Tracking the Sun: Pricing and Design Trends for Distributed Photovoltaic Systems in the United States, 2024 Edition

Berkeley Lab’s annual Tracking the Sun report describes trends among grid-connected, distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) and paired PV+storage systems in the United States. For the purpose of this report, distributed solar includes residential systems, roof-mounted non-residential systems, and ground-mounted systems up to 5 MW-AC.  Ground-mounted systems larger than 5 MW-AC are covered in Berkeley Lab’s companion annual report, Utility-Scale Solar.

The latest edition of the report is based on 3.7 million systems installed through year-end 2023, representing close to 80% of systems installed to date. The report describes and discusses key trends related to:

• Project characteristics, including system size, module efficiencies, roof-coverage ratios, prevalence of paired PV with storage, use of module-level power electronics, third-party ownership, mounting configurations, panel orientation, and customer segmentation
• Median installed-price trends, both nationally and by state
• Variability in pricing according to system size, state, installer, equipment type, and other factors, relying on both descriptive analysis and a multi-variate regression to estimate the effects of key pricing drivers for residential systems installed in 2023.