This week, the Energy Department announced a new SunShot Technology-to-Market financing opportunity that will provide $45 million to companies and entrepreneurs to develop new solar technology for the market. We’re excited to see how these opportunities will help boost the solar industry’s growth. As President Obama stated in his last week’s State of the Union in the State of the Union address, every three weeks during 2014, we’ve installed nearly as much solar energy as we did the entirety of the year 2008. With the price of solar power falling, the demand for solar power is growing -and we’re seeing an explosion in the growth of solar energy.
Last week, we took a glance at the expansion of energy from solar (chart below), and we asked ourselves how distributed solar power plants are throughout the United States and how it has changed over time.
Check out the above map using the timeline to move between the years. Things began to begin to take off in the year 2008. Since that time, The U.S. has added 630 solar power plants with a capacity that is distributed 1MW or more. This is an increase of 1,200 percent in total or around 6,600 megawatts.
How much energy is this? The power generated by utility-scale solar panels in the U.S. is enough to supply electricity to 1.7 million houses. It is expected to increase to more than 4 million homes by the time until 2017. The rapid expansion is only supported by investments like the $45 million recently provided by the Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. The funds are intended to aid a booming U.S. solar manufacturing sector, making us more competitive and reducing costs for installation and production. By removing barriers to the market, the number of American houses and businesses powered by the sun will increase.