Who is going solar? New Berkeley Lab report on solar-adopter income and demographic trends.

The income of new households going solar has fallen from $129,000 to $110,000 over the past decade, thanks in part to the falling cost of solar, and to solar expanding outside of high-income California. Still, controlling for local income levels and compared to other homeowners, solar households have incomes 54% higher than median in their county, or 21% higher than other homeowners.

These are some findings from the 2022 edition of the report Residential Solar-Adopter Income and Demographic Trends, now available from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

The annual report, based on address-level data for 2.8 million residential solar adopters across the country, describes trends in solar-adopter household income levels, race and ethnicity, language preference, rurality, education levels, occupation, age, home value, and location within a “disadvantaged community.” The report also describes income differences across system ownership models, installers, system sizes, stand-alone vs. paired solar-plus-storage systems, and systems on multi- vs. single-family buildings. This latest update includes data on systems installed through 2021.

The following are a few select findings from the latest update:

Solar adopters span all income ranges. Solar adopters include households across all income levels, as shown in Figure 1 on the left. For example, roughly one third of all households that installed solar in 2021 had incomes between $50,000 and $100,000, while 15% of adopters were below that range and roughly half were above that range.

FIGURE 1

Solar adopter incomes skew high, compared to the broader population. As shown in Figure 1 on the right, the median household income for 2021 solar adopters was $110,000, compared to $79,000 for all U.S. owner-occupied households and $63,000 for all U.S. households (including renters). The disparity in these national numbers partly relates to the fact that close to half of residential solar adopters were in California, a relatively high-income state. However, as shown in the report, even at the individual state level, solar-adopter incomes consistently skew high.

Solar adoption has been slowly shifting toward less affluent households over time. The median household income of 2010 solar adopters is $129k, compared to $110k for 2021 solar adopters, as shown by the Absolute Income line in the left-hand figure below (which is based on current incomes for all solar adopters). The shift toward less affluent households partly reflects a “deepening” of solar markets, as indicated by the Relative Income line, which compares solar-adopter incomes to all households in the same county and shows a steady downward trend. Solar markets are also “broadening” into progressively less affluent states, as shown in the figure on the right-hand side. That latter trend has been driven to a large extent by solar market growth in Texas and Florida, which fall respectively within the sets of Middle- and Low-Income states. 

FIGURE 2

The share of the solar market in disadvantaged communities has been rising over time. The U.S. Department of Energy has developed a designation for “disadvantaged communities” (DACs) that considers a diverse set of criteria related to energy burden, environmental and climate hazards, socio-economic vulnerabilities, and fossil dependence. Using these designations, Figure 3 shows the that the percentage of residential solar installations in DACs more than doubled from 5% in 2010 to 11% in 2021. Despite that improvement, DACs still remain under-represented relative to their share of the population as a whole (18% of households).

FIGURE 3

The report is accompanied by an online data visualization tool that enables users to further explore the data from the report. The authors will host a free webinar highlighting key findings from this study on November 17th at 10:00 am Pacific / 1:00 pm Eastern. Register for the webinar here.

Research funding for Residential Solar-Adopter Income and Demographic Trends is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office.