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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

My "We" is Australia and UK-centric.

People have home solar, but it's hardly widespread. It's still a "fancy" thing to have.

In the UK, it's expensive, and it's not the technology, it's everything else. I don't see how that can improve unless the installation costs come down, and I don't know how that could/would happen.

I had solar installed last year, at the end of the summer, it cost roughly £14,000 for a system that can produce 6.51kWp and with 12kWh of battery storage (about 10kWh usable).

The 465W all-black panels (14 of them) I had installed are a little under £100 each to buy off-the-shelf, that accounts for 10% (£1400) of the cost of my system.

The batteries and inverter together another roughly £3.5k, so, about £9k of that cost was not for "solar and battery tech", a good chunk of it, somewhere around 40% of the total was labour, and the rest in scaffolding. Even if we allocate say another £1k to "hardware"; rails, wire, switchgear etc, that's still £8k easily.

Even if the hardware was free, £8-10k installation costs seems prohibitively expensive for the average UK household, unless you were totally wiping out your monthly bills and could pay it off over the lifetime of the system.

I suspect part of the issue in Australia is the same; I believe (perhaps incorrectly) you have a lot more sun down there so I'd expect the scale of (number of) installations to be higher.

You were ripped off.

Absolutely. A local company is currently advertising 12 470w panels, 10kwh storage for £7695 fully installed with additional pannels fully installed for £200 each. /r/uksolar is a great resource for comparing quotes.

There are a lot of variables that need to be factored in, and they don't cover many of them in these cheaper quotes.

What size inverter? Is it a hybrid inverter? 10kWh of Storage is 8-9kWh usable because batteries are only warrantied to 80-90% depth-of-discharge, is that enough?

Since there's only ~5.6kWp of panels in that quote it's probably over-provisioned, and it will likely come with a smaller inverter, say 3.6kW, which is what a lot of these cheaper companies will do, and export will be limited under G98 to 3.68kW.

That also means that in peak sun, your 5.6kW of panels are going to clip at the inverter capacity and you won't be able to access more than that limit in power.

£200 per extra panel isn't bad, the company I went with charged £300, but mine came with per-panel optimisers (at my request, mainly for the monitoring functionality rather than optimisation). If I wanted to add an additional elevation though, that would be per-panel cost plus ~£2000 for the additional elevation of scaffolding.

If you're going for one of these installations and haven't already, ask these questions, and if you can get a decent price that's great, I wish you luck. I'm not on reddit so I can't comment on the quality of that sub.

This is the reason there hasn’t been greater proliferation in the US. There’s a ton of premium added on top of cost.

That quoted price is nuts I did it cheaper in Canada in 2007. And that was with tracking panels (which I would never do again, I'd just buy more panels).

I wasn't ripped off, but I didn't go for the cheapest quote either. I wasn't trying to suggest my installation was typical or what someone could expect to pay in the UK, the point I was trying to make was the cost of labour adds significantly, and overall even if you paid half what I did, it's still too much to expect the majority of UK households to take it up.

My system is larger than typical for a UK home, I also paid a premium to have it installed by a company with an excellent reputation for their work, I'd had a new roof the week before and wanted a high quality installation.

I also went with a company that let me decide how I wanted it installed; other companies wanted to put the batteries in my loft or under the stairs which was an absolute no from me, I don't want them inside my home, and I had them install the batteries and inverter in a brick out house on the opposite end of the property to where the consumer unit is, again, at a premium.

I had per-panel optimisers and monitoring hardware installed, and because I wasn't aware of it until later, I added the bird-mesh on after signing the contract and did get ripped off on that part (NOTE: if you get solar in the UK, and have ever so much as seen a pigeon, get bird mesh).

It's also worth noting that checking today, all of the hardware has dropped in price, my panels are now 20% cheaper, batteries are 15% cheaper, inverter is 10% cheaper, and I imagine installations and labour might be cheaper in the winter than the peak of summer like I had mine installed.

All of that said, the total cost of installation doesn't really matter so much as the ROI, which for me works out at most ~6 years, if none of the hardware fails in the meantime.

EDIT: There's a mistake in my previous comment which I based all of the subsequent numbers on; the cost of 2 batteries + inverter was closer to £5k not £3.5k.

Australia has the highest per capita solar capacity in the world :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country#Global_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Australia

Also ridiculously far ahead on grid connected battery storage.

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...

Australia > all of Europe (yes all of Europe, not just EU) combined on that one.

To be fair Australia also has approximately infinitely more sun than most of Europe does. But true, we could be doing a lot better in the EU regardless

The thing to look at is C02 equivalent emissions from electricity generation.

Despite Australia's high solar and battery penetration Australia's electricity generation is fairly high emissions.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/5y/monthly

France and Sweden have considerably lower emission electricity generation than Australia does.

~39% of Australian homes have solar as of 2025. Seems pretty widespread

There's so much home solar in Australia that the electricity price goes negative at midday.

https://www.aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-...

And as a follow on for anyone curious about "can't you just store it and make bank" Australia now leads the world in per capita grid storage. https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...

I guess at some level it is a matter of incentives. In their city, we have electricity 20-22 hours per day (used to be 12-18 when i was growing up) and we can’t rely on the state to provide us electricity consistently.

But also, due to infrastructure. Everyone who could afford it has had a battery and inverter in our homes since forever. Hooking up some solar panels to it is relatively straightforward.

I think there are also some state sponsored subsidies involved although I couldn’t tell you how much.

I would say 10% of the homes in my estate in Derbyshire have rooftop solar. We haven't gone for it yet because I still think the cost is too high. It might work out when electricity gets even more expensive.

Is there any truth to the climate sceptic claim that solar in the UK can’t generate useful power with our bad weather and cloud cover? I always said that it’s not like Germany has better weather but they have tons of solar. However it would be great to have an answer from the UK.

It definitely generates useful amounts of power, especially in the summer. The problem is that we still need gas plant, and the distribution infrastructure ready for the rest of the year when it isn't so effective.

In the last year, 2.11% or 308 MWh of our electricity came from solar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/GB/12mo/monthly

By way of comparison, that same source shows Germany generating 2.16% (527 MWh) of its electricity from solar so its pretty similar: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DE/12mo/monthly

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