I would love to get solar panels but it feels like the price is artificially high. Panel costs keep going down but I've never seen a set of solar panels for less than $20k, regardless of panel cost. I think the solar companies keep increasing other costs to keep it at the same level, which means there isn't enough competition yet.
Decreases in panel costs result in only modest decreases in residential solar costs, because the panels aren't the bulk of the cost of install. There's all the labor of installing them, the other equipment like inverters and electric panel upgrades, the engineering time to evaluate the site and design an optimized system size and placement, and then just the general overhead that comes with the business (sales, marketing, admin, billing, etc.). The panels themselves might only be 30% of that.
Looks like even less than 30% - the chart in this article shows panels are only around 10% of total cost for residential, meaning further panel price declines now have very little effect:
