The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
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This 2021 solar energy assessment validation (“2021 Validation Study”) leverages a subset of 13 projects for which granular production, curtailment and availability data were available. DNV provides updated discussion of its sub-hourly clipping methodology, characterizes its data set, outlines the study methodology, presents updated validation results and interpretation, and identifies areas of future work.…
View Full ResourceRecycling solar panels is an expensive, complicated and energy-intensive process, writes energy fellow Rachel Meidl. But with cumulative solar waste projections expected to rise globally over the next few decades, she argues that it is vital to design a more circular and sustainable management system for end-of-life panels.…
View Full ResourceWhether a small business, a community school, or a local household, millions of American electric customers have installed rooftop solar or subscribed to shared solar farms. And it doesn’t just save money for solar customers — widespread adoption of distributed solar benefits all of us by creating jobs and lowering the costs of building a cleaner, more resilient power grid. As the price to install solar continues to fall, the opportunity expands each year to more and more Americans.
This report shares data from ILSR’s first ever Barriers to Distributed Energy Survey and stories from interviews with solar developers to …
View Full ResourceThis roadmap offers a vision for the radical transformation and decarbonization of the U.S. electricity system. It articulates where the solar industry stands today, establishes new goals for the next decade and outlines the steps we must take to get where we want to go. The pages that follow lay out how the solar industry will expand exponentially from comprising 3.7% of the U.S. electricity mix today to 30% of all electricity generation by 2030. This will put solar on pace to provide essential reliability services, deploy with storage for resilient community infrastructure and fully decarbonize the electric grid by …
View Full ResourceSilicon-based photovoltaic technology is reaching its practical efficiency limits. Perovskite solar cells, which can be fine-tuned to absorb different colors of the solar spectrum, could be a game-changer, offering the tantalizing possibility of more efficient, cheaper solar power.…
View Full ResourceBerkeley Lab’s “Utility-Scale Solar, 2021 Edition” presents analysis of empirical plant-level data from the U.S. fleet of ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV), PV+battery, and concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) plants with capacities exceeding 5 MWAC. While focused on key developments in 2020, this report explores trends in deployment, technology, capital and operating costs, capacity factors, the levelized cost of solar energy (LCOE), power purchase agreement (PPA) prices, and wholesale market value.…
View Full ResourceIn 2019, SEIA laid out a vision for the 2020s in our Roadmap for the Solar+ Decade. In that roadmap, we set a target for solar energy to reach 20% of generation by 2030 as the U.S. transforms the electric grid and builds a robust clean energy economy.
In light of historic changes in the last two years – shifting political dynamics, increased urgency to address climate change, the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and more – the potential for solar growth has only increased.
To reach President Biden’s goal of decarbonizing the U.S. electricity sector, total CO2 emissions from …
View Full ResourceOn August 16, an anonymous group of companies filed tariff circumvention petitions with the U.S. Department of Commerce. If allowed to proceed, these anonymous petitions would cripple the U.S. solar industry and ruin America’s plans to tackle climate change. The U.S. Department of Commerce must exercise its authority to reject these petitions.…
View Full ResourceDramatic improvements to solar technologies and other clean energy technologies have enabled recent rapid growth in deployment and are providing cost-effective options for decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid. The Solar Futures Study explores the role of solar in decarbonizing the grid. Through state-of-the-art modeling, the study envisions deep grid decarbonization by 2035, as driven by a required emissions-reduction target. It also explores how electrification could enable a low-carbon grid to extend decarbonization to the broader energy system (the electric grid plus all direct fuel use in buildings, transportation, and industry) through 2050.
The Solar Futures Study uses a suite of …
View Full ResourceMany electric utilities utilize Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) to develop and communicate a long-term vision for their resource development. As such, IRPs play a significant role in solar development and in how customers achieve their clean energy goals. For large-scale energy customers, including corporations and local governments, understanding how IRP processes impact resource decisions—and how this relates to achieving their clean energy targets—can influence their engagement with utilities and regulators.
A range of barriers can limit solar energy in IRPs, including outdated or unfounded solar technology assumptions and modeling practices that do not enable solar to compete fairly with other …
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