From the Executive Summary: To stimulate renewable energy development, governments at the local, state and federal level have provided a myriad of incentives for residential electricity customers who install solar panels on their roofs, some of which overlap. The combined effect of these incentives is quite substantial – particularly in light of the dramatic decline in the cost of solar panels that has recently occurred.
This report aims to inform policymakers by quantifying the total incentives as a percentage of the installed cost of a typical residential solar facility located in each of 15 states, including: Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Nevada, and North Carolina. These states were selected to capture diversity in location, state-level incentive policies, retail tariff designs, and wholesale electricity prices.