Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Gabriel Chan, University of Minnesota

Several recent studies have examined the distribution of income and race of adopters of customer-sited solar photovoltaic arrays (Barbose, et al. 2018; Sunter, et al. 2019). These studies suggest that public policies to incentivize the individual adoption of clean energy technologies may reinforce historical inequities. Despite the technical potential of low-to-moderate income households to host solar installations (Sigrin and Mooney, 2018) and recent evidence and actions that suggest trends toward greater equality in clean energy access, fundamental barriers remain due to unequal access to capital, credit, and property ownership.

In this context, community shared solar (CSS) has emerged as a policy and programmatic approach to enabling more equitable access to the benefits of solar energy (Chan, et al. 2017). Several states have adopted policies to incentivize CSS, a subset of which have also adopted specific policy mechanisms to mandate or incentivize low-income participation in these programs (Heeter, et al. 2018). In parallel, several new organizational models have been developed, in some cases with the support of policy, to increase low-income participation in CSS.

In this study, I investigate the policy and organizational models of several cases of policy and organizations that aim to increase participation of low-income communities in CSS. Based on a set of over 50 semi-structured interviews with program managers, community-based organizations, and developers of low-income focused CSS projects, I identify the necessary financial conditions, organizational functions, and policy factors that enable low-income access to CSS. Anticipated results will inform state policy and program design to make CSS more effective as a mechanism to overcome the challenges of broadening access to the benefits of solar.

References

Barbose, Galen, Naïm Darghouth, Ben Hoen, and Ryan Wiser. 2018. “Income Trends of Residential PV Adopters: An analysis of household-level income estimates.” Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Report LBNL-2001146.

Chan, Gabriel, Isaac Evans, Matthew Grimley, Ben Ihde, and Poulomi Mazumder. 2017. “Design choices and equity implications of community shared solar.” The Electricity Journal 30(9), 37-41.

Heeter, Jenny, Lori Bird, Eric O’Shaughnessy, and Sam Koebrich. 2018. “Design and Implementation of Community Solar Programs for Low and Moderate-Income Customers.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Report NREL/TP-6A20-71652.

Sigrin, Benjamin and Meghan Monoey. 2018. “Rooftop Solar Technical Potential for Low-to-Moderate Income Households in the United States.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Report NREL/TP-6A20-70901.

Sunter, Deborah, Sergio Castellanos, and Daniel Kammen. 2019. “Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity.” Nature Sustainability 2, 71-76.