Great response, thanks for taking the time to write out the numbers!
What do you think about the implications for transportation, maintenance and land use? I have zero idea what the balance of those costs would be for a grid-scale solar farm, but ostensibly going from let’s say 20% to 21% efficiency means you need 5% less land, weight to transport from factory to site, fewer panels to inspect/build/install, fewer to purchase, etc.
I’m sure someone else has a better idea how much it would affect the LCOE than I do!
It isn’t going to make something economic that previously wasn’t. If the costs are sufficiently low (unlikely) it might have positive ROI in some scenarios.
Generally though, solar projects are go/no-go due to things like cost of money and electrical sales pricing agreements + site specific variables like insolation, flatness/road access, cost of local labor, local weather impacts on racking costs, access to transmission, and bulk wholesale costs of materials.
It’s hard to beat flat land out in the open desert near major urban areas with nearby highways and transmission lines, for instance.
What you’re talking about is likely at most half a percent of that equation.
Yep, that’s what I figured! And hence my original post at the top of this thread, suggesting that it’s easy to feel like we have sort of “solved” solar from a panel efficiency perspective and it’s everything else that we still need to improve on (grid infra, storage, etc etc), and additional percentage points of efficiency won’t really mitigate the existing limiting factors.
What do you think about the implications for transportation, maintenance and land use? I have zero idea what the balance of those costs would be for a grid-scale solar farm, but ostensibly going from let’s say 20% to 21% efficiency means you need 5% less land, weight to transport from factory to site, fewer panels to inspect/build/install, fewer to purchase, etc.
I’m sure someone else has a better idea how much it would affect the LCOE than I do!