Eating Healthy for Life

There are two main factors which govern solar power cost and these are quite simply, the production cost of the solar panels and the installment cost of the solar system in your home.

Solar power panels may be green, eco-friendly and also help to save the planet but unless they can be competitive in the energy marketplace then they will never be widely used. A new coal-burning plant can deliver electricity at $2 per watt and so this is the benchmark figure that the solar experts want to match.

For the past twenty years scientists have been developing ingenious and cheaper designs of solar power panels. It is the Silicone based solar photovoltaic panels that have dominated the industry and they sell for about $3 a watt, but this is before installation.

For some time there was an actual scarcity of silicone and although the interest in solar panels was increasing, the solar panel producers were not able to fulfill that demand. Now although there is a plentiful supply of silicone, nevertheless the operation of refining it to make the semiconductors is a costly process and there are not many companies that do this. The few factories that are able to produce this refined silicone have a monopoly on the supplies which means that while the demand is high they still keep the price inflated.

The price of refined silicone is one of the key factors in the cost of solar panels. The main thrust of research going on today is in developing ways to reduce the quantity of silicone that is needed to produce a solar panel. There is also investigation taking place in using alternative cheaper materials that are equally effective. There are specific organic materials that have semiconductor properties which may be used rather than silicone.

The cost of installation will change quite considerably depending on whether you do it by yourself or if you call in a professional installer. To install a solar power system in your home using a specialist installer will cost you between $10 - $12 per watt. If you install the solar system by yourself then it should most likely cost you about $4 per watt.

While the initial expense of installation of a home solar energy system would still be relatively expensive there is no doubt that in the near future, given the amazing advancements that are happening, the price will come down. In the mean time, government authorities all over the world are encouraging and subsidizing the use of this particular technology by offering tax rebates and incentives for homeowners who install solar power systems.

Therefore if you install your solar energy system by yourself at the cost of approximately $4 per watt and then claim all of the tax savings and credits that are available in the area, then your solar power cost may not be so far from the $2 per watt benchmark of the energy delivered by the coal-burning plant.