Installing solar panels on your roof and hooking them up to the grid or your home electrical system involves lots of hardware, but much of the expense of a typical residential installation comes from “soft” costs.
This is why it’s so important to do a bit of research on local solar installers and get multiple quotes before signing up for a home installation. There’s plenty of different solar panels out there, but they’re essentially a commodity at this point. The real difference in the experience you have with your solar installation, and how much you pay for it, can be heavily influenced by the soft costs involved.
To bring these invisible costs to light, we’ve compiled a quick guide breaking down the major soft costs of solar and going over a few strategies for mitigating them.
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What are solar panel soft costs?
As of 2021, 65% of the total cost of a solar installation can typically be attributed to soft costs, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Soft costs include expenses of a solar company’s sales and marketing, labor, overhead, permitting and supply chain.
A recent Wood Mackenzie report finds that at the beginning of 2023, the average cost of a residential solar installation in the US was $3.28 per watt. Here’s a look at average costs by state, according to data from FindEnergy.com.
Of that, nearly $2 per watt goes to soft costs. The biggest chunk of soft costs goes to customer acquisition, otherwise known as sales and marketing, along with overhead and profit. Together, these combine for about 40% of the cost of a residential installation.
Here’s a closer look at the different soft costs that end up adding thousands of dollars to the cost of each installation.
How much does solar panel maintenance cost?
Panels by themselves, not accounting for the cost of installation or related expenses, run between 80 cents and $1.80 per watt, on average.
How long does it take to install solar panels?
