SunShot Initiative

The SunShot Initiative is a federal government program run by the US Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office. It bills itself as a national effort to support solar energy adoption in order to make solar energy affordable for all Americans. The initiative is a collaboration of private companies, universities, state and local governments, and nonprofits, as well as national laboratories.

The program began in 2011 with the initial goal of making solar energy competitive with traditional forms of electricity by 2020. The federal government invested $282 million in FY 2015 to fund the SunShot Initiative. According to the SunShot Q4 2016/Q1 2017 Solar Industry Update report, The United States installed 14.8 GW of PV in 2016, an increase of 97% from 2015, representing approximately $30 billion in deployed capital, along with another $2.2 billion in U.S.- manufactured PV products.

By 2016, the program achieved 90% of the progress towards the 2020 goal. In September 2017, it was announced that it had already reached it's 2020 goal, and was now refocusing on grid reliability issues.

When the program was first launched in 2011 it set a series of goals and cost targets:

In 2016, the SunShot Initiative announced new cost targets that it wanted to be achieved by the year 2030:

According to the program, "These cost targets inform the decisions SunShot makes to spur the country’s solar market and drive deployment of solar energy."

The SunShot Initiative is divided into five subprograms:

All subprograms issue competitive awards to universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, solar companies, and state and local governments to fund research and development projects that will aid in lowering the cost of electricity generated from solar technology.

Below is a spending breakdown of the Soft Costs program for fiscal year 2015:

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