Berkeley study on solar energy

Does rooftop solar reduce energy burden?

Pairing an empirical household-level dataset spanning United States geographies together with modeled hourly energy demand curves, we show that rooftop solar reduces energy burden across a majority of adopters during our study period from a median of 3.3% to 2.6%.

Does solar adoption reduce household energy burden?

Solar adoption reduced low-income household energy burden by roughly 1.3 percentage points more than for high-income households (F = 15061.9, p < 0.0005). More specifically, median EB decreased from 7.7% to 6.2% for low-income adopters and from 4.1% to 3.3% for moderate-income adopters (Fig. 4).

Why is solar a good option for low-income households?

Importantly, solar reduces the rate of high or severe energy burden from 67% of all low-income households before adoption to 52% of households following adoption, and correspondingly from 21% to 13% for moderate-income households.

Can rooftop solar help reduce EB in low-income households?

Rooftop solar can support state and federal goals to reduce EB, including for LMI households. Nevertheless, there was a large fraction of low-income households whose post-adoption EB remained high (6–10%) or severe (over 10%), indicating persistent energy affordability issues.

How does solar affect EB?

With solar, the number of low-income households experiencing severe and high EB experienced a percentage point drop of 8.8 and 5.5, respectively, while moderate-income households saw corresponding point drops of 0.4 and 8.5, respectively.

How do we estimate hourly solar production for adopter households?

In order to estimate hourly solar production for adopter households, we use each household’s county centroid to create an hourly profile with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s System Advisor Model and then scale this based on respective, empirical installation size 46.