NREL: Policies Can Grow Solar in Every State

One size does not fit all when it come to the United States’ solar success, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has found. But the good news is that everything is connected.

The major takeaway of NREL’s new report The Effect of State Policy Suites on the Development of Solar Markets (PDF) is that ” the value of strong foundational policies is applicable to all states.” To achieve overall success, all states need a varied series of smart solar policies, hopefully including robust net metering and interconnection components, in place for years — and the more, the better.

This civic-minded convergence in turn stimulates market forces, where cratering installation costs, third-party ownerships and more all help to speed adoption, which eventually leads the nation as a whole to the solar utopia it was promised last century. It is when all of the United States, the large and the small, get serious about a smart suite of solar policies — from renewable portfolio standards, investment tax credits, net metering, panel ownership, interconnection efficiency, anything else they can think of — that they are most optimized to unplug from last century’s broken energy and infrastructure models.

It may sound like a no-brainer for spaceship Earth; we’re all in this together, after all. But even that makes sense: Official reports such as these are often created to fortify what we already know, so we can’t get back to the business of doing more of it. More, being the operative word.

“We built quantitative evidence showing that, across the board, states with three or more market creation or market enabling policies have the most robust solar markets,” report coauthor Elizabeth Doris explained in NREL’s press release, hopefully within earshot of all of the United States’ governors.

Another key finding of NREL’s new report, the third in the Department of Energy’s ongoing series, is that regional variation plays an important role in the success of a state’s solar market. Which also makes sense: Even with similar policies in place, the report notes, California and Illinois are not going to have the same achievements, because they are, in short, different states. “Policy suites are more effective if they are tailored to the economic and demographic background of the state,” the report asserts. Which is why a solar set-aside is needed in Pennsylvania’s crumbling coal economy but perhaps not in others — although, that would be cool too.

Despite these regional differences, NREL’s big picture remains clear: Successful solar markets happen when all states diversely and continuously support their citizens capacity to go solar, with as many personalized solutions and policies as possible. Let’s hope local politicians read these reports more than once before thinking about unplugging investment tax credits or rolling back net metering and interconnection innovations.

This article appeared at Solar Energy