NREL Conduit Blog

We are seeing rapid transformation in the rooftop solar market with falling costs and increased deployment, but these changes don’t mean that every new building will suddenly be outfitted with a solar energy system tomorrow, or next week, or even next year. However, there are building design options that can be leveraged today in order to take advantage of potential solar installations in the future.

Solar-ready building design, as the name suggests, refers to designing and constructing a building in a way that facilitates and optimizes the installation of a rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system at some point after the building has been constructed. Solar-ready design can make future PV system installation more cost-effective by reducing the need for infrastructure upgrades, ensuring solar technical feasibility, and planning for PV system optimization. Solar-ready design is not a new concept—several states and municipalities, including California and Tucson, Arizona, have already started including solar-ready design mandates in their building ordinances and policies*—but it is still a relevant one, particularly in areas experiencing new urban development.

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) is becoming a more prevalent method for local communities to source electricity. Under CCA programs, cities and local governments generate or buy electricity, usually from renewable energy sources, based on the needs of their residents.

CCAs are a hybrid between municipal utilities and standard investor-owned utilities (IOU), as depicted in Figure 1. Typically, utilities (whether investor-owned or municipal) are responsible for purchasing and distributing power, grid maintenance, and customer service. Under a CCA program, the CCA, which is administered by the local government, purchases the power, while the incumbent IOU maintains the grid and provides customer service. Because the local government is involved in some of the standard utility functions, the CCA could be considered a middle ground between an IOU and a municipal utility.

New research shows that more than 25 percent of all commercial customers across the continental United States may be able to further reduce their electricity bills by adding battery storage in conjunction with solar installations. And perhaps surprisingly, some of the best economic opportunities for customer-sited storage are in states like Colorado, Michigan, and Georgia.

These findings are detailed in a new paper released by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Clean Energy Group (CEG), Identifying Potential Markets for Behind-the-Meter Battery Energy Storage: A Survey of U.S. Demand Charges. It represents the first comprehensive analysis of commercial battery storage market opportunities across the U.S., finding that about 5 million customers nationwide may have the potential to cost-effectively invest in storage technologies today.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in partnership with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), is initiating a three-year analytical support program for state public utility commissions (PUCs). PUCs will have access to in-depth analytical support from the national laboratories on topics related to distribution system planning and regulatory, policy, programmatic, and technology assessments of distributed energy resources (DERs).

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Solar Technical Assistance Team (STAT) Network is hosting a one-day training for state decision-makers on how to use NREL’s portfolio of solar tools to inform decisions. The meeting will focus primarily on the  System Advisor Model  (SAM);  Jobs and Economic Development Impact  (JEDI) models, the Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen) model and the  Renewable Energy Planning and Optimization  (ReOpt) platform. This training session will provide state energy office staff an opportunity to learn about the solar policy questions these tools can help answer and how NREL’s solar tools can contribute to more robust energy policy analyses. In addition, participants will benefit from in-depth, hands-on training using their own state-specific data to address targeted policy questions.

Distributed solar capacity in the United States is on the rise: approximately 2,580 megawatts (MW) of new residential solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity was brought online in 2016, and installed capacity increased more than 50% every year between 2012 and 2015.

There are over 450,000 known brownfield sites across the United States, and many of these are in urban or suburban areas. As real estate in urban environments becomes more competitive and as the demand for clean energy increases, unproductive, abandoned, or contaminated sites present abundant opportunities for clean energy. Decommissioned solid waste landfills, in particular, can play host to new solar photovoltaicPDF (PV) arrays.

The price of solar energy generation has plummeted in recent years, with the average installed cost for residential solar photovoltaics (PV) dropping 43% between 2010 and 2015.[1] Most of this decline has come from falling equipment prices, with the non-equipment costs, also known as soft costs (Figure 1), remaining fairly consistent.

Local communities have a big role to play in reducing the soft costs associated with installing solar energy systems. In addition to permitting and inspection practices, local zoning ordinances can either inhibit or support distributed solar deployment within jurisdictions. Identifying and addressing barriers to solar energy installations in the local zoning code is a baseline strategy for reducing solar soft costs. Below are several factors that communities might consider in evaluating their local zoning practices to enable solar deployment.

Solar is not a major contributor to the energy economy in Wyoming. The  state generates 88% of its electricity from coal and 11% from wind , with small amounts coming from pumped hydro-electric and natural gas (Figure 1). As the least populous state in the nation, Wyoming uses a fraction of the electricity it generates,  exporting nearly two-thirds across state lines . With abundant land, access to transmission, and a culture of revenue-generating electricity sales, could there be a pathway for solar technologies to contribute to the Wyoming energy economy? NREL  Solar Technical Assistance Team (STAT) Network  experts recently took a short road trip from  Golden, Colorado  to Cheyenne to talk solar with Wyoming state agencies, local planning departments, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) representatives (Figure2). What might make Wyoming take a look at solar?

To date, no one source has collected all of the clean energy-related economic development policies that states have adopted to spur growth. This has made it difficult to answer this important question: what policies foster the most job development and offer the best return on investment? A recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) report serves as a foundation to answer this question.