Topaz, California - 580 MW - cost $2.5 billion - built in 2 years
Tamil Nadu, India - 648 MW - cost $677 mln - built in 8 months
...wait, what?
Tamil Nadu, India - 648 MW - cost $677 mln - built in 8 months
...wait, what?
This is not a situation limited to solar energy. In India we have the social technology to organize men and build large projects. The US had this technology 100 years ago, but we've lost it.
Trains
Delhi metro, phase 2: 77 miles of track, 85 stations, $2.9B, 3 years.
Hudson Yards NYC: 1 mile of track, 1 station, $2.5B, 9 years.
Green line expansion, Boston: 4 miles of track, 4 stations, $3.1B, 7 years (if all goes according to plan).
Space exploration
Mangalyaan mission to mars: $74M.
A movie about Matt Damon getting stuck on mars: $108M.
The real answer is much more complicated and there is no easy one-size-fits-all answer. Environmental regulation, litigious environment in the construction industry, overuse of contractors and consultants instead of in house expertise, buy america provisions, labor scheduling rules, poor planning, supplier market that has been drastically cut off due to bidding complexity and procurement regulation, bad incentives, poor oversight, corruption, incompetence, etc ad infinitum. If you had to sum it up, you could say that the US is uniquely incompetent in all aspects of government-sponsored infrastructure projects.
I imagine the salary difference in the solar and construction industries are similar. Also the cost of land, high taxes, safety and environmental regulations, and other external factors that are less of an issue in third-world countries.
Its simply not feasible to compare the cost of living and the cost of capital projects in one of the world's richest countries compared to one of its poorest. The same way you can't compare the cost of manufacturing domestically to manufacturing in, say, Vietnam where factory workers get paid $200 a month. Factory wages in the US are around $42.82/hour.
http://thehigherlearning.com/2015/04/09/u-s-factory-workers-...
What I hope is that early adopters are not penalised so much by this fact. Ie. that panels are easily swappable (scaffolding and the rest can stay as is; maybe batteries need to be swapped) and there will be marked for old, less efficient panels (and used batteries?) to be sold to late adopters or subsidised recycling?
You'd pay 75% less per watt of panel capacity today compared to 7 years ago, due to manufacturing improvements up and down the supply chain plus brutal market competition between manufacturers. That is a dramatic change.
Module price per watt is about 50 cents right now IIRC and would have been something like $1.25 when Topaz was built. Labor and installation is obviously more expensive in California than India.
(for example, here's a much larger area in the same county for $35 million: http://www.landwatch.com/San-Luis-Obispo-County-California-F... )
edit: tack on another couple hundred million for power line easements and you still haven't explained all that much of the cost difference. And I really doubt that they spent anywhere near $300 million on land and easements.
http://solarcellcentral.com/images/module_prices.jpg http://www.data360.org/temp/dsg605_500_350.jpg http://costofsolar.com/management/uploads/2013/12/solar-pv-c...
Land costs were less than 2% ($0.03 per watt).
India, although has achieved some good results, is mostly a third world country [1] (barring few metro places), and thus various project costs are mostly insignificant as compared to US California. Also cutting corners regarding project safety issues, labor safety issues is not uncommon in third world countries.
It is also similar to China being able to manufacture things at a cheaper price, with almost forced labor and no minimum wages comparable to USA.
It is also similar to Bangladesh being able to manufacture clothes at a cheaper price, with almost forced labor and no minimum wages comparable to USA.
Do you remember what happened in Bhopal? [2]
Granted, the company UCIL was American, but it was the Indian govt which allowed it to go scot-free.
India is not China - democracy (for the most part) still works as effectively as it does in the USA. For example, Standing Rock.
I didn't find a good explanation why OP thinks this is because of the lack of Social Technology though.