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Why isn’t rooftop solar cheaper in America? In Australia in 2024, a standard rooftop system can cost as little as 90 cents per watt. In the U.S., a similar system might go for $4 per watt. If America could come even close to Australia’s rooftop solar prices, then we would be able to decarbonize the power system much faster than we are now.
Mary Powell has the answers. She is the chief executive officer of Sunrun, a $2.6 billion company that is the country’s largest rooftop solar and battery installer. Sunrun has set up or managed more than 900,000 rooftop systems across the U.S. Powell previously led Green Mountain Power, Vermont’s largest investor-owned power company.
On this week’s episode of Shift Key — a continuation, of sorts, to one of our most popular early episodes — Rob and Jesse talk about how the rooftop solar business works and what’s driving America’s higher costs. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Jesse Jenkins: And so, just some stats to start off the conversation. The latest quarterly solar update from the Department of Energy notes that the average cost of a 2 to 10 kilowatt residential rooftop system in the U.S. is roughly $4 per watt, DC, installed. That’s the full installed system costs, not just the modules.
I just looked up solarchoice.net.au, the Australian site that tracks bids and costs in Australia, which has one of the most vibrant rooftop solar industries in the country. There, you can now install a rooftop solar system in Sydney for just under $1 U.S. per watt, which is quite remarkable — you know, dramatically cheaper than it was a few years ago, but also dramatically cheaper than the U.S residential solar market, by a factor of four.
And so obviously, if we could knock the cost of rooftop solar in the U.S. down by another 75%, it would be an incredible value proposition all over the country. So, how do we get there, Mary? What explains why solar in the U.S., rooftop solar, is much more expensive than it is in places like Australia — I should say, it’s not just Australia. It’s also, you know, the U.K. and Germany and Belgium and other places. Why is it so much more expensive here now than it is in these other countries? And how do we drive down the cost of residential solar installations in the U.S. so that we can unlock that potential here, too?
Mary Powell: Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is so exciting when you think about it, Jesse. What gets me so excited when you say that is I think, ‘Oh my gosh, we are selling all across America now with savings against what people are paying for utility power.’ So customers — even at our current costs. So back to your question on how I see the future, just think about how powerful that will be as we continue to innovate and figure out ways to drive down the cost.
Now, that said, the biggest driver of the cost difference is the way the American energy system is built. And not just that, but we have 40,000 AHJs in the United States that each have their own distinct solar process and rules. And in Australia they have fewer than 600.
Robinson Meyer: And those are like cities?
Powell: It’s housing jurisdictions. It’s like — let me give you an example. In DuPage County, Illinois, we have to have a full time employee pull permits all day. Only one permit at a time.
You know, the other big thing in the U.S. is our whole energy system, as we know, it is very much driven by state and regional rules. Like rules of the road, a lot of regulatory differences from one jurisdiction to another, a lot of massive differences from one utility to another. So, you know, interconnection for residential is still costly, time consuming, and is even prohibited in some areas. Interconnection fees for home solar systems from utilities range from $100 to $10,000. So, one of the bright spots is the work that Sunrun was involved in, a lot of players were involved in, and that Secretary Jennifer Granholm is really focused on, which is SolarAPP+. So, that is one way to drive down the cost, Jesse.
Back to the difference: So really, I would say, the biggest difference is bureaucracy. When you talk about Australia and you talk about the U.S., that’s the biggest difference.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by…
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Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
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A conversation with Mike Hall of Anza.
This week’s conversation is with Mike Hall, CEO of the solar and battery storage data company Anza. I rang him because, in my book, the more insights into the ways renewables companies are responding to the war on the Inflation Reduction Act, the better.
The following chat was lightly edited for clarity. Let’s jump in!
How much do we know about developers’ reactions to the anti-IRA bill that was passed out of the House last week?
So it’s only been a few days. What I can tell you is there’s a lot of surprise about what came out of the House. Industries mobilized in trying to improve the bill from here and I think a lot of the industry is hopeful because, for many reasons, the bill doesn’t seem to make sense for the country. Not just the renewable energy industry. There’s hope that the voices in Congress — House members and senators — who already understand the impact of this on the economy will in the coming weeks understand how bad this is.
I spoke to a tax attorney last week that her clients had been preparing for a worst case scenario like this and preparing contingency plans of some kind. Have you seen anything so far to indicate people have been preparing for a worst case scenario?
Yeah. There’s a subset of the market that has prepared and already executed plans.
In Q4 [of 2024] and Q1 [of this year] with a number of companies to procure material from projects in order to safe harbor those projects. What that means is, typically if you commence construction by a certain date, the date on which you commence construction is the date you lock in tax credit eligibility, and we worked with companies to help them meet that criteria. It hedged them on a number of fronts. I don’t think most of them thought we’d get what came out of the House but there were a lot of concerns about stepdowns for the credit.
After Trump was elected, there were also companies who wanted to hedge against tariffs so they bought equipment ahead of that, too. We were helping companies do deals the night before Liberation Day. There was a lot of activity.
We saw less after April 2nd because the trade landscape has been changing so quickly that it’s been hard for people to act but now we’re seeing people act again to try and hit that commencement milestone.
It’s not lost on me that there’s an irony here – the attempts to erode these credits might lead to a rush of projects moving faster, actually. Is that your sense?
There’s a slug of projects that would get accelerated and in fact just having this bill come out of the House is already going to accelerate a number of projects. But there’s limits to what you can do there. The bill also has a placed-in-service criteria and really problematic language with regard to the “foreign entity of concern” provisions.
Are you seeing any increase in opposition against solar projects? And is that the biggest hurdle you see to meeting that “placed-in-service” requirement?
What I have here is qualitative, not quantitative, but I was in the development business for 20 years, and what I have seen qualitatively is that it is increasingly harder to develop projects. Local opposition is one of the headwinds. Interconnection is another really big one and that’s the biggest concern I have with regards to the “placed-in-service” requirement. Most of these large projects, even if you overcome the NIMBY issues, and you get your permitting, and you do everything else you need to do, you get your permits and construction… In the end if you’re talking about projects at scale, there is a requirement that utilities do work. And there’s no requirement that utilities do that work on time [to meet that deadline]. This is a risk they need to manage.
And more of the week’s top news in renewable energy conflicts.
1. Columbia County, New York – A Hecate Energy solar project in upstate New York blessed by Governor Kathy Hochul is now getting local blowback.
2. Sussex County, Delaware – The battle between a Bethany Beach landowner and a major offshore wind project came to a head earlier this week after Delaware regulators decided to comply with a massive government records request.
3. Fayette County, Pennsylvania – A Bollinger Solar project in rural Pennsylvania that was approved last year now faces fresh local opposition.
4. Cleveland County, North Carolina – Brookcliff Solar has settled with a county that was legally challenging the developer over the validity of its permits, reaching what by all appearances is an amicable resolution.
5. Adams County, Illinois – The solar project in Quincy, Illinois, we told you about last week has been rejected by the city’s planning commission.
6. Pierce County, Wisconsin – AES’ Isabelle Creek solar project is facing new issues as the developer seeks to actually talk more to residents on the ground.
7. Austin County, Texas – We have a couple of fresh battery storage wars to report this week, including a danger alert in this rural Texas county west of Houston.
8. Esmeralda County, Nevada – The Trump administration this week approved the final proposed plan for NV Energy’s Greenlink North, a massive transmission line that will help the state expand its renewable energy capacity.
9. Merced County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire is having aftershocks in Merced County as residents seek to undo progress made on Longroad’s Zeta battery project south of Los Banos.
Anti-solar activists in agricultural areas get a powerful new ally.
The Trump administration is joining the war against solar projects on farmland, offering anti-solar activists on the ground a powerful ally against developers across the country.
In a report released last week, President Trump’s Agriculture Department took aim at solar and stated competition with “solar development on productive farmland” was creating a “considerable barrier” for farmers trying to acquire land. The USDA also stated it would disincentivize “the use of federal funding” for solar “through prioritization points and regulatory action,” which a spokesperson – Emily Cannon – later clarified in an email to me this week will include reconfiguring the agency’s Rural Energy for America loan and grant program. Cannon declined to give a time-table for the new regulation, stating that the agency “will have more information when the updates are ready to be published.”
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” Cannon wrote – a statement also made in the USDA report.
REAP is a program created in 2008 that exists to help fund renewable energy and sustainability projects at the level of individual farms and has been seen as a potential tool for not only building more solar but also more trust in agriculturally-focused communities. It’s without question that retooling REAP to actively disincentivize awardees from building solar on farmland could have a chilling effect, at least amongst those who receive money from the program or wish to in the future. This comes after Trump officials temporarily froze money promised to farmers, too.
As we’ve previously written in The Fight, agricultural interests can at times present as much a threat to the future of solar energy as any oil-funded dark money group, if not more so. Conflicts over solar production on farmland make up a large portion of the total projects I cover in The Fight every week, and it is one of the most frequently cited reasons for opposition against individual renewables projects. (Agricultural workforces are one of the most important signals for renewable energy opposition in Heatmap Pro’s modeling data as well.) I wrote shortly after Trump’s inauguration that I wondered when – not if – he would adopt this position.
It’s unclear what exactly led USDA to dive headlong into the “No Solar on Farmland” campaign, aside from its growing popularity in conservative political circles, but there is reason to believe farming interests may have played a role. USDA has stated the report was the product of discussions with farming groups and an industry roundtable. In addition, per lobbying disclosures, at least one agricultural group – the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau – advocated earlier this year for “congressional action and/or executive orders” to “balance renewable and conventional sources of energy” through “limit[ing] solar on productive farmland.” (The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau denied this in an email to me earlier this week.)
There’s also reason to believe some key stakeholders were caught off-guard or weren’t looped in on the matter.
American Farmland Trust has been trying to cultivate common ground between farmers, solar companies, and various agencies at all levels of government over the future of development. But when asked about this report, the nonprofit told me it couldn’t speak on the matter because it was still trying to suss out what was going on.
“AFT is meeting with the Trump administration to learn more about what they are planning in terms of policy and programs to implement this concept,” AFT media relations associate Michael Shulman told me.