Full Title: Tracking the Sun 2021: Pricing and Design Trends for Distributed Photovoltaic Systems in the United States
Author(s): Galen Barbose, Naïm Darghouth, Eric O’Shaughnessy, Sydney Forrester
Publisher(s): Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Publication Date: September 16, 2021
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Description (excerpt):
Berkeley Lab’s annual Tracking the Sun report describes trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States. The latest edition of the report is based on data from roughly 2.2 million systems, covering 79% of all distributed PV systems installed nationally through year-end 2020.
The report describes trends related to:
- Project characteristics, including system size, module efficiencies, prevalence of paired PV with storage, use of module-level power electronics, third-party ownership, mounting configurations, panel orientation, and non-residential customer segmentation
- Median installed-price trends, including both long-term and more recent temporal trends at the national and state levels, with comparisons to other recent PV cost and pricing benchmarks as well as to prices reported for other countries
- Variability in pricing across individual projects based on system size, state, installer, module efficiency, inverter technology, and non-residential customer type
The report also includes an econometric analysis to estimate the effects of individual drivers on installed prices for host-owned residential systems installed in 2020.