Other than the SEGS I-IX parabolic trough projects built in the 1980s, virtually no large-scale or "utility-scale" solar projects existed in the United States prior to 2007. By 2012 – just five years later – utility-scale had become the largest sec...
Solar Energy Technologies Office
May 13, 2015
minute read time
Other than the SEGS I-IX parabolic trough projects built in the 1980s, virtually no large-scale or "utility-scale" solar projects existed in the United States prior to 2007. By 2012 – just five years later – utility-scale had become the largest sector of the overall PV market in the United States, a distinction that was repeated in 2013 and is expected to continue for at least the next few years.
With this critical mass of new utility-scale projects now online and in some cases having operated for several years, the rapidly growing utility-scale sector is ripe for analysis. This report, the second in what is envisioned to be an ongoing annual series, meets this need through in-depth, annually updated, data-driven analysis of installed project costs or prices, as well as operating costs, capacity factors, and power purchase agreement ("PPA") prices from a large sample of utility-scale solar projects in the United States. Given its current dominance in the market, utility-scale PV also dominates much of this report, though more balanced coverage is expected in future editions as new CSP projects start to generate usable data.
| Date | September 2014 |
| Topic | Financing, Incentives and Market Analysis |
| Subprogram | Soft Costs |
| Author | Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory |
https://emp.lbl.gov/publications/utility-scale-solar-2013-empirical