Yet, nation-wide siting and technical potential of industrial-scale rooftop PV still need to be quantified and optimized to set and meet sustainability goals for land conservation, energy transition, and climate change moving forward.

This project will provide research on the extent to which large commercial building “LCBs” stocks within the US can reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emission impacts associated with electricity generation and the extent to which it rooftop solar on LCBs can contribute to land sparing. Land sparing may fall outside of typical life-cycle assessments; solar facilities built in natural lands may disproportionately contribute to GHGs and may put pressure on limited land resources for agriculture, conservation, and cultural values held by indigenous/tribal groups. The project is high risk because it relies on a computationally demanding and novel application/extension of Aurora’s solar optimization platform to accommodate the incredibly large rooftops (e.g., 59 football fields) of the LCBs for analysis. The project is high reward because our efforts leading to LCB Rooftop PV models could serve as an invaluable resource for LCB owners, stakeholders, and decision-makers interested in developing PV who would otherwise require cost-prohibitive consultation services from technical experts necessitating thousands of dollars of up-front investment.

Our broader dissemination goal for this study is to provide capacity building, data sharing, and knowledge transfer across the LCB Rooftop PV knowledge system (a complex network of actors, organizations, and objects that perform knowledge-related functions, most notably linking knowledge with action) efforts to overcome public awareness and institutional barriers of PV development on LCBs. Achieving this goal may facilitate a rapid “low carbon” and “low land” footprint transition, where unintended consequences on ecosystems and their services from solar development are reduced or avoided altogether.