WHITE HOUSE News:
- Empowering Communities To Deploy Solar
WASHINGTON D.C.— The White House has announced 15 Solar Market Pathways projects to pursue various approaches to developing actionable solar deployment plans and strategies to promote deployment at residential, community, and commercial scales—from expanding shared or community solar programs and local financing mechanisms to integrating solar energy generation into communities’ emergency response plans.
Aimed at cutting the non-hardware “soft costs” of solar – such as permitting, financing, and connecting to the electric grid – the case studies and lessons learned from these projects will ultimately provide similar jurisdictions with examples that can be replicated—an important step towards making solar deployment faster, easier, and cheaper across the country.
The awardees include not-for-profits, utilities, industry associations, universities, and state and local jurisdictions in California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Utah, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C.
The U.S. has installed more than 17 gigawatts of solar power—enough to power 3.5 million average American homes—and deployment is expected to accelerate as costs continue to fall and more residential, commercial, and utility-scale projects come online.
Broadly, these investments build on the SunShot Initiative’s support of state-of-the art products, solutions and technology advancements that will drive down the costs of solar energy and help America lead in the global clean energy race.
