175
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
175 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
43577 readers
623 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Where the fuck are you getting panels for $0.12/watt!?
Most likely: alibaba
My roommate is rebuilding his Volkswagen 2012 Golf R's engine right now. We were watching on YouTube, you can get a whole engine on Alibaba for like $500. Seems like it's 50/50 of it working and being like a brand new car, or just a huge clusterfuck that won't run and turns into a shitshow disaster
€0.13/watt* here, random store I found online in my country, but it is a legitimate business, I checked that much. Not quite $0.12, but close enough and I didn't spend much time looking for it.
Though I feel like just a few months ago I couldn't find anything this cheap.
Either way, for me personally, my geographical location makes it kinda useless in the winter and for some months I'd have nothing to do with the excess I would produce from just a few panels - in the summer, there's no point selling to the grid during daytime and the nights are too short to make proper use of any stored energy, you'd have fully charged batteries all the time.
Couple of months in spring and fall where things would run into a nice equilibrium though. Unfortunately not enough savings to pay for a battery. Think sodium batteries will change that over the coming years though, so I might go for it eventually.
* just noticed this is excluding VAT, so add 24% on top - but then price comparisons make sense without VAT anyway, since that varies by country. I think most US states have much lower sales tax than our VAT.
I checked around in Alibaba and for bulk orders directly from a big manufacturer (with EXW terms, meaning pick-up at the factory, so no shipping and no taxes included) it was actually less that $0.12/watt, quite a bit less if enough units were ordered.
Such consumer price in Estonia kinda dovetails with the indicative prices per watt that I've seen in Alibaba being less than $0.12/watt, as even though Estonia has 0% VAT on solar panels and the EU has no Duty Tax on them so there's no tax paid, what's left that's on top of the factory price (so the shipping costs + a little margin for the seller) still requires the panels to be less than $0.12 at the factory to end up sold to consumers in Estonia for €0.13
Skimming the article I couldn't find any definition of terms, but I assume this is production cost, not cost to the end user after markups from the manufacturer, distributor, and retailer.