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Evaluating community solar as a measure to promote equitable clean energy access

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 28 June 2024

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Abstract

Rooftop and community solar are alternative product classes for residential solar in the United States. Community solar, where multiple households buy solar from shared systems, could make solar more accessible by reducing initial costs and removing adoption barriers for renters and multifamily building occupants. Here we test whether community solar has expanded solar access in the United States. On the basis of a sample of 11 states, we find that community solar adopters are about 6.1 times more likely to live in multifamily buildings than rooftop solar adopters, 4.4 times more likely to rent and earn 23% less annual income. We do not find that community solar expands access in terms of race. These differences are driven, roughly evenly, by inherent differences between the two solar products and by policies to promote low-income community solar adoption. The results suggest that alternative solar products can expand solar access and that policy could augment such benefits.

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Fig. 1: Comparisons of demographic characteristics of community and rooftop solar adopters.
Fig. 2: Comparisons of race of rooftop and community solar adopters.
Fig. 3: Conditional associations between demographic factors and solar adoption choices.
Fig. 4: Comparisons of demographic characteristics across three solar products.
Fig. 5: Demographic characteristics in community solar and rooftop solar subsamples.

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Data availability

This work was performed using proprietary, household-level data that cannot be shared. However, elements of the rooftop solar data are publicly available from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at https://emp.lbl.gov/projects/solar-demographics-trends-and-analysis. Aggregated data are available in via Github at https://github.com/eoshaugh2/community_solar_access. The LIFT Solar Toolkit used in the imputed carve outs analysis (Methods) is publicly available at https://lift.groundswell.org/solar-projects/.

Code availability

Code used in this analysis is available via Github at https://github.com/eoshaugh2/community_solar_access.

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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the Solar Energy Technologies Office award number 38444 and contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 (E.O. and G.B.). This work was authored in part by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for DOE under contract number DE-AC36-08GO28308 (S.K. and J.S.). Funding was provided by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the US Government. The US Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Eric O’Shaughnessy & Galen Barbose

  2. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA

    Sudha Kannan & Jenny Sumner

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  1. Eric O’Shaughnessy
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Contributions

E.O. wrote the paper and led the analysis; G.B. conceived of the study, supported the analysis and co-led data acquisition; and S.K. and J.S. led data acquisition and supported the analysis.

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Correspondence to Eric O’Shaughnessy.

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Nature Energy thanks Michael Garvey, Christine Lasco Crago and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Tables 1–10 and Figs. 1 and 2.

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O’Shaughnessy, E., Barbose, G., Kannan, S. et al. Evaluating community solar as a measure to promote equitable clean energy access. Nat Energy 9, 955–963 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-024-01546-2

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