Full Title: Shared Solar: Current Landscape, Market Potential, and the Impact of Federal Securities Regulation
Author(s): David Feldman, Anna M. Brockway, Elaine Ulrich, and Robert Margolis
Publisher(s): National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Publication Date: April 1, 2015
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
This report provides a high-level overview of the current U.S. shared solar landscape and the impact that a given shared solar program’s structure has on requiring federal securities oversight, as well as an estimate of market potential for U.S. shared solar deployment. Shared solar models allocate the electricity of a jointly owned or leased system to offset individual consumers’ electricity bills, allowing multiple energy consumers to share the benefits of a single solar array.1 Despite tremendous growth in the U.S. solar market over the last decade, existing business models and regulatory environments have not been designed to provide access to a significant portion of potential PV system customers. As a result, the economic, environmental, and social benefits of distributed PV are not available to all consumers. Emerging business models for solar deployment have the potential to expand the solar market customer-base dramatically. Options such as offsite shared solar and arrays on multi-unit buildings can enable rapid, widespread market growth by increasing access to renewables on readily available sites, potentially lowering costs via economies of scale, pooling customer demand, and fostering business model and technical innovations. Fundamentally, these models remove the need for a spatial one-to-one mapping between distributed solar arrays and the energy consumers who receive their electricity or monetary benefits. The output of shared solar arrays can be divided among residential and commercial energy consumers lacking the necessary unshaded roof space to host a PV system of sufficient size, or divided among customers seeking more freedom, flexibility, and a potentially lower price.