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.
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.