Lost in Siting: The Hidden Carbon Cost of Inequitable Residential Solar Installations

TL;DR

This paper uncovers the hidden energy and carbon costs of the current inequitable distribution of residential solar installations in the US and proposes strategies and a toolkit to improve both equity and carbon efficiency.

Contribution

It reveals the counterintuitive finding that high-carbon-offset-potential areas have fewer solar installations and introduces a multi-objective siting strategy and toolkit to enhance equity and climate impact.

Findings

Higher black population neighborhoods have 7.4% higher carbon offset potential but 36.7% fewer installations.

Lower-income neighborhoods have 14.7% higher potential and 47% fewer installations.

A multi-objective siting strategy can improve societal equity and carbon efficiency by up to 39.8%.

Abstract

The declining cost of solar photovoltaics (PV) combined with strong federal and state-level incentives have resulted in a high number of residential solar PV installations in the US. However, these installations are concentrated in particular regions, such as California, and demographics, such as high-income Asian neighborhoods. This inequitable distribution creates an illusion that further increasing residential solar installations will become increasingly challenging. Furthermore, while the inequity in solar installations has received attention, no prior comprehensive work has been done on understanding whether our current trajectory of residential solar adoption is energy- and carbon-efficient. In this paper, we reveal the hidden energy and carbon cost of the inequitable distribution of existing installations. Using US-based data on carbon offset potential, the amount of avoided carbon emissions from using rooftop PV instead of electric grid energy, and the number of existing solar installations, we surprisingly observe that locations and demographics with a higher carbon offset potential have fewer existing installations. For instance, neighborhoods with relatively higher black population have 7.4% higher carbon offset potential than average but 36.7% fewer installations; lower-income neighborhoods have 14.7% higher potential and 47% fewer installations. We propose several equity- and carbon-aware solar siting strategies. In evaluating these strategies, we develop Sunsight, a toolkit that combines simulation/visualization tools and our relevant datasets, which we are releasing publicly. Our projections show that a multi-objective siting strategy can address two problems at once; namely, it can improve societal outcomes in terms of distributional equity and simultaneously improve the carbon-efficiency (i.e., climate impact) of current installation trends by up to 39.8%.