Analysis of Incentive Program for Solar Energy Projects in New York State
Analysis of Incentive Program for Solar Energy Projects in New York State
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Why this analysis?
Why this analysis?
In recent years, global warming has shown its effects in many ways, questioning how much all of us need to do to stop it before a no return point. Energy generation is one of the main factors that are consuming the last of our nonrenewable resources as well as contaminating the air, water, etc. Solar energy has proven to be a much more clean solution for energy generation and has been increasingly promoted and used in different countries.
In an attempt to reduce carbon footprint, several governments, including New York State one, are reducing taxes and giving incentives to people willing to go solar for energy source. New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) are in charge of the different incentives and solar panel implementation in this State and provides historical data of the projects where there have been an incentive provided by them with other important project characteristics.
NY-Sun (part of this program) works directly with solar contractors and developers to offset the cost for New York residents to go solar. They offer additional incentives to some homeowners through Affordable Solar, which increases the amount received for households earning less than 80 percent of the median income in the area. In addition to incentives, NYSERDA offers On-Bill Recovery, Smart Energy, and Companion loan options for residents to help New York State residents finance renewable and energy efficiency projects. These loans provide lower interest rates to lower-income New Yorkers and to those who cannot qualify for traditional financing. For projects that exceed these loan amounts, they can access the Companion Loan for additional financing. Loan amounts are available from $1,500 to $25,000 with loan terms of five, 10, or 15 years.
Giving the relevance of the topic, in this website we share some analysis of the solar energy projects from 2000 to 2019 in New York State, mainly focusing on the costs, incentives and KWh generated over time and by city/county.
Some initial statistics of this dataset to keep in mind...
Some initial statistics of this dataset to keep in mind...
The NYS Solar Electric Programs Reported by NYSERDA Dataset(link) contains:
101,909 rows of data, each row representing a project in New York State from 2000 to 2019.
The original dataset contains 34 columns, and each indicates a parameter of projects. With geographical information (link) added for each project, a total of 35 columns in the dataset to further process storytellings. Explanations of Some critical columns are given below,
Counties: 62, every county has solar power projects.
Cities: 2177 different NY cities.
Sector:Indicates if a project is residential uses. (Residential vs. non-residential proportion: 97% : 3%) Therefore, some analysis are going to be only focused on residential, given the differences on cost and nature of them.
Other relevant concepts to know regarding the features:
Date Application Received: Date project application was received by the program.
Date Completed: Date NYSERDA recognized the project as interconnected and operational, and closed out the project application.
Electrical Utility: Electric utility company for project location.
Primary Inverter manufacturer: The manufacturer who supplied inverters for the project.
Total Inverter Quantity: Number of Inverters installed.
Primary PV module manufacturer: The manufacturer who supplied PV modules for the project.
Total PV module Quantity: Number of PV modules installed.
Project cost: Cost of each project.
Expected kWh Annual Production: Expected annual electricity production in kiloWatt-hours (kWh, Energy unit) as a result of projects.
Raw data was being further cleaned and filtered for each storytelling. E.g. missing values handling and others.
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