Executive Summary
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It’s no secret: 2023 was a challenging year for the U.S. residential solar industry. While installs kept growing, and installed capacity reached new highs, new roadblocks made this one of the more challenging years in recent memory.
With inflation and subsequent high interest rates putting a squeeze on Americans’ pocketbooks, gone (for now) are the days of zero-interest loans to finance solar systems. This, coupled with policy shifts — including changes to net billing in California and other states — resulted in a dip in what many in the industry refer to as the “solar coaster.”
While we may be in a dip of the ride, we can see the ascent ahead. But when? And how?
The data in this report will reveal the challenges the industry faces today. But it will also spotlight areas of hope, new growth, and technologies that are leading the way.
This is the second annual Solar Industry Snapshot, and it certainly shows a different environment than last year’s. We again looked at three unique datasets: Aurora’s own database of solar projects, a survey of homeowners, and a survey of solar professionals.
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The first dataset is Aurora’s database of solar projects. As the leading provider of design and sales software to the solar industry, we anonymized and brought together over nine million projects between 2022 and 2023 to help shine some light on where the solar market is in early 2024.
The next datasets address the residential solar market, which is made up of two distinct groups: homeowners and solar professionals. Any analysis of the market is incomplete without extensive data on both.
To gain insight into the frame of mind of homeowners, we partnered with Dynata, the world’s largest first-party data research company. In January 2024, we surveyed 1,000 U.S. adult (18+) homeowners who expressed interest in solar. We asked them for their opinions about home electrification, solar, and solar professionals.
To click in the final puzzle piece, we surveyed more than 500 U.S. solar professionals in January 2024. We gathered data on what they’re seeing from the sellers’ side of things: how their business is doing, what they’re expecting in the future, what they need to succeed, and their views on homeowner trends.
These three data sources together give us a pulse check of where the solar industry is in 2024, where the potential areas for growth are, and what potential roadblocks lie in wait.