A new study by Berkeley Lab found that residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (R-PACE) programs increased deployment of residential solar photovoltaic systems in California, raising it by about 7 to 12% in cities that adopt these programs. R-PACE is a financing mechanism that uses a voluntary property tax assessment, paid off over time, to facilitate energy improvements and, in some jurisdictions, water and resilience measures.
While previous studies demonstrated that early, regional R-PACE programs increased solar PV deployment, this new analysis, Assessing the PACE of California residential solar deployment, is the first to demonstrate these impacts from the large, statewide R-PACE programs dominating the California market today, which engage private capital to fund the upfront costs of the improvements.
Berkeley Lab estimated the impacts using econometric techniques on two samples:
-Large cities only, allowing annual demographic and economic data as control variables
-All California cities, without these annual data
Analysis of both samples controls for several factors other than R-PACE that would be expected to drive solar PV deployment.
Berkeley infers that on average, cities with R-PACE programs were associated with greater solar PV deployment in a study period (2010 to 2015). In the large cities sample, solar PV deployment in jurisdictions with R-PACE programs was higher by 1.1 W per owner-occupied household per month, or 12%. Across all cities, solar PV deployment in jurisdictions with R-PACE programs was higher by 0.6 W per owner-occupied household per month, or 7%. The large cities results are statistically significant at conventional levels; the all-cities results are not.
The estimates imply that the majority of solar PV deployment financed by R-PACE programs would likely not have occurred in their absence. Results suggest that R-PACE programs have increased PV deployment in California even in relatively recent years, as R-PACE programs have grown in market share and as alternate approaches for financing solar PV have developed.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy-Building Technologies Office supported this research.
The residential PACE programs including programs such as Renovate America’s HERO financing, which empowers homeowners to make energy and efficiency improvements to their homes and pay for them over time at a competitive, fixed interest rate through an additional, voluntary assessment on their property taxes.
“PACE was designed to encourage the adoption of more clean-energy technologies, and it’s encouraging to see evidence that these programs are really moving the needle when it comes to driving deployment of distributed solar PV and empowering homeowners to go solar,” said Renovate America CEO Roy Guthrie.
News item from Berkeley Lab
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