Solar PV Balance of System | Rocky Mountain Institute | RMI.org
approvals can also cause dropout. Small community officials responsible for structural and electrical permitting are often unfamiliar with PV systems, making it difficult and time-intensive to secure a basic permit to continue or finish construction. Permitting costs associated with time delays and repeated submittals may make a project uneconomic. Similarly, the interconnection process with the local utility may be expensive if additional equipment or studies are needed to ensure the utility that interconnection of the system will not compromise system reliability. As with local regulators, utility stakeholders may lack experience in large PV-system approval. For ground-mounted systems, state and federal environmental regulations may also cause dropout. • Financiers—for larger systems (10–20 MW and bigger), capital constraints—exacerbated by the world financial crisis—may kill even sound projects. Capital may not be available for large projects, or the demands that capital providers place on developers—in the form of cost of capital and collateral—may prove unacceptable. Capital availability is less of a constraint for smaller projects and rooftop systems. While certain projects cannot be financed due to limited capital availability (as described above), many other projects’ (especially smaller systems’) inability to obtain financing may reflect one of the other drivers above: customer expectations, stakeholder and/or installer inexperience, or permitting challenges. Project dropout rates should decline as more installers, customers, and regulators gain experience with solar PV development. To accelerate this decline, an increased availability of information on potential development sites can help developers focus on sites with good potential that are suitable to their experience
levels. In addition, the increased education of installers, land/building owners, regulators, and utilities can help reduce dropout. For more information on these needs, see the “Enablers” section below.
Opportunity 2: Eliminate Unnecessary Steps and Streamline Processes
Charrette participants highlighted the significant cost-reduction opportunities available by streamlining the underlying business processes involved in the commercial PV BoS. The charrette business process breakout group considered the processes and associated time commitments for a 1 MW groundmounted system.38 Participants also estimated the potential cost reductions from eliminating all delays and non-essential steps (i.e., steps that did not directly contribute to process objectives). With an optimized process, charrette attendees felt the project timeline could be condensed from 24 months to three months—a huge risk and cost-reduction opportunity. Figure 35 shows a rough estimate of potential savings based on charrette participants’ experience. Significant additional work is required to better understand the process cost baseline and reduction opportunities. Many of the ideas that participants suggested for condensing 24 months to three aligned with broader themes of standardization and education, indicating that these strategies are doubly valuable for their ability to improve process efficiency and reduce dropout. Standardization is the central component of any plan to dramatically reduce the time and expense of business processes. To streamline business processes, standardization of the entire PV product is needed, from the physical (module, racking, and attachment) to the perFigure 35. Proposed Reductions to Business Process Costs
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Note: Values in Figure 35 represent charrette participants’ estimates of the cost breakdown for a typical large installation. Values may vary significantly between projects based on market dynamics, technology, owner, and system type. Private land, self-owned, self-financed, net metered.
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