This article examines the impact of retail electricity rate design on the economic value of grid-connected photovoltaic (PV) systems, focusing on commercial customers in California. Using 15-min interval building load and PV production data from a sample of 24 actual commercial PV installations,...

This article evaluates the first year of the Section 1603 Treasury cash grant program, which enables renewable power projects in the US to elect cash grants in lieu of the federal tax credits that are otherwise available. To date, the program has been heavily subscribed, particularly by wind...

Deployment of customer-sited photovoltaics (PV) in the United States has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven by falling PV system prices, the advent of customer financing options, and various forms of policy support at the federal, state, and local levels. With the success of these efforts,...

The penetration of wind and solar generating resources is expected to dramatically increase in the United States over the coming years. It is widely understood that large scale deployment of these types of renewable energy sources (e.g., wind, solar) that have variable and less predictable...

The Western Renewable Energy Zone (WREZ) initiative brings together a diverse set of voices to develop data, tools, and a unique forum for coordinating transmission expansion in the Western Interconnection. In this paper we use a new tool developed in the WREZ initiative to evaluate possible...

This article statistically isolates the impacts of city-level permitting and other local regulatory processes on residential PV prices in the United States. We combine data from two “scoring” mechanisms that independently capture local regulatory process efficiency with the largest dataset...