Income and demographic trends of US residential solar adopters

Description and Background: The poster highlights the results of Berkeley Lab's annual report on income and demographic trends for residential solar adopters. The analysis is based on household-level income estimates for roughly 2.8 million adopters across the United States through 2021, representing 86% of the national market. The results show a steady migration of solar adoption toward lower income households over time, with growing representation among low-to-moderate (LMI) households. In 2021, 22% of all adopters earned less than 80% of area median income (AMI), and an additional 21% earned between 80% and 120% of AMI. Adoption nevertheless continues to skew high relative to the broader population. This skew is most pronounced for systems paired with battery storage, for host-owned systems, and for systems installed on single-family homes. Beyond income trends, solar adopters also tend to live in Census Tracts not identified as “disadvantaged communities” and tend to identify as Non-Hispanic White, be primarily English-speaking, have higher education levels, be middle-aged, work in business and finance-related occupations, and live in higher-value homes. Nevertheless, certain states and counties exhibit notably less disparity between solar adopters and other households. This presentation will present several “deep dives” into a few of these examples to explore possible underlying causes of these regional variations to highlight different business and program models for stimulating solar adoption among LMI households.

The results of this research are applicable across a broad swath of solar industry stakeholders. Policymakers, in particular, will find this information useful—both as a means of benchmarking progress toward greater income equity in the solar sector, and also for evaluating alternate approaches to advancing that equity. Such efforts are critical to the future health of the solar industry, both for maintaining broad political support for solar energy, distributed resources, and equitable technology adoption.