From 2GreenEnergy Intern Louis de Saint Phalle: The State of U.S. Solar in 2014 According to SEIA
We at 2GreenEnergy are lucky enough to have super-intern Louis de Saint Phalle working for us, vigorously researching and writing on important matters in the renewable energy arena. I was delighted that Louis actually moved out to Santa Barbara (from Paris) for several months, to facilitate interaction with me; we enjoyed many interesting conversations, and he even came up for dinner with my wife and some other friends. Best of all, he’s the “gift that keeps on giving,” in that he continues to produce excellent reports, like this one. -ed.
About a month ago, the Solar Energy Industries Association released its report for the second quarter of 2014, in collaboration with Green Tech Media Research. Although the full report comes at a price not affordable by many (probably best not to know how much exactly), the publicly available executive summary provides really interesting numbers that give an idea of where solar is at right now. Here are some main points if you haven’t checked it out.
Solar energy represented 53% of new U.S. power generation installed in the first half of 2014, versus 30% for natural gas and 14% for wind.
The second quarter of 2014 was the fourth biggest quarter ever for solar power. On the residential and commercial side, it elevated the total of new solar customers in 2014 to over 500,000.
A record-breaking 57% of all new residential solar power installed in the second quarter of 2014 came from California.
Q2 2014 is the third quarter in a row with over 1 gigawatt of solar installed. All market segments (residential, commercial and utility-scale) grew from last quarter.
No new concentrated solar power plants came online during the period. This is mostly due to project completion timing as the previous quarter was the largest in U.S. CSP history.
The average national residential solar systems pricing fell 2.4% from last quarter. For non-residential, it fell 5%.
The report summary also briefly mentions that the net metering debate is still raging on for solar, which I will address in my next blog post.
