Soft Costs of Photovoltaic Systems: Analyses of Non-Hardware Costs

This book presents results from the first U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sponsored, bottom-up data-collection and analysis of non-hardware balance-of-system costs – often referred to as business process or soft costs – for residential and commercial photovoltaic (PV) systems. It quantifies the indirect corporate costs required to install distributed PV systems as well as the transactional costs associated with arranging third-party financing. It accompanies the recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory soft cost benchmarking report (Friedman et al 2013), which quantifies all the non-hardware balance-of-system costs associated with building a residential or commercial PV system.