New paper on hardware and soft drivers of solar energy cost trends in Nature Energy

A new article by Prof. Klemun was published in Nature Energy on August 17, 2023. The paper shows that system deployment processes in solar energy markets have been relatively slow to improve over time as compared to hardware like modules or inverters, and will need to be addressed to lower solar energy costs further.

Across major solar markets, “soft technology features”, including installation techniques, codified permitting practices and supply chain management approaches, contributed just 10-15% to cost declines since the 1980s, while the rest was enabled by hardware improvements. The limited influence of soft features in PV’s cost dependency network, and the slower improvement rates observed for those features, are among the reasons for this result. As soft technology is increasingly dominating the total costs of installing solar energy systems and other clean energy technologies, this trend threatens to slow future cost reductions and hamper the global transition to clean energy.

While focused on solar photovoltaics, the study presents a conceptual framework and quantitative method that can be used for separating the cost change contributions of hardware and soft features in technologies more generally. The approach can be applied retrospectively, to identify features that enable or hamper cost improvement, or prospectively, to estimate and rank cost reduction impacts of future innovations. The study’s co-authors include Goksin Kavlak, James McNerney, and Jessika Trancik.