U.S. Utility-Scale Solar Plant Data: Deployment, Costs, and Performance

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory compiled data on 1,760 U.S. ground-mounted solar projects installed through 2024. The synthesis covers deployment trends, capital costs, capacity factors, LCOE, PPA prices, and wholesale market value for PV, PV+battery, and CSP plants exceeding 5 MWAC.

Use Cases

• Analyze capital cost (CapEx) trends across different project types and years to model cost reduction curves.
• Compare capacity factors and Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) between PV, PV+battery hybrid, and CSP plants.
• Study Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) price distributions and their correlation with wholesale market value metrics.
• Assess the deployment scale and characteristics of projects in interconnection queues to forecast future capacity.

Strengths

• Contains project-level data for 1,760 operational utility-scale solar installations.
• Synthesizes data from authoritative sources including the EIA, FERC, and state agencies.
• Covers multiple analytical dimensions: costs, performance, market value, and technology trends.

Limitations

• Project count is limited to plants over 5 MWAC, excluding smaller distributed solar projects.
• Data is aggregated into a public file with 57 tabs, which may require significant effort to parse and join.
• Confidential project-specific details may be omitted from the public data file.

Provenance

Source

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Department of Energy.

Collection Method

Compiled and synthesized from diverse sources including the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), and state agencies.

Time Range

Projects installed through 2024.

Freshness

Data includes projects installed through 2024, with the dataset last updated in October 2025.

Geography

United States, focusing on ground-mounted systems.