-3

I suspect that it's less than a factor of two. Is this right?

A 1 kw panel has 10kg of silicon at $20/kg.

That's $200 for a panel that costs less than $400, at 34 cents/watt.

A 1.5mw turbine has 170 tons of steel worth $2.4/kg.

That's $408k for something that sells for less than 750k.

Anyone have better information? It seems like renewables are being sold basically at material cost, plus some profit and administrative overhead.

D J Sims
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    What is the result, if renewable prices are close to scrap value? Will upvote if you can provide some more detail or the consequences if such a case were true. – LShaver Jul 11 '16 at 08:31
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    It means that, if renewables keep getting cheaper, people will eventually buy them just to take apart and sell the material – D J Sims Jul 11 '16 at 14:20
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    OK, but there won't ever be a point where you could make a profit doing that... unless you're suggesting people would recycle panels before their time? I'm still not seeing the connection to sustainability. – LShaver Jul 11 '16 at 16:06
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    So renewables won't keep getting cheaper? – D J Sims Jul 11 '16 at 18:27
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    The raw material prices will go down as demand increases, manufacturing costs will go down as the industry matures and technology advances, and $/watt costs will go down as energy density increases (with technology improvements). But what you're talking about is the margin between raw material costs, and selling price. Unless people start working for free, this margin will never get small enough for someone to make a profit buying renewables and selling them for raw materials. Unless I'm mistaken, and there are examples of products where this occurs? – LShaver Jul 12 '16 at 00:08
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    That's obviously wrong. Material prices track oil prices. – D J Sims Jul 12 '16 at 01:13
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    Either way, if renewables are getting cheaper, raw materials will be getting cheaper too. There will always be a margin between material cost and selling price. What you're saying is that someone could buy renewables, add value by doing labor to strip the materials, and then sell them for more than what they paid for the original? This seems unlikely, and unprecedented. – LShaver Jul 12 '16 at 02:22
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    Your first sentence is absurd. Renewables only decrease in price when oil prices decrease – D J Sims Jul 12 '16 at 02:41
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    I'm agreeing with you, for the sake of argument. The question remains: if you wanted to make money selling raw materials, why would you buy finished goods and strip them? – LShaver Jul 12 '16 at 02:43
  • I wouldn't unless renewables prices fell – D J Sims Jul 12 '16 at 02:44
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    If the prices fell the margins would be smaller. Unless you're proposing that eventually renewables will be cheaper than the raw materials they're made of? – LShaver Jul 12 '16 at 02:49
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    Your question is exactly what would happen – D J Sims Jul 12 '16 at 02:50
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    So if that's what you're really asking, that should be the question. I'd recommend starting a new one, the water here is a bit muddy. – LShaver Jul 12 '16 at 02:55

1 Answers1

2

No.

The problem is that you've just taken some fairly random numbers and multiplied them together.

If you want to actually understand the cost structures of the manufacturers, then you need to go into the line-by-line detail of their accounts - lines that generally won't be publicly available, due to commercial confidentiality.

And that's going to be very difficult for PV, where the cheapest manufacturers have particularly opaque accounts.

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