Millerdavid

Just speaking as an outside observer, layman's 2c. The drop in solar panel prices probably ended 3 years or so ago, and the major revolution since then has been the drop in battery prices.
I've seen articles indicating that raw materials alone make up around 60-70% of the cost of solar panels, and pricing is now much more driven by commodity prices than by the technological innovation, ie. it doesn't leave much more room for dropping the prices through improvements in manufacturing or economies of scale, if they still want to make a profit. You would basically need a radical innovation in using much cheaper materials or something similarly groundbreaking.
I think the way to drop overall costs from here is to incorporate solar modules into the structure of other products. There have already been innovations like solar window blinds, solar roof tiles, solar windows, or even just using solar panels as carport roofs. The next step as I see it is to roll some of these out at scale.

Good morning, everyone.  I'm new here, and I'm hoping to mine a bit of the knowledge on here.
My story is simple.  I currently stay in a small town in a house with a small backup solar setup.  I bought the house with 2 x 450W panels, a Mecer 2.4kW inverter and 2 x 12V100AH gel batteries installed.  I hated the setup from the start as it's installed in the living room and the inverter isn't particularly quiet, but alas, I needed the backup in case of loadshedding (I work from home).
Eventually the gel batteries couldn't keep up with Stage 6 and so on load shedding, not getting enough time to charge to float between uses, and they gave up the ghost.  I DIY-replaced the two gel batteries with a Sunmagic 25.6V 150AH LiFePO4 battery.  The new lithium battery allowed the inverter to actually use it for what it was made for, and I set it to use the absolute minimum power from the battery, and charge via solar.  It's been working well-ish.
Anyway, time passed and we viewed a smallholding outside of town, put in a bit of a lowball offer (based on the work the place needs) and it got accepted.  So now we're moving.  However, the transformer costs on the smallholding is simply outrageous, so I'm going to take the place off grid.  It's not a big place and we don't use a lot of electricity (we work smart, using around 20kW a day, max 30kW a day when it's really cold and we run some heaters around the place.  Stovetop is gas, everything is LED and energy efficient, but the geyser is still electric.  We're not going to change that right now, it's a future thing.
So, what I want to do is simply not register the Eskom pole to my name when I buy the place, and they'll then cut the house off.  I then want to install a solar system that'll run the house.  The house has plenty of roof space (around 450 square meters), the DB is in the garage (so I can put everything in there, under roof, outside the house), and we're good to go.
However, the finances are a worry.  I need to finance the whole shebang as all cash we have is going into security on the smallholding.  So I searched around and found Solar.co.za and I'm wondering if they're legit, how it works, etc.  They have a rent-to-own system that's essentially financing the whole thing on their side, but I can't find much about them online, except for mixed reviews on HelloPeter.
So, here I am.  Can anyone recommend me a rent-to-own solar company that'll do what I need at around R3k per month?  From the solar.co.za guys I can get 16 x 455W panels, 2 x 5kW LuxPower inverters, and 3 x HinaESS 5.14kW batteries for ~R2,900 per month.  That's perfectly in my budget, and if I install a generator I have alongside that, I should be fine even on rainy days, right?
I hope to learn a lot, and expect a TON of questions from me!