PV Shingle Costs [RE-wrenches]

[Eric Smiley]

David,

I have to agree with Joel. An economic analysis can be a waste of time.
Most residential roofing materials are so inexpensive that there is
little impact on the PV cost except that the cost of mounting the
modules can be essentially zero since the roof needs to be installed
anyway.

However, I am asked to provide such analysis fairly often on commercial
projects (Hey, they're paying for the anlysis). I have used Retscreen
software, a free excel-based program for economic or feasibilty analysis
of renewable energy projects. It takes a little while to figure it out
and you need to change some defaults for BIPV projects, but it provides
a professional looking report and it is more accurate than a simple
payback analysis. Tax incentives, rebates, inflation etc. can all be
included.

Retscreen produces an analysis from the PV perspective. All the costs of
the PV including design, installation, permits, etc. are added up, and
then values for the roofing material and the roofing installation costs
that would be incurred in the absence of PV are subtracted to find the
"PV premium". The program goes on to calculate the return on investment
based on estimated energy production.

But, this is may be more detailed than a home owner is looking for. If
all you need is a comparison of capital cost, either approach (PV
perspective or roofing perspective) works. I have found that since
roofing (and curtain walls) are usually priced in square feet that the
easiest approach for a back-of-the-envelope is to calculate the square
foot cost of the PV (and the watts per square foot) and then calculate
the "PV premium" in terms of square feet. Then convert back to dollars
per watt.

Eric Smiley
Project Leader
Photovoltaic Energy Applied Research, Technology Centre
British Columbia Institute of Technology
Burnaby Campus

NE25 - 3700 Willingdon Avenue
Burnaby, British Columbia
Canada V5G 3H2

phone: 604.432.8657    fax: 604.436.0286
esmiley at bcit.ca             www.tc.bcit.ca

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