Article originally published by Berkeley Lab. A new report [August 2021] from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides a valuable initial look at residential and non-residential distributed solar+storage markets, showing significant growth and huge potential for the future.
In Behind-the-Meter Solar+Storage: Market Data and Trends, researchers at Berkeley Lab looked at data from 50,000 residential solar+storage installations and 1,000 non-residential installations, representing about 90% of paired systems installed through the end of 2020.
They found that, overall, about 17% of all installed U.S. battery storage capacity is paired with solar behind a customer’s utility meter. Surprisingly, all those customer-sited systems add up to more than the entire solar+storage capacity installed directly on the grid: roughly 550 MW of customer-sited solar+storage versus 420 MW of grid-sited systems. Two-thirds of the customer capacity comes from small residential systems, which tend to be sized around 5 kW. Read the article.