Funding Program: SuNLaMP
SunShot Subprogram: Soft Costs
Location: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA
SunShot Award Amount: $2,503,530

This project consolidates efforts to measure progress towards the SunShot targets and identifies pathways for further cost reductions. The team will build large and varied datasets to track and analyze trends in the cost, performance, and pricing of solar systems through the Tracking the Sun and Utility-Scale Solar reports. This will provide foundational analysis to help address the remaining non-hardware cost and deployment barriers.

Approach

The research team will collect, synthesize, analyze, and disseminate comprehensive data on the installed price of residential and mid-market photovoltaic (PV) systems, as well as utility-scale PV and concentrating solar power systems. This includes refining and expanding the scope of collection from previous versions of the two reports. The team will also be able to use datasets from both reports to conduct further analyses to produce groundbreaking insights into the opportunities for industry and policymakers to drive further cost reductions and increase deployment.

Innovation

This project plays a major role in tracking progress toward SunShot Initiative cost targets. The expanded reports will facilitate market transparency, consumer awareness, and solar deployment through dissemination of extensive data resources and research. The reports will also empower state and local decision makers, the Energy Department, and the solar industry by identifying methods to reduce non-hardware balance-of-system costs.