| Summary: | The urgency of addressing climate change and grid decarbonization in the United States necessitates the rapid deployment of clean energy technologies at scale. Residential solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies have emerged in the past decade as one such technology as a result of substantial cost declines, though market penetration remains low. New government initiatives and policy incentives have been enacted to encourage the uptake of these technologies, however recent research has documented distributional challenges related to their deployment. Building on emerging studies focused the racial equity implications of residential solar PV deployment, this research implements a series of regression models on two, national solar installation datasets, controlling for market, policy, and demographic variables. The primary goal of this work is to systematically evaluate the effect of race and ethnicity on 1) the probability of a community having at least one solar installation and 2) the diffusion of solar PV technologies, defined as the total number of installations in a community. Results indicate strong evidence that communities classified as majority-Black are associated with decreased likelihood of having any solar at all, and fewer installations overall, in most of the specified models. The results vary for majority-Hispanic communities, with observed disparities present in some of the models. Controlling for certain demographic variables has differentiated effects for different racial and ethnic majority classifications, due to the cumulative impacts of socioeconomic disadvantage for those groups. The study concludes with a discussion of policy implications, methodological limitations, and avenues for future policy research to support an equitable clean energy transition.
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