US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year

Re:US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year by hwillis on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:41PM (#15290365)

> In the US at least, a huge fraction of costs for residential solar are in customer acquisition. Something like 20%-30% of the cost of a residential install goes to paying for lists of potential customers and marketing to them!

Page 22 of the report[1] estimates sales and marketing/customer acquisition for residential solar to be 12% of the price, and says Vivint and Sunrun report it as 17% and 22%, so I think your numbers are a bit high. I also doubt that cost will actually fall- if anything it might rise, since advertising pays for itself. As costs drop it becomes more important to advertise the low costs!

[1]: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf

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Re:US solar plant costs fall another 30 per cent in one year by epistasis on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @10:55PM (#15290422)

Ah yes, 30% was too high. But 19% is what's reported by other analysts, such as GreenTechMedia [1]. Like you, GTM also expects customer acquisition costs to remain high, which I find to be unfortunate. As pointed out above [2], Australia manages to have an industry with less money spent on marketing.

[1] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/costs-to-acquir...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15290269

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