Research Themes +
Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
Strategic Initiatives +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
Publications
News +
For media inquiries,
please contact ETA
Interim Communications Manager
Kiran Julin

kjulin@lbl.gov
About Us +
The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

Capturing the Sun: A Roadmap for Navigating Data-Access Challenges and Auto-Populating Solar Home Sales Listings

Publication Type

Report

Date Published

12/2016

Authors

Stukel, Laura, Ben Hoen, Sandra Adomatis, Craig Foley, Laura Parsons

Abstract

There are now over one million homes in America with solar panels. Yet real estate listing services (known as multiple listing services or MLSs) lack a standard way to report on the solar features of a home when it is placed on the market. Without this information, sellers may be losing out on value, and buyers may not know what they are getting. And real estate agents have a harder time bringing solar sellers and interested buyers together.

With more solar homes being sold, the market needs an improved process for listing, valuing, and closing on sales of these homes. The Roadmap proposes a way to fill that gap by guiding solar and real estate professionals through the key challenges and the best path forward to get solar data into MLSs. Experts from the real estate, appraisal, and solar data industries collaborated to write the report.

The Roadmap promotes the concept in the real estate industry known as “automatic population,” in which data aggregated in one industry can be automatically matched with home sale listings on an MLS. The Roadmap is intended as the first step toward auto-population, to help professionals identify barriers in a local context and develop the most appropriate implementation strategy in their market to connect the data to an MLS. It guides readers through a series of assessments to arrive at one of three recommended pathways. The recommendations are informed by real-world progress in three distinct case-study markets: Massachusetts, Colorado, and San Diego.

Year of Publication

2016

Notes

A webinar recorded on January 26, 2017 can be found here.