Well, of course there's going to be overhead costs at the point of delivery, but saving money for individual households is not the point.

The $ amount in this report is representative of the raw materials, manufacturing, logistics, installation and long-term maintenance required by each method. The point is to do a direct comparison between them (hence "levelized") so that we can judge which is the most effective.

Because material use and manufacturing are included, the $ amount represents environmental impact (at least in part). Based on this report, residential solar is a terrible use of resources. We could put the same resources to better use building more efficient large-scale systems.

So again, we have to solve these problems collectively, not individually.