☀️ Is solar production following the sunshine? Pt. 1
At the state level, the amount of sunshine available is not strongly correlated to the amount of solar generation
I recently wrote about how solar capacity is smashing forecasts, but whether or not solar is growing in the right geographies is a different question.
Solar resources — i.e. sunshine or ‘global horizontal irradiance’ (GHI) — is not even across the U.S., and the Southwest is obviously the sunniest region.1 Forgetting about electricity pricing for a second, we should expect the geography of solar capacity to be highly correlated to the geography of solar resources, right?
Sort of, but not really! Some odd patterns emerge from the map. For example, despite having relatively little sunshine, most states in the Northeast have higher solar generation percentages than states like Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.
What about using a different data to normalize solar production? Here is solar generation relative to state GDP (kWh/$GDP).
In this comparison, Nevada is the clear standout. But similar oddities emerge: North Carolina has almost double the amount of solar kWh/$ of GDP as Florida, despite North Carolina having about 10% less sunshine. The Northeast states don’t stand out as much because they have large economies, but it’s still surprising to see Maine and Vermont with more than 4X the amount of solar kWh/$GDP than Oklahoma.
I’ll write about why this might be the case at a later date. Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend!
Check out the interactive versions of the maps below ↓↓↓
“Global Horizontal Irradiance (GHI) is the amount of terrestrial irradiance falling on a surface horizontal to the surface of the earth. GHI can be measured with a variety of instruments.“ (Sandia National Labs).