Publisher's Synopsis
Previous work quantifying the non-hardware balance-of-system costs-or soft costs-associated with building a residential or commercial photovoltaic (PV) system has left a significant portion unsegmented in an "other soft costs" category. This report attempts to better quantify the "other soft costs" by focusing on the financing, overhead, and profit of residential and commercial PV installations for a specific business model. There are many different business models in the PV marketplace, with varying cost structures; however, a common model was chosen to gain better insight of typical costs within the currently unsegmented "other soft costs" category. This report presents results from a bottom-up data-collection and analysis of the upfront costs associated with developing, constructing, and arranging third-party-financed residential and commercial PV systems. It quantifies the indirect corporate costs required to install distributed PV systems as well as the transactional costs associated with arranging third-party financing. It accompanies the recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory soft cost benchmarking report (Friedman et al. 2013), which quantifies all the non-hardware balance-of-system costs associated with building a residential or commercial PV system. We conducted in-depth interviews with members of financing departments at large PV installation companies on the subjects of third-party financing and overhead costs, and we collected data from industry participants' corporate public filings. From these inputs we designed and built a model intended to capture all direct and indirect costs of residential and commercial installations, using a specific business structure in which there is a power purchase agreement/lease customer; engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) installer; developer; and tax-equity provider under a sale-leaseback transaction. This benchmark characterizes one of many possible business models-one in which the market participants are not vertically integrated but are separate entities. For this corporate structure, adding all costs and margins together, a residential PV system would have had, in 2012, a total price of $4.52/W, and a commercial system would have a price of $3.66/W. Third-party-ownership-related costs add $0.78/W to a residential portfolio and $0.67/W to a commercial portfolio. However, this ignores three of the main benefits of third- party financing arrangements. First, third-party financiers offer additional services not included in the upfront cost of direct ownership. Second, while third-party financing costs may increase upfront costs, they may effectively lower the levelized cost of energy. Third, third-party businesses have gained significant market share in the United States, driving a considerable amount of PV demand. Without this volume of third-party customers, businesses are significantly less likely to operate efficiently, which would cause overhead costs to increase.
