:: Your Solar Power Home | Financial Viability of Installing PV Solar Panels ::

There continues to be real debate about the viability of home owners installing PV solar panels to produce electrical power. The same debate does not seem to apply to hot water systems.

One of the main arguments is that surrounding the question of economy of scale.

Industrialised societies have developed national infrastructures linking power generating plants of whatever sort by means of a grid system so that supply and demand can be managed across the distribution area. The distribution area can be local, regional, national or trans-national.

Home solar systems become part of this grid system, but they can never replace it. The costs of running and maintaining the grid remains, regardless of how many homes have their own electricity generating “micro-system”.

Each home solar power system installed has to be designed to suit the individual site. Because of this, there is a limit to the economies of scale in purchasing component parts.

It can be argued that, although the installation costs of a home solar power system can be high, the system should pay for itself within its own lifetime. While solar cells themselves may have a guarantee that covers their effectiveness for, say, 20 years, some of the other component parts may have a much shorter guarantee period, such as five or six years. If it is a manufacturing fault that needs remedied under the guarantee, check the small print to see who meets the cost and whether the system might need to be dismantled and sent somewhere for servicing.

For the moment, it is likely to be cheaper to continue to buy power from the grid. And as a number of power generating utilities are moving to build huge solar plants, they are the beneficiaries of the economy of scale. Across the northern hemisphere, huge solar thermal plants and PV solar arrays are already in place providing power for thousands of households and more are on the way.

Solar thermal plants work in a similar way to conventional plants, with the sun’s rays focused to heat water to generate steam that drives the turbines. Indeed, some conventional power stations could be converted to solar thermal stations. Europe’s first commercially operating thermal plant near Seville is already providing power for up to 6,000 homes and it is planned to eventually meet the needs of 600,000 people.

The capital cost of these new stations is shared amongst the customers and at a much cheaper cost than each of the households installing their own home solar power systems. Given that solar power or other alternative fuels are not likely to replace conventional sources of power, but only supplement them, does it not make more commercial sense to construct commercial size solar power plants rather than thousands of home solar systems?

This is but one view; there are others. To read about how the citizens of a local community banded together to benefit from the economy of scale, click here.