Abstract

In order to encourage the adoption of renewable technology, both governments and electric utilities offer incentives to the public on residential and commercial levels. It is important to understand which of these incentives is the most effective and efficient to reap the most benefit while eliciting the lowest cost possible for all parties. Additionally, it is important to find what other factors are affecting the rate of solar adoption by looking at trends in the United States throughout recent years. Collecting data from utilities and governments, we used the GIS software ArcGIS to map incentives over time on both a state and utility level. Then, we began running regressions to determine the effects of financial incentives on the amount of solar panel capacity installed per utility, as well as the effects of other factors such as electricity prices and green attitudes. Between the years 2011 and 2017, we found that the value of incentives for residential consumers had a significant effect of approximately 0.5W per customer per dollar increase. We also found that the value of incentives had a significant negative effect of approximately -0.26W per customer per dollar increase. These preliminary results show that there is a large difference between how residential and commercial customers react to financial incentives, and that more results could give further insight into which types of incentives work best for each type of customer.