climate policy

Our analysis suggests that expected private payoffs explain surprisingly little of the variation in rooftop solar adoption.

Earlier engineering studies suggested rooftop solar would pay off on nearly all new California homes. Our project-level analysis found a more complicated story.

Solar mandates are spreading rapidly. Combining an engineering model of private payoffs with adoption data from California new construction, we find that most buildings forgo solar despite positive payoffs, and that San Francisco’s and California’s mandates increased solar adoption considerably.