SEIA Resources
Reports
SEIA produces a variety of research and other supporting resources for the solar industry, ranging from full reports to short factsheets. Below is a list of our reports, organized by date. For a full library of research and resources, click here.
Environmental and Economic Benefits of Building Solar in California
In this report, the authors examine California's leadership in US expansion of renewable energy electricity generation by discussing first the boom in utility-scale solar farms in California and the subsequent employment effects of having built 4,250 MW of utility-scale solar powered electricity generating facilities in California over the last five years.
Deconstructing Solar Photovoltaic Pricing: The Role of Market Structure, Technology and Policy
In the report, a team of researchers from Yale University, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Texas-Austin, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory empirically examined heterogeneity in PV prices in the United States.
The Value of Distributed Electricity Storage in Texas
This whitepaper, commissioned by Oncor Electric Delivery Company, shows that deploying electricity storage on distribution systems across Texas could provide substantial net benefits to the state. The analysis assumes that the storage deployment plan will be developed to capture as much benefits as possible by integrating value from increasing customer reliability, improving the transmission and distribution systems, and transacting in the wholesale power markets.
Solar Market Insight Report 2014 Q3
Bridges to New Solar Business Models: Opportunities to Increase and Capture the Value of Distributed Solar Photovoltaics
In this report, Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), with support from the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative, investigates opportunities to optimize and demonstrate DPV’s value as it is integrated into the grid to utilities, customers, and solar companies alike.
Financial Impacts of Net-Metered PV on Utilities and Ratepayers: A Scoping Study of Two Prototypical U.S. Utilities
As distributed generation continues its rapid expansion, these new resources will have an increasingly larger role. This analysis focuses on two prototypical investor-owned utilities, one in the southwest and one in the northeast. For each utility, this study models the potential impacts of PV over a 20-year period, estimating changes to utility costs, revenues, average rates, and utility shareholder earnings and return-on-equity (ROE).
Effective Information Channels for Reducing Costs of Environmentally-Friendly Technologies: Evidence from Residential PV Markets
To identify opportunities to decrease costs associated with residential PV adoption, in this letter we use multivariate regression models to analyze a unique, household-level dataset of PV adopters in Texas (USA) to systematically quantify the effect of different information channels on aspiring PV adopters’ decision-making.
Agent-Based Modeling of Energy Technology Adoption: Empirical Integration of Social, Behavioral, Economic, and Environmental Factors
In this paper we present the architecture of a theoretically-based and empirically-driven agent-based model fot technology adaptation, with an application to residential solar photovoltaics (PV).
Solar Valuation and the Modern Utility's Expansion into Distributed Generation
Residential solar's diffusion across the U.S. power grid is inspiring concern in the utility industry. Of particular debate have been net energy metering policies (NEM), which engender revenue losses and lead to cross-subsidization of solar customers by non-solar customers. An emerging alternative to NEM is the value of solar tariff (VOST), which is designed to pay residential solar generation based on a more nuanced benefit-cost analysis to determine the actual value of residential solar to utility operations.
Solar Community Organizations and active peer effects in the adoption of residential PV
Abstract: Solar Community Organizations (SCOs) are formal or informal organizations and citizen groups that help to reduce the barriers to the adoption of residential solar photovoltaic (PV) by (1) providing access to credible and transparent information about the localized benefits of residential PV and (2) actively campaigning to encourage