Berkeley Lab tracks the installed price of essentially every solar system in the country. In its most recent Tracking the Sun report, it did something uncomfortable: it broke the numbers out by installer.
Among the top 100 residential installers, median prices ranged from $2.60 to $5.90 per watt.
Same panels. Same inverters. Same roofs, more or less, spread across the same states. Nationally, the 20th-to-80th percentile band for host-owned residential systems ran $3.20 to $5.50/W. One homeowner paid a little over half what their neighbor paid, and the difference had almost nothing to do with what got installed.
That spread is the industry's real problem. Not the tax credit, not interest rates, not whichever company folded last quarter. The spread. And if you sell solar for a living, you should understand exactly what it's made of, because you are standing inside it.
The batteries make it obvious
Battery cells got cheap. Aggressively cheap.
BloombergNEF's annual survey put the 2025 global average lithium-ion pack price at $108/kWh, down 8% in a year. The stationary-storage segment specifically came in at $70/kWh — down 45% year over year, making it the cheapest application segment for the first time. LFP packs averaged $81/kWh against $128/kWh for NMC.
Now look at what a homeowner pays. Per EnergySage's July 2026 data, the national average installed home battery runs about $15,650 for 13.5 kWh before incentives. Tesla quotes average $967/kWh installed. Enphase, $1,429. FranklinWH, $1,232. In California, the average is $1,074/kWh.
Before anyone accuses us of a bad-faith comparison: an installed battery is not a cell price, and it never will be. There's an inverter, a disconnect, conduit, a crew, an electrician, a permit, an interconnection application, an inspection, a warranty someone has to honor for a decade, and a business that has to still exist to honor it. All of that is real cost and all of it deserves to get paid.
Here's what that doesn't explain. On the same marketplace, in the same period, the cheapest brand quotes averaged about $342/kWh installed and the most expensive about $3,505/kWh. That is a tenfold spread on a component whose cell cost is converging worldwide. No permit fee explains a 10x.
What the price is actually made of
NREL's cost benchmark models a residential system from the bottom up. For Q1 2024, an 8 kW residential install came out to $3.25 per watt, split like this:
| Component | $/Wdc |
|---|---|
| Module | $0.40 |
| Inverter | $0.37 |
| Balance of system | $0.62 |
| Labor | $0.21 |
| Soft costs | $1.64 |
| Total | $3.25 |
Soft costs are about half the price of a residential solar system. Not the panels — the panels are twelve percent. Sales, marketing, customer acquisition, overhead, permitting, financing costs, and margin. (For scale: in 2010 the module alone was $3.28/W, more than an entire system costs to build today. And residential soft-cost share peaked at 68% in 2017, so this is an improvement.)
None of that is inherently dishonest. Selling solar costs money. What it means is that the price of solar in America is now mostly a decision, not a bill of materials — and decisions can be made in good faith or bad.
Where it goes bad
Two places, mostly.
The finance layer. The CFPB looked at solar lending and found that "dealer fees" — points a lender charges to buy down a rate — often increase the loan cost by 30% or more above the cash price of the project. The Bureau's finding on how they're presented is the damning part: "Lenders frequently bake these fees into a loan's principal without including them in the stated annual percentage rate." A homeowner comparing a 2.99% solar loan to a 7% home equity line is not comparing two things. They can't see the fee, so they can't price it.
The sales layer. In March 2026 the New York Attorney General sued a residential solar company and its lenders, alleging it generated nearly $275 million in New York by falsely promising free or discounted roof replacements, telling consumers they were signing "application or credit-check forms" when they were signing purchase contracts, selling to low-income households at payments they couldn't carry, and concealing lender fees inside inflated prices. California's SB 784, which would force oral and written disclosure of dealer fees and extend cancellation windows, passed the Senate 27–2 in June 2025, worked its way through Assembly committees over the following year, and sat in Assembly Appropriations again on August 13, 2026 — held in committee and under submission. It is not law, and disclosure of these fees is not currently required.
Why we take this personally
GRID exists because of the spread, so we'll say the quiet part plainly.
We hate insane redline markups. We can't stand shops that treat California customers like a piggy bank and treat their own dealers like greedy salespeople. Those two things are the same behavior seen from two sides. The customer gets a number with no relationship to what was delivered. The rep who knocked the door gets handed that number, told to defend it, and then blamed for the industry's reputation — while the margin that made it indefensible was set three layers above them by someone who will never meet the homeowner.
A rep can't sell honestly on top of pricing they can't see. That's not a character problem. It's an information problem, and it is completely fixable.
For the record, we're not against markup. Somebody has to fund the sale, carry the ops, honor the warranty, and eat the truck roll when a customer calls in year four. A dealer deserves to make real money and we'd rather they made more, not less. The problem was never that there's a margin. It's margin that's hidden, and margin that has nothing to do with what anybody delivered.
What we do about it
Concretely, not aspirationally:
Every dealer on GRID sees the redline. The published rate for every install partner and every financing lane sits in the app, along with the adders. Not a PDF someone emails you after you ask twice — the live rate sheet, built off our executed contracts with our install partners. Your org can price a deal knowing the actual number it's pricing on top of.
One network, one book of pricing. Install pricing is negotiated on the network's pooled volume rather than each small org's own. A three-rep shop shouldn't pay the worst rate on the menu for the same install a hundred-rep shop gets, and on GRID it doesn't.
The platform is $0. No seat fees, no subscription, no minimum. We're paid on the install side of funded deals, so we make money when your deals actually build — which means we cannot make money by being expensive to you.
Honest math, honest timelines, nothing hidden. It's the only real weapon against a charlatan, and the charlatan is who we're actually competing with — not the other dealers.
If you're running an org and can't see what you're being marked up on, that's worth 20 minutes.
The bottom line
Solar hardware is a commodity now, priced globally and converging. Solar pricing in America is not — a top-100 installer's median price can be more than double another's for a comparable system, and roughly half of what any homeowner pays is soft cost.
That gap is where the industry's reputation gets made or lost, one kitchen table at a time. Every dollar of unexplainable markup is a homeowner who tells ten neighbors solar is a scam, and a rep who has to knock ten more doors because of it.
Solar reaching everyone is a price problem before it's a technology problem. We'd rather be on the right side of it.
Sources: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Tracking the Sun 2024 Edition (August 2024, 2023 data); BloombergNEF Lithium-Ion Battery Price Survey (December 9, 2025); EnergySage solar battery cost data (updated July 13, 2026); NREL U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmark, Q1 2024 (January 2025); CFPB Issue Spotlight on solar financing (August 7, 2024); New York Attorney General press release (March 17, 2026); California SB 784 status. Allegations in pending litigation are allegations, not findings. GRID is a dealer operating platform and does not sell solar to homeowners; figures cited are industry data and are not GRID pricing.
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