Three years ago, the Solar and Storage Industries Institute (SI2) was founded to accelerate solar and storage technologies. Now, as we celebrate our third anniversary, SI2 has helped shape national and industry conversations on solar permitting, agrivoltaics, and interconnection reform.
As we enter our fourth year, we’re charging ahead with new research and the team is excited to continue providing industry shaping insights to decision makers, developers, utilities, and more.
The Past Year
2024 saw SI2 expand its reach through original, high-value research and education on many of the most impactful issues facing energy markets.
- Siting and Permitting: SI2 won two U.S. Department of Energy grants related to improving sitting and permitting processes for large-scale solar projects. Although our work highlights solar as the key resource, the insights from the work will have broad applicability across electric generating technologies, leading to more positive outcomes for communities looking to site energy projects.
- Agrivoltaics: We also advanced our agrivoltaics work, releasing the first national survey capturing farmers’ views on solar. The results show most farmers see value in adding solar projects on their land, provided they can keep farming. This strong interest signals real demand and highlights an opportunity for collaboration between stakeholders. Now that we know that under the right circumstances farmers and solar developers are eager to work together, our experts are focused on providing the tools and resources to make that collaboration easier.
- Electric Load Forecasting : Electric load is growing fast and our analysis shows that utilities may not be planning for enough generation to meet demand under some scenarios. Our results reinforce that faster and more streamlined processes are needed to connect any kind of power plant to meet load.
- Meeting Energy Demand with Flexible Interconnection (FLEX): This year, SI2 also released a first-of-its-kind report in the United States that demonstrates FLEX offers significant economic benefits to community solar developers. FLEX can provide up to 176% more revenue over the lifetime of the project and allows solar projects to connect to the grid faster, by passing the need to wait for upgrades and helping to meet energy demand sooner.
What’s Next
Despite uncertainty around how much the federal government will continue to support work in areas such as siting and permitting reform for large-scale resources, our work remains important.
The solar and storage industry is growing, and our experts are supporting this progress with cutting-edge research and education projects to address deployment challenges. Later this year, SI2 will release a list of innovative ways independent power producers can engage the communities where their plants are located to drive better permitting outcomes for all stakeholders.
We are also planning to release an update to our interconnection report that includes examples demonstrating how a more rationale fee structure can take some of the guess work out of the interconnection process.
And look for case studies on the ways in which agrivoltaic projects overcame thorny challenges and supported family farmers.
Charging Ahead
I’m excited about the year and the team we have assembled.
In 2024, Shawn Rumery joined the team to lead our program work, bringing more than a decade of research and policy analysis experience to the organization. We also added in-house communications expertise with the addition of Katie Arberg, who is helping us share our work with industry partners, policymakers, the media and the public. Our new class of SI2 fellows, Jessica Norris and Charlotte Hay have been key players in all our major projects.
Like any new, fast-growing organization, we are solving new problems every day and thank our Board of Directors and Industry Advisory Committee for their leadership.
Many thanks to our partner organizations, industry supporters, donors and friends as we charge into our fourth year of operation.
