and complexity front....

For an example of a Casegrain array look at SolFocus. 

The concerning items include extreme aging of the cells (hard job) Risk at misfocus (although they had some good news there for the Fresnel, safety wise...) the demanding focus/tracking requirements.  A good read and a hint as to why I think we need a different approach.

A look into the pyschology of ROI...

Here is a neat (OK somewhat disheartening) story in Joseph Romm's blog (I think it is a blog) over at theenergycollective.com.

It is a long article so stick with it and get to the more thoughtful ROI (Return On Investment) aspects. Like this bit

Lots of equipment is changed at end of life, regardless of energy efficiency. What often happens is that an engineer will say: “Inefficient boiler X will pay for itself in 10 years in savings over the existing model. More efficient boiler Y will pay for itself in 15 years. We’ll take the less efficient cheaper model.” But ROI calculations on these projects should only consider the delta between the cost to replace equipment (which would be spent anyway) and cost to replace with more efficient equipment.

 Makes sense. This is how I justified my change in heating system from a replacement to a re-engineering. The base expense is just going to happen so that is the zero point. Every candidate gets credit for doing the job for that least price. The alternatives then have to have additional benefits that merit the premium over the base. ROI is nice but this is not an investment so much as a prepaid expense. This is expense I cannot easily avoid (my sweater and coffee/soup expenses could not fix the heating problem) so I should not use investment notions, exclusively, to evaluate it.

We had a similar issue with picking a car. (this one does not play out well, sorry to say.) We wanted a new car (to boost reliability as this was a high value for us right then) and sized up 3 year old cars of the base models and found the "roll off the lot penalty" seems to have vanished for base models of the low end Civic Corolla type car. Part of it is that the quality of cars has gone way way up. The rest must be some intersection of lower markups and a better sense among buyers of the value of hanging on to their car. Anyhow, for each car we took the base model expense, then around $15K and our relatively modest annual miles driving and three cost scenarios for gasoline 3,4 and 5 dollars per gallon. PLUS the "get a new battery" penalty on the hybrids at 5 years or whatever it was. That was the killer. The mileage improvement was real but the cost of getting it was also real and we thought that the best comparison was the delta. If we doubled our miles driven in a year then we had an argument for a Hybrid. Instead we figured we could go with the still efficient (in this case Civic) and just try to clip off a day a week with telecommuting and or carpooling. About the same carbon footprint. For far less.

Super read I thought.

Prototyping is a picky little devil...

OK, Got the datalogging multi meter.

Got the card to hook it up to my array of inputs...
Threaded a ribbon cable to all the little posts... tested all the pins (beep... beep... beep goes the continuity tester!)

Now how to get the Ribbon cable to plug into my breadboard... Thought I had the requisite bits and bobs... But I left behind this at Frys...














because I did not yet see how it could be used to pull the even and the odd numbered pins to opposite sides of the trench in my bread board... You have to give it some rough treatment but...

 Clever! thanks Open Circuits!  Saved the day.

Gizmag is really easy to spoof...(evidently)

Sorry to have dropped away.    Thought I'd hop in with a quick observation:

I like to get the Gizmag emails with the wacky bikes and human powered helicopters etc... But along with comes the likes of this:

http://v3solar.com/how-exactly-does-this-new-spin-on-solar-work/

ARRG. I'll leave this to my kind readers as an exercise in critical thinking to see what is wrong with this product... (Not a hint exactly but an indication as to why you should sniff about before getting excited is the menu bar at the top: "Home, About Us, Investor") Watch the spinning wheel take people's money just like the ones at the roulette tables (minus the free drinks.)