Funding Program: SuNLaMP
SunShot Subprogram: Soft Costs
Location: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO
SunShot Award Amount: $2,700,000

This project quantifies the soft and hard costs of solar in order to target research and development activities that increase market transparency, guide accelerated solar deployment strategies, and identify opportunities to reduce solar costs. This foundational analysis will address the remaining non-hardware costs and identify deployment barriers to achieving ubiquitous solar.

Approach

The research team will expand existing data-sharing partnerships to enhance data-collection protocols and databases. This project will build on the extensive network of state and utility incentive programs that have been feeding data into the Tracking the Sun and OpenPV databases.

Innovation

This project will provide a clear picture of a low-cost solar landscape and the associated market opportunities, customer-acquisition strategies, and technology-deployment trends. Increasing market transparency leads to expanded access to capital and accelerates market growth, which will lower soft costs for consumers.