due to the overwhelming non-reaction and Fluffy's welcome...

due to the overwhelming non-reaction and Fluffy's welcome encouragement I will give it a go; all numbers are worth what you paid for them.

Silex (SLX) in their announcement today put Australia's PV flat panel market at 200MW in 2010.

Up it 50% in 2011 to 250MW to recognize the new gov and caveat that this is for residential only (excusable as commercial and particularly utilility scale installations are an order of magnitude more complex and expensive and are likely to be done by a category of construction companies not yet evident in Aus.

PV insights gives generic panels at about $1.70 per watt at the moment (more for top brands but, these are survey prices and not what is actually being charged at the factory gate. Add in 10% GST and transport, discount for the unknowns and lets say panels $2 per watt in Soltec's shed.

Someone somewhere (here or on Whirlpool/green/pv gave an installer's marging of 15-25% to advertise/design/install/report so installed panel on suburban roof is $2.40 per watt.

WA is about 10% of Australia's population, therefore about 25MW of the 250MW likely in 2011, cost to importers about $50M, cost installed about $60M.

SOO claims 17% of WA retail market, say 20% reflecting SLX comment that the wholesaler/installer game is about to rationalize rapidly with only half the present operators surviving the next 5 years, gives $12M profit split between SOO and installers 1:2, $4M profit to SOO in 2011 calendar. A bit under 2cents/share.

TAKE HOME: there is not much money in it for SOO unless it greatly increases market share or adds value through a CBD-type plan/design/advisory/even BOO service.

Interesting is to think about what 5MW of panels imported by SOO might look like. Say each panel stays in the shed in Welshpool for a week, that is about 100kW of panels, or 500 panels in the shed at any one time. Say a container of panels every two weeks.

Get bigger!