A record 1.7GW of community solar was installed in the US in 2024, a 35% increase from 2023, according to a report from Wood Mackenzie and trade body the Coalition for Community Solar Access (CCSA).
More than two-thirds of the installed community solar capacity last year came from three states: New York, Maine and Illinois. All three states reached annual record installations and ended up accounting for 83% of the US total installations for community solar.
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Cumulative community solar installations sat at 8.6GW as of the end of 2024.
Despite the record installs for community solar in 2024, long-term growth for the sector remains unclear due to policy uncertainty at both national and state levels.
Jeff Cramer, CCSA President and CEO, said: “This record growth comes at a time when customer and grid demand for community solar has never been higher.
“However, barriers to meeting this demand—such as interconnection delays and policy red tape—are leaving dozens of gigawatts of new local power, tens of billions of dollars in investment and millions of customers on the sidelines. With increasing bipartisan momentum to address these challenges, the potential for continued record growth remains strong.”
Caitlin Connelly, research analyst and lead author of the report, added that the top state markets are quickly getting saturated and will not be able to sustain the same levels of growth in the long term. On top of that, emerging markets have not been fast enough to ramp up, and programme size caps have limited the potential for growth in these states in order to compensate for the decline in larger markets.
With that in mind, Wood Mackenzie estimates that community solar’s growth will contract 8% annually until 2029. At the same time, it estimates that the total installed community solar will reach 15GW by that time.
Depending on how policy changes and interconnection reform are implemented, the growth outlook could vary.
“Although the new US administration has fueled an extreme amount of uncertainty in the US solar sector, material actions so far have resulted in minimal changes to our base case outlook,” added Connely.
“However, in a low case representing an extreme downside scenario, our five-year outlook contracts 40% compared to the base case. By contrast, business as usual at the federal level and rapidly improving state policy and interconnection conditions result in a high case outlook 37% higher than the base case.”
Community solar boost from new markets
New markets in the community solar sector could help boost future installs. New legislation in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Iowa, Georgia, Washington and Wisconsin has progressed in the past 12 months and with strong bipartisan support.
Most recently, the Midwestern states of Missouri and Iowa have seen legislative progress for the implementation of a community solar programme, as covered earlier this week on PV Tech.
According to the report, if all these new markets pass community solar legislation, it could boost the base outlook by at least 16% by 2029.
