Not entirely true, nor entirely false haha. I know USA still does manufacturing but if you looked globally, even China is starting to get out capitalismed. Myanmar is where the cheap labour is at now, though if we go further you'll just see child labour there. Welcome to late stage capitalism.

As for Labour, I believe Mexicans are your equavilents of cheap Labour. I believe in paying good honest money for good honest work, so I do it personally with my construction friends and share the profits equally after sales comms. A very rare thing where I'm from.

different places have different requirements. Your take out meals there generally fall within 10$ I believe while ours here is at 3$. At the end of the day I can't comment too much but USA ain't the friendliest place to start a business with all the overheads and taxes.

I am a solar contractor myself. But considering that I'm from Singapore instead of the US its very different over here. Generally people stay in government housing apartment equavilents and the entire grid is owned and managed by the government so they pretty much got the monopoly on how much the selling back of electricity is worth.

Equipment wise, China and Taiwan is the answer. Even for brands like jinko where research is done in Germany, the entire manufacturing is done there. At the end of the day, the panels are pretty much made from sand into silicon crystals and I've sent a couple of different brands for lab testing since the tenders I'm working has it as a requirement, they all yielded results with less than 1% of variance.

Labour wise most of the workers here are migrant workers from places like blangadesh. Blue collar jobs are highly looked Down upon here and its valued cheaply as compared to places like nz or AU.

So yea overall a 20 panel system here in sg goes for around 20k sgd which is around 17k usd without a battery system. After factoring margins and logistics.

Usd? Your house must be pretty huge, cost price per watt is about 0.2 usd, if you include shipping and distributor mark ups it's at most 0.5 usd. A 20 panel system of 550w each is 11kw which is 5.5k. A 12kw inverter is around 2k and a 10kw battery should be about 10k making your total cost about 18k usd and between labour and delivery and profit margins I'd say 25k is fair for a 20 panels system. So 75k should be for a 60 panel system and that's way too huge. A family of 10 probably wouldn't even be able to use it effectively enough.

Heh let's see how long it goes before he suicides with bullets to the back of his head.