Lost in Siting: The Hidden Carbon Cost of Inequitable Residential Solar Installations

Abstract

The declining cost of solar photovoltaics (PV) combined with strong federal and state-level incentives have resulted in a high number of residential solar PV installations in the US. However, these installations are concentrated in particular regions, such as California, and demographics, such as high-income Asian neighborhoods. This inequitable distribution creates an illusion that further increasing residential solar installations will become increasingly challenging if it is not already prohibitive. Furthermore, while the inequity in solar installations has received attention, no prior comprehensive work has been done on understanding whether our current trajectory of residential solar adoption is energy- and carbon-efficient. In this paper, we reveal the hidden energy and carbon cost of the inequitable distribution of existing installations. Using US-based data on carbon offset potential—the amount of avoided carbon emissions from using rooftop PV instead of electric grid energy—and the number of existing solar installations, we surprisingly observe that locations and demographics with a higher carbon offset potential have fewer existing installations. For instance, neighborhoods with relatively higher black population have 7.4% higher carbon offset potential than average but 36.7% fewer installations; lower-income neighborhoods have 14.7% higher potential and 47% fewer installations; Republican-leaning states have 23.8% higher potential and 60.8% fewer installations. We propose several equity- and carbon-aware solar siting strategies that prioritize developing solar in certain areas based on their characteristics – these strategies may inform, for example, the development of targeted incentives. In evaluating these strategies, we develop SunSight, a toolkit that combines simulation/visualization tools and our relevant datasets, which we are releasing publicly. Our projections show that a multi-objective siting strategy can address two problems at once – namely, it can improve societal outcomes in terms of distributional equity and simultaneously improve the carbon-efficiency (i.e., climate impact) of current installation trends by up to 39.8%.