While this does make solar pv installations in the USA slightly more expensive, the cost of panels is a surprisingly small number of the total cost of install. Labor is the largest, by a wide margin.
To add to this: Depending where you are, labor can be more than half of the total cost of installation. The best case scenario from my googling is just slightly under the hardware cost.
That said, this is for home installation, obviously a solar plant that is installing a huge amount of them will have lower costs per watt
While this does make solar pv installations in the USA slightly more expensive, the cost of panels is a surprisingly small number of the total cost of install. Labor is the largest, by a wide margin.
To add to this: Depending where you are, labor can be more than half of the total cost of installation. The best case scenario from my googling is just slightly under the hardware cost.
That said, this is for home installation, obviously a solar plant that is installing a huge amount of them will have lower costs per watt
As it damn well should be.