Community Solar in Cook County: Opportunity Assessment

U.S. Department of Energy SunShot Initiative is a national collaborative effort to make solar energy cost competitive with other forms of electricity by the end of the decade. The SunShot Initiative’s Solar Market Pathways Program will support 15 projects, including the Cook County Community Solar Project, over the next two years that are advancing solar deployment across the United States. The Cook County Community Solar Project will identify and establish models for community solar and ways to eliminate barriers to implementation.

The goals of this opportunity assessment are to quantify community solar customer potential by analyzing Cook County housing demographics, assess and quantify market potential for community solar installations by analyzing physical characteristics of vacant land and buildings in Cook County, identify the number of sites suitable for community solar installations and potential combined solar energy capacity for these sites, identify most suitable vacant land and buildings to streamline community solar development, and help inform the project’s pilot site selection process in Fall/Winter of 2015.