Friday, March 28, 2008

Feb 2008 SREC trades and prices

Shown below are the SREC trades and prices for Feb 2008. These are broken up into two figures by seller, either solar facility owner (fig. 1), or aggregator (fig 2). For either seller, the data is separated by buyer: aggregator, broker, LSE - load serving entity, or other. While it's not apparent from the graphs, any one data point may reflect the sale of just 1 or maybe many SRECs on that day and price. You'll have to look at the spreadsheet to answer that for now. Note also the price for 38 separate trades from solar facility owners, in fig 1, to broker buyers were not reported, hence not graphed.

(click image to enlarge)

solar project updates

The list of completed solar projects in NJ was recently updated for installations finished in Jan-Feb of 2008; these will be added/graphed here by Apr 1. But the spreadsheet is online now here (Excel 1 MB)

Monday, January 7, 2008

2007 prices for PV installations

The table and graph below summerize installation prices in $ per Watt peak (dc) for PV systems across several market segments in New Jersey in 2007. The data is derived from the NJ database of PV projects installed in 2007 and posted at the NJ Clean Energy website in an Excel spreadsheet found here.



Square blue symbols are the mean price paid for each market segment, bars reflect the range of prices paid (and are equal to one standard deviation or the price range of the number of systems, whichever is smaller). Data is now updated for projects paid through 1-04-2008.

Friday, January 4, 2008

Historic prices for PV systems in NJ

The easiest place to start is the $ price of installed PV systems in New Jersey, based on project data provided by the NJ Office of Clean Energy, found at Ref. [1]. There are several market segments to look at, based on tax status, but here the focus is on residential and commercial systems, which together represent almost all systems installed to date.

A very big caveat here is that for the period covered 2003-2007, the principal NJ State incentive was a rebate, $ per peak Watt (the dc peak rating of the system), and a less-valuable-at-the-time solar renewable energy credit (SREC). Going forward in 2008 the principal incentive will be SREC credits (sold by PV owners into a market trading in SRECs), valued at up to about 61 cents per kWh in '08-'09. Secondly, the Federal tax credit in effect during this period, will expire in 2008 unless Congress amends or creates a new law. So while PV pricing may show continuity across 2007 - 2008, the price trend for future systems may differ from the historic trend seen to date.

Graphed below are prices in NJ for solar PV installations, which include all costs to enable the system to begin producing electricity, expressed in $ per peak Watt installed. NJ does not charge sales tax on PV systems, and the install cost here does not reflect any rebates or tax incentives or deductions. It's what you'd pay in an unsubsidized world, minus the State sales tax.

Residential
The first two graphs give for residential systems the nominal price (Fig.1), or real price (Fig.2) expressed in 2007 dollars, using project data from Ref. [1]. As the spreadsheet of project data contains some errors, the few cases where prices were above $15/W or below $2/W were ignored for the data plotted in the figures here. The project data includes up to November 30, 2007 installations, and final data for all systems installed in H2 '07 will be available late this month. Dates for systems are 'checkdates' on which the system rebate was paid out, which may differ by several months from the actual completion of the installation.


FIGURE 1 Mean price and standard deviation (SD, shown as error bars) in prices charged, all in nominal dollars (not adjusted for inflation), for 6-month intervals, and linear fit (red line) to the mean price data. Bar chart in blue shows systems installed per corresponding 6-mon period.


FIGURE 2 Mean values and SD of prices charged for residential projects of Fig 1 in real dollars (inflation-adjusted). Inflation, nationally about 3%/year, is found using calculator of Ref[6].

Also plotted is the DOE target for costs in 2015: $2.50 - 3.00 per Watt [3]. This DOE target would make solar PV electricity price competitive with that from conventional sources, the price you now see in your utility bill, about 15 cents per kWh this Winter. When PV electricity is economic, solar energy can become a significant fraction of the State's energy supply mix.

While prices are not trending down fast enough to meet the DOE's 2015 targets, recall NJ incentives have until very recently (end of 2007) provided generous capacity-based rebates, i.e. $ per kWp installed. These rebates are not available presently, but may return at much reduced value for some small systems beginning in the 2008-09. The principal incentive will be the production-based SREC - capped at 71cents per kWh starting July 2008 and likely to trade at values as high as 60 cents/kWh (traded in units of MWh). Will this production-based incentive lower costs, and work to make PV competitive with grid utility prices? More on this in later posts.

Commercial
In the graphs below for commercial systems we've plotted price trend innominal and real dollars 2007 prices. Note the decrease in PV installation price arises mainly from the ~3% inflation/CPI factor. The other comment here is we haven't split this group into smaller systems (less than 20 kW), medium (20 kW - 100 kW) from the larger (greater than 100 kW). We do in later posts, as well as graph project data for other market segments (non-profits, schools), and graph up levelized cost of electricity, a metric used to compare solar PV electricity prices to that of utility prices we all see in our monthly bills. More to say about this market segment in the near future.


FIGURE 3 Mean and SD of nominal prices for installation of PV systems for commercial customers, systems of all sizes (1-2000 kW). Note this data is dominated by systems less than 20 kW (2/3 of the 327 commercial systems installed from 2003-2007 with less than 20 kW in size).


FIGURE 4 Same as Fig.3 but plotted for real prices.

Below in Fig 5. is the commercial systems installed by size (20-100kW, 100-450kW, and GT 450 kW) during hte 2003-07 period. As can be see by hte linear fits to the data, prices for these systems rose very slightly over this period.


FIGURE 5


FIGURE 6

The purpose

This site will follow and publish solar PV prices in NJ - and compare to the targets of the DOE - with the goal to help drive costs lower over time - by providing as much information as possible for potential consumers about real prices, and how they vary. The data used here is provided publicly by the NJ Office of Clean Energy - we use it and do a little analysis and graphics.