Utility-Scale Solar, 2024 Edition: Empirical Trends in Deployment, Technology, Cost, Performance, PPA Pricing, and Value in the United States

Berkeley Lab’s “Utility-Scale Solar, 2024 Edition” presents analysis of empirical plant-level data from the U.S. fleet of ground-mounted photovoltaic (PV), PV+battery, and concentrating solar-thermal power (CSP) plants with capacities exceeding 5 MW_AC (PV plants of 5 MW_AC or less, including residential rooftop systems, are covered separately in Berkeley Lab’s companion annual report, Tracking the Sun).

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• 18.5 GW_AC of new utility-scale PV capacity came online in 2023, bringing cumulative installed capacity to more than 80.2 GW_AC across 47 states.
• Installed costs continued to fall in 2023. Relative to 2022, capacity-weighted averages decreased by 8% to $1.43/W_AC (or $1.08/W_DC). Costs, based on a 7.1 GWAC sample of 76 plants completed in 2023, have fallen by 75% (averaging 10% annually) since 2010.
• Plant-level capacity factors vary widely, from 6% to 36% (on an AC basis), with a sample median of 24%.
• Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of new 2023 projects increased slightly to $46/MWh prior to the application of tax credits but continued to fall to $31/MWh when accounting for federal incentives.
• PPA prices have largely followed the decline in solar’s LCOE over time, but newly signed longer-term PPA prices have increased since 2021, to an average of $35/MWh (levelized, in 2023 dollars). 
• Solar’s average energy and capacity value (i.e., ability to offset costs of other power generation sources) across the U.S. was $45/MWh in 2023. Solar’s average market value was lowest in CAISO ($27/MWh), the market with the greatest solar generation share, and highest in ERCOT ($67/MWh).
• Newer solar projects had greater market value in 2023 than their generation costs, yielding $1.1 billion in benefits. Projects built in 2022 delivered on average $15/MWh more market value than their costs in 2023.
• Solar’s combined value from wholesale electricity markets, public health and climate damage reduction were greater than generation costs and incentives, yielding $13.7 billion in net benefits in 2023. We estimate U.S. health benefits of $24/MWh and reduced global climate damages of $101/MWh.
• Adding battery storage is one way to increase the value of solar. Deployment of 52 new PV+battery hybrid plants set a record with 5.3 GW installed in 2023. Our public data file tracks metadata and PPA prices from more than 100 PV+battery hybrid projects that are already online or that have secured offtake arrangements.
• Looking ahead, a massive pipeline of at least 1,085 GW of solar capacity dominates the nation’s interconnection queues at the end of 2023. Nearly 571 GW, or 53%, of that total was paired with a battery – in CAISO it was a staggering 98%. Historically only 10% of the requested solar capacity is built.

For more information, and to explore related interactive data visualizations, go to utilityscalesolar.lbl.gov.

A brief overview of this study can be found here. A webinar discussing this study was recorded on October 29, 2024, and can be viewed here.