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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

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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.

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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).

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  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).

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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).

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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

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  1. Fedor A. Dokshin
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  2. Brian C. Thiede
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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.

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Correspondence to Fedor A. Dokshin.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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

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

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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

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