The global solar industry is almost entirely focused on technological developments in hardware to bring down overall costs of solar systems. However, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe improving soft technology features holds a great scope to accelerate the cost decline, since their share now typically ranges from 35% to 64%.
A quantitative model developed by the team analyzed the cost evolution of solar energy systems by assigning contributions to the individual technology features since 1980, when solar energy system costs dropped by over 99%.
They found these reductions were largely led by improvements in hardware. Software technological improvements such as codified permitting practices, supply chain management techniques and system design processes contributed only 10% to 15% of total cost declines.
They also studied soft costs in different countries and found variations in soft costs. For instance, soft costs for solar energy were found to be about 50% lower in Germany than in the US.
Another finding was that countries with better soft technology performance 2 decades ago still have better performance in present times, but those with worse performance haven't gotten any better.
Not focusing on soft technology, which increasingly dominates the total costs of installing solar energy systems, threatens to slow future cost savings, as per the study funded by the US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office.
"We are making huge investments of public dollars into this, and soft technology is going to be absolutely essential to making those funds count," said Senior Author of the study and a Professor in MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) Jessika Trancik.
To tackle the same, the team recommends engineers to develop hardware improvements that make soft costs more dependent on hardware technology variables by creating more standardized equipment that can reduce on-site installation times. On the other hand, they could also directly target soft technology features without changing hardware, by creating more efficient workflows for system installation or automated permitting platforms.
Their paper titled 'Mechanisms of hardware and soft technology evolution and the implications for solar energy cost trends' was recently published in Nature Energy journal.