Most of this post is based on a Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) Paper that studied the title subject. This was released earlier this month as I’m starting to write this (March 2022), and is an update of a similar study that was released two years ago: In this updated study, which samples 50% more capacity than the original and adds two additional years of operating history, we assess the performance of a fleet of 631 utility-scale PV plants totaling 31.0 GWDC (23.6 GWAC) of capacity that achieved commercial operations in the United States from 2007-2018 and that have operated for at least two full calendar years.
This paper is a summary of the above paper, and I will add some additional information and an opinion in the last section of this post about the implications of these findings.