I would appreciate data to the contrary, but the accounting in your first claim doesn't seem right to me. Behind the meter rooftop solar should be the most cost-effective because no new distribution is required nor is any land use change required.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has charts and reports showing US system prices per installed watt for residential solar and utility scale solar with single axis sun tracking:

https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-in...

In 2010, the cost-per-watt was a little more than 2 dollars higher for residential solar than for utility scale solar ($8.70 vs $6.54). In 2022, residential was still a little more than 2 dollars higher ($3.16 vs $1.06), but since system costs have plummeted, that means the ratio now favors utility scale installations much more dramatically.

You can see in the charts that "Soft Costs - Other" remains persistently high for residential solar. That includes things like permitting and inspection. A 100 megawatt solar farm requires permitting and inspection too, but it's much less cost than the 10,000 permits and inspections required for equivalent capacity distributed across residential rooftops. The other big difference evident from 2010 to 2022 is that residential solar inverter costs are still significant whereas the inverter costs have become practically invisible in 2022 for large solar farms. More aggressive price competition and increasing unit capacity have proportionally lowered the inverter costs much more for large solar farms.

The cost per megawatt hour generated is actually even more imbalanced in favor of large solar farms than these cost-per-watt charts show. You can't use solar tracking on rooftops. Solar farms with single axis tracking to follow the sun's position generate more energy per year than equivalent wattage installed in fixed positions on rooftops. Average rooftop systems are also less frequently cleaned than ground level solar farms. Not only does rooftop solar cost 3 times as much per installed watt, it also generates maybe 30% less energy per installed watt per year.

Thanks for the link.

Two issues I see missing from NREL's analysis: land use and distribution.

I don't see a cost attributed to land in there. It's free for residential because it's already put to use, but not so for utility-scale and probably hard to estimate broadly. Environmental impacts of that land use should also be accounted for in addition to direct land acquisition cost and/or leasing. Solar generation does not have land impacts when placed on a roof. That land is already "disrupted" and therefore allocated for human use.

Either way, labor is now the dominant piece of the cost for residential, and it's obvious that one-off small jobs in high-price metros are more expensive than a crew operating in rural areas. An accounting looking strictly and materials + labor is going to heavily favor utilities, but it doesn't capture the full picture.

Last I checked in West Texas, the cost of land was < 2% of the total cost of installing a solar field. This was for land at $1200/acre.

Yes, you cherry-picked an under-regulated market with cheap land. Not to mention that cheap land is usually further from metro areas and thus requires more distribution costs. Either way, as I mentioned land acquisition cost does not fully encapsulate the environmental costs of covering large tracts of natural land with panels.

I looked in online real estate sites recently and found $1000/acre land within a few hours of NY City. Land is quite cheap.

I hope you are spending your time attacking farming, which uses orders of magnitude more land than PV (and will even in a PV-powered world) and delivers orders of magnitude less economic value per unit of land.