Twenty UT Austin graduate students participating in a Policy Research Project led by LBJ School of Public Affairs Prof. Varun Rai have produced a series of research papers examining seven key aspects of the solar energy market. The papers explored low- and middle-income PV adoption; modeling economic and information intervention design; evaluation of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar in Your Community Challenge; property value impacts near large-scale solar facilities; solar market maturity and evolution of business models; social media data for predicting PV adoption; and individual-level variation in adoption of innovations. The DoE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office provided data and analytical support and many of the student papers relied on data collected and curated by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For more, read summaries or the full set of papers.
