Is the incentive highly associated with the project cost or there are other factors to account for? This is our main goal to find out with the above plot. We also wanted to understand if there is also a relation with KWh annual production and the projects held in there (as we assumed that if the averages of incentive and cost are low it might be due to the number of projects in the city). To look at this we obtained the averages per city in New York State as well as the total projects and performed the above analysis. Here are our main insights:
New York State Energy Research and Development Authority invests in multiple projects across different cities with emphasis in some cities based on the large difference of project cost and number of projects of certain observations. This might be the result of trends and number of requests of different cities as well as the architecture design of the homes not allowing solar panels installation in some cases. Another potential reason might be adverse weather conditions as New York has some regions with significantly lower temperatures
Highest number of projects city: Staten Island, Richmond with 7,269 residential projects with average incentive of $4,381 and project average cost of $32,703
Highest incentive and cost: Marbletown, Ulster, average incentive of $74,250, project cost $134,000 and expected 17,432 KWh
0.58 correlation between project cost and incentive averages by city. This can be interpreted as a moderate positive correlation, meaning that the higher the project cost, the higher the incentive received, however this is not a strong correlation and therefore the impact is not entirely based on project cost only.
Ratio between cost and incentive: When considering to go solar, people might wonder the incentive they will get based on the project cost. Given that there is a moderate positive correlation, we can say that it can be expected to obtain a $0.15 incentive per dollar of cost.
2015 is the year with highest number of solar projects in NYSERDA dataset. Since we are comparing cost and incentive, we focused this analysis on this year. Main findings are:
Rochester Gas and Electric has a lower project cost than the rest of utility providers, however their incentive is similar to others. This means that if the project is under this provider, there is a higher per dollar incentive that the requester would get.
PSEG Long Island has a lower incentive than the rest of electric companies but a similar project cost. This discrepancy might come from other factors related to the materials, type of residential properties, etc that the State considers when assigning the funding
How Many Solar Projects have been Installed Based on Electric Utility?
There are seven electric utility companies that provide electric and gas services in New York State, and each company serves one of the areas in the state. Utility companies provide alternating current through grid to local residential and commercial use, so the electric utility is associated with the number of projects installed in a certain location. Accordingly, as the number of projects associated with a utility company gets large, solar energy is broadly used in this location. For example, the map in the geography section showed that Suffolk and Nassau County, which belong to Long Island of New York, have the highest solar projects installation.
This is also shown in the race bar that PSEG Long Island engaged in 27181 solar projects by 2019. The following utility company is Consolidated Edison, which mainly serves utility for the southeast of the New York State and is engaged in 27087 solar projects by 2019, closing the big gap at the beginning of the 2000's that it was between PSEG Long Island and other providers.
The race bar showed how solar projects spread over time. In 2000, Long Island completed the first solar project, based on its longitude and latitude, which reflects location is always the most important factor. In 2003, other areas started participating in more solar projects. Rochester Gas & Electric serves a small area around Rochester in New York State, where fewer projects are installed.
To sum up, based on the service scope of each utility company, the eastern side not only has more solar projects but also installed earlier than the central and west parts of New York State.
What is an Inverter in a Solar Energy System?
A solar inverter can transform direct current produced by photovoltaic solar panels into usable alternating current which can be applied to more electrical appliances.
Insights:
In the bar charts above, we can see that the cost of the project significantly changes depending on the manufacturer, being Chint Power Systems America the highest with ~$600k project cost. Most of the manufacturers have average project cost below $50k, showing how big the difference is between them.
Some things to consider:
While analyzing also the expected KWhs per manufacturer, we see that it is aligned with the cost being higher. So most of the reasoning behind the primary inverter manufacturer seems to be from the scale of the project
There might be some manufacturers with low number of projects that are biasing the average cost
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https://www.doityourself.com/stry/3-types-of-solar-inverters-explained
Surprisingly, the diversity of the solar inverter market brings multifarious inverter manufacturers. There are hundreds of solar Inverter Manufactures in the dataset. There might be multiple inverters used for one project. For the table, we care about which manufacturer produced more inverters for NYS.
Only showing manufacturers produced more than a thousand inverters for the state. The nationality of each company is shown with the flags.
From the table, we could clearly observe that,
The overwhelming amount of inverters produced by Enphase Energy occupied the entire solar inverter market in NYS. Roughly 66% of the market share is taken by the company. It indicates that Enphase Energy is the market leader in production undoubtedly.
Half of the top ten companies are US businesses. It might show the preference for the market.
What is a PV module?
A Photovoltaic (PV) module is a device that converts light into electricity. It is usually referring to multiple photovoltaic cells combined. In each project, there may be more than one module used to form a bigger array.
The table also contains flags to indicate where the origin of each company.
Unlike the inverter market, where the top one company dominates over half of the market share, the top company (Hanwha Q CELLS) only takes about 15% of the market share (Total of 7,717,241 PV modules installed).
More Chinese companies occupy the list. 7 out of 15 companies are from China.
Companies such as SunPower, LG, and CHINT that engaged with multiple power-related devices, marketed products successfully enough for their name appairing on both tables.
Insights from Module Market Occupancy analyses:
There are more than hundreds of manufacturers who contributed their productivity to New York State solar projects. We are only capable of identifying the nationalities of the top companies as the last table provided. The rest of the companies with installation numbers less than one million do not formulate a country associated. These companies go under "Company without Nationality Identified" category. The proportion of this category is below 20%, and will not give a huge impact on our observations. Roughly speaking, a great proportion of the companies under the unidentified category are from China.
Over half of the PV modules are from Asia (China, South Korea, and Japan). Chinese PV module manufacturers are leading the market with a potentially more than 30% proportion.
Companies from the United States no longer dictate the PV module market like the inverter market.
