Solar Opportunity Assessment Report

Solar Opportunity Assessment Report

What will it take to transform solar energy from a niche resource into a competitive, mainstream technology - and beyond, to serve society with solar's full promise? This Solar Opportunities Assessment Report, or SOAR, attempts to answer that simple but complex question and offer some possible pathways forward. It examines what is needed to grow the U.S. solar industry -- incrementally into a thriving industry, as well as through bold, audacious measures that could dramatically accelerate the transition to a clean-energy future. It focuses on three pathways for solar's future over the next quarter-century: Current Growth, Accelerated Growth, and Hypergrowth, and describes the challenges and opportunities within each.

SOAR is based on in-depth interviews with more than 30 leading authorities in the solar field to understand their perceptions and best thinking about the state of the solar industry, the challenges the industry faces, and where the best opportunities lie to break through those barriers to accelerate the growth of solar photovoltaics (PV). The interviews were complemented with additional research on and knowledge of the solar industry as well as with work done for our 2002 report Bringing Solar to Scale, which promoted a plan to dramatically ramp up the supply and demand for solar photovoltaics in a way that created a cost-competitive global industry in the state of California. This research was conducted by Clean Edge, Inc., on behalf of the Solar Catalyst Group.