Tracking the Sun

Description

Berkeley Lab's Tracking the Sun report series is dedicated to summarizing installed prices and other trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States. The present report, the 11th edition in the series, focuses on systems installed through year-end 2017, with preliminary trends for the first half of 2018. As in years past, the primary emphasis is on describing changes in installed prices over time and variation in pricing across projects based on location, project ownership, system design, and other attributes. New to this year, however, is an expanded discussion of other project characteristics in the large underlying data sample. Future editions will include more of such material, beyond the reports traditional focus on installed pricing. The trends described in this report derive primarily from project-level data reported to state agencies and utilities that administer PV incentive programs, solar renewable energy credit (SREC) registration systems, or interconnection processes. In total, data were collected and cleaned for more than 1.3 million individual PV systems, representing 81% of U.S. residential and non-residential PV systems installed through 2017. The analysis of installed pricing trends is based on a subset of roughly 770,000 systems with available installed price data.

Resources

Name Format Description Link
28 GitHub documentation for the projects installed through 2018 with preliminary data for the first half of 2019 https://github.com/openEDI/documentation/blob/main/TrackingtheSun.mder/TrackingtheSun.md
33 Summarizes installed prices and other characteristics of grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/tracking_the_sun_2019_slide_deck_summary_0.pdf
21 This data visualization tool allows users to further explore the data summarized in Tracking the Sun: 2019 edition (included in this submission). https://emp.lbl.gov/tracking-sun-tool
33 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)s annual Tracking the Sun report summarizes installed prices and other trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States. The latest edition of the report is based on 3.2 million systems installed through year-end 2022, representing more than 80% of systems installed to date. As in years past, the primary emphasis is on describing changes in installed prices over time and variation across projects. https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/emp-files/5_tracking_the_sun_2023_report.pdf
21 AWS S3 explorer page housing 2018 and 2019 data summarized in the Tracking the Sun: 2019 edition https://data.openei.org/s3_viewer?bucket=oedi-data-lake&prefix=tracking-the-sun%2F
28 GitHub documentation for the projects installed through 2018 with preliminary data for the first half of 2019 https://github.com/openEDI/documentation/blob/main/TrackingtheSun.md
21 AWS public dataset program registry page for data released under the Department of Energy's (DOE) Open Energy Data Initiative (OEDI). The registry page contains information about dataset documentation, access, and contact, for each of the OEDI Data Lake datasets. https://registry.opendata.aws/oedi-data-lake/
33 Summarizes installed prices and other characteristics of grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the United States https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/default/files/5_tracking_the_sun_2023_report.pdf

Tags

  • tracking-the-sun
  • pv
  • photovoltaic
  • solar
  • oedi
  • installed-price
  • grid
  • pv-installations
  • residential
  • power
  • non-residential
  • energy

Topics

Categories