A 2x4 stud is like $3, for example. Decorative cedar is quite a bit more expensive.
Rarity speaks to how poorly suited the material is for building durable fences and the ~irrelevance of the cost of plywood in this subthread.
Bonus, it keeps scientists employed, maintaining our capacity.
No. None of that ever works. Everyone has the "good idea" of cramming PV into some other product thinking that doing so will somehow reduce labor. It never does. Solar shingles are typical. They sound great but in reality require hundreds or thousands of electrical connections all spread over the moving flexible surface that is a wooden roof. You will be chasing electrical gremlins the moment the temperature shifts. And fixing any of those gremlins will involve penetrating the waterproofing, the core function of any roof. It is far easier to build and maintain a normal roof and then mount dedicated panels atop. The same too with siding. Want solar walls? Build normal walls and hang solar panels on them.
It is like building a computer into a desk. It seems like a great idea that will save space and keep your office tidy. There are lots of youtube videos about such builds. In reality, it is expensive on day one and extremely inconvenient to maintain in the long run. Nobody ever does it twice.
If it's cheap enough, you can tolerate failures and poor illumination of the panels for things like fence panels or whatever.
I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.
But you just can't. When you are using lots of tiny things all connected through each other then you have less tolerance for faults, not more. One bad connector can mean that an entire run of shingles is dark. So even a 1% fault rate, if you have a few hundred connections in each run of shingles, means that basically nothing is connected. Or think of a long fence. One broken bit can mean the entire fence after that break is no longer connected. You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.
> > I do agree you need big panels to not have excessive labor from connections.
> You're just setting yourself up for a long day of checking connectivity only to have the fence shift again.
If only we had ways to make long runs of wiring relatively reliable.
My point is: there's second order effects: expensive panels need to have as high of a capacity factor as possible; high capacity factor constrains installations and increases other costs. If you cut 2/3rds of the cost of the panel away, other costs decrease, too, and more types of installation become reasonable.
Even if we never get to any of these thresholds, its worth a shot. Cleaning up the energy sector needs to be all-hands-on-deck and people researching this stuff doesn't preclude policy changes (subsidies, federal job guarantee/new CCC, etc.) to address the labor angle.
You don't call an electrician every time you plug in a hairdryer, and a hairdryer is typically higher voltages and currents than a single panel.
You can avoid this by using microinverters, but they're a pretty substantial premium on each panel and an added point of failure.
There is lot of tech around solar panels that is being effectively obsoleted by the plummeting costs of the panels themselves. Why bother trying to squeeze out the last few percentage from each panel when it's so much cheaper to just install a couple more panels to make up the difference? This is the big difference between countries like the US where solar installs are still expensive at $3-$6/watt and countries like Australia where home solar installs are under $1/watt.