Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Matters Arising
  • Published:

Revised estimates of racial and ethnic disparities in rooftop photovoltaic deployment in the United States

Nature Sustainability volume 6, pages 752–755 (2023)Cite this article

Subjects

Matters Arising to this article was published on 12 June 2023

The Original Article was published on 10 January 2019

arising from D. A. Sunter et al. Nature Sustainability https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z (2019)

Rooftop photovoltaic (PV) technology is an important component of sustainable energy transitions, but there is widespread concern about social inequalities in PV deployment. In a recent article, Sunter et al.1 found that Black- and Hispanic-majority census tracts (that is, neighbourhoods) in the United States have, on average, much lower levels of rooftop PV deployment than white- and no-majority tracts. However, our re-analysis of comparable data identifies irregularities in Sunter et al.’s reported procedures and results, generates substantively different estimates of ethnoracial disparities in PV deployment nationwide and extends their original analysis by examining how such disparities vary with the maturity of a state’s PV market. Accurate accounts of ethnoracial disparities in PV deployment are necessary to develop interventions that effectively and equitably promote sustainable energy transitions.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Buy this article

  • Purchase on SpringerLink
  • Instant access to full article PDF
Buy now

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Fig. 1: Relationships between household median income and home ownership and rooftop PV deployment by race and ethnicity.
Fig. 2: PV deployment estimates by race and ethnicity and by state arranged by state rank of average solar deployment.

Data availability

The data to replicate our findings are available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HOH3DR.

Code availability

The code to replicate our findings is available at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/HOH3DR.

References

  1. Sunter, D. A., Castellanos, S. & Kammen, D. M. Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity. Nat. Sustain. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z (2019).

  2. Baker, R. S. The historical racial regime and racial inequality in poverty in the American South. Am. J. Sociol. 127, 1721–1781 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Curtis, K. J. & O’Connell, H. A. Historical racial contexts and contemporary spatial differences in racial inequality. Spat. Demogr. 5, 73–97 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Barbose, G. L., Forrester, S., O’Shaughnessy, E. & Darghouth, N. R. Residential Solar-Adopter Income and Demographic Trends: 2021 Update (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, 2021).

  5. Sarzynski, A., Larrieu, J. & Shrimali, G. The impact of state financial incentives on market deployment of solar technology. Energy Policy 46, 550–557 (2012).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank E. Fosse for his valuable comments. Any remaining errors are ours alone. B.C.T. acknowledges the assistance provided by the Population Research Institute at Penn State University, which is supported by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (grant no. P2CHD041025). B.C.T. was also supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture Multistate Research Project No. PEN04623 (Accession No. 1013257).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Fedor A. Dokshin

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, USA

    Brian C. Thiede

Authors
  1. Fedor A. Dokshin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Brian C. Thiede
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Contributions

F.A.D. designed and performed the analysis. B.C.T. helped refine the analytic procedures. F.A.D. and B.C.T. jointly wrote and prepared the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Fedor A. Dokshin.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Sustainability thanks Shawn Hazboun and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–7, Figs. 1–5, Tables 1–3 and References.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Dokshin, F.A., Thiede, B.C. Revised estimates of racial and ethnic disparities in rooftop photovoltaic deployment in the United States. Nat Sustain 6, 752–755 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01134-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01134-4

This article is cited by

Search

Advanced search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing