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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The future of solar photovoltaic (PV) power looks bright precisely because it has attained stunning cost improvements over a relatively short period of time. To be clear, the lion’s share of this progress has occurred thanks to legitimate technological advances and innovation in manufacturing. Chinese firms invested heavily in large, modern factories that have achieved high efficiencies of scale, aided by substantial regional then national government support in the form of direct subsidies, cheap land, and subsidized, affordable electricity.
But solar manufacturing plants that began operating in Xinjiang over a decade ago were attracted to industrial parks and coal mines …
View Full ResourceCalifornia’s Solar for Multifamily Affordable Housing (SOMAH) program is an excellent example of how state energy agencies and community-based organizations (CBOs) can work together to create more impactful and sustainable solar programs that provide the maximum benefit to environmental justice communities.
This white paper, written by CESA Project Director Abbe Ramanan with contributions by Ayesha Abbasi of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), details the program’s creation, structure, and impact. It includes key take-aways and recommendations on how state energy agencies and community-based organizations can work together to design and implement effective solar programs.…
View Full ResourceThis Roadmap provides recommendations for mobilizing a massive and more equitable scale-up of investment in solar energy by 2030. The solution pathways and recommendations in the paper focus on tackling policy and market barriers in all solar market segments, reducing investment risk in developing and emerging economies, and spurring a new level of international collaboration to overcome global investment challenges at scale.…
View Full ResourceThe report describes income, demographic, and other socio-economic trends among U.S. residential rooftop solar adopters. The report is based on address-level data for roughly 2.8 million residential rooftop solar systems installed through 2021, representing 86% of all U.S. systems. With its unique size, geographic scope, and level of detail, this report is intended to serve as a foundational reference document for policy-makers, industry stakeholders, and researchers.…
View Full ResourceThis report, prepared by Clean Energy Group (CEG) with American Microgrid Solutions (AMS), examines the opportunity for resilient power, solar PV paired with battery storage (solar+storage), to provide reliable backup power to cooling centers when times of extreme heat coincide with power outages. Health impacts of extreme heat, the implications of extreme heat on the electric grid, and future extreme heat trends are also discussed. The report includes seven case studies, a critical facility in each region of the country, each with a technoeconomic analysis for installing and operating solar+storage. The report concludes with a discussion of project economics and …
View Full ResourceThe off-grid solar (OGS) sector has the potential to increase universal access to energy, alleviate poverty, support economic development, and increase gender equality. Nevertheless, although considerable advances have been made in closing gaps in access to energy, women’s presence in the sector as consumers and active participants in OGS value chains remains limited.
This Gender Equality and Off-Grid Solar Operational Handbook responds to sectoral needs by providing operational guidance based on case studies demonstrating promising approaches to closing gender gaps in the OGS sector.
The primary objective of the operational handbook is to increase the focus on off-grid energy and …
View Full ResourceHeliostat-based concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) systems can offer immense potential to provide low-cost, dispatchable renewable thermal and electrical energy to help achieve 100% decarbonized energy infrastructure in the United States. Heliostats are a major determinant of both capital cost and performance of state-of-the-art commercial molten salt towers and Generation 3 CSP systems.
In 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) launched the Heliostat Consortium (HelioCon), a five-year initiative to advance heliostat technologies. The HelioCon mission is threefold: (1) establish strategic core testing and modeling capabilities and infrastructure at national labs; (2) support
heliostat technology development …
The study estimates the performance of behind-the-meter solar PV-plus-energy-storage-systems (PVESS) in providing critical-load or whole-building backup across a wide range of geographies, building types, and power interruption conditions. The study also considers a set of 10 historical long-duration power outage events and evaluates how PVESS could have performed in providing backup power during those specific events. The analysis is the first in what will be a series of studies by Berkeley Lab, in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, on the use of PVESS for backup power. This initial study, which relies on simulated end-use level building loads, solar …
View Full ResourceAs electricity production moves away from central station, fossil fuel-fired power plants, and toward more spread-out clean energy projects that occupy more land, questions around where to put projects have come to the forefront. Siting large-scale projects also raises questions about changing land use patterns, the environmental impact of large-scale solar projects, as well as their impacts on the host community.
This new Solar and Storage Industries Institute policy brief proposes a siting framework for large-scale solar projects which will produce much needed zero-carbon electricity and can serve important ecosystem enhancement and conservation roles. This paper argues that large-scale solar …
View Full ResourceBerkeley Lab’s “Utility-Scale Solar, 2022 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 2021, 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.…
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