The macro view of solar policy: The case for supporting utility-scale power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Solar costs have come down drastically over the last decade. • Yet, solar power still provides less than 5% of electricity generation globally. • Policy is fragmented among promoting utility-scale, commercial and residential solar. • Utility-scale is the only way to provide significant solar power and is the most efficient. • Utility-scale power requires increases in transmission capacity and integration of electricity markets. New solar energy generation is drastically needed as a source of clean electricity as the U.S. and the globe make the transition away from fossil fuels. Yet, even as solar costs have dramatically declined, solar sources still provide less than 5% of global electricity. We examine issues in solar policy leading to this low adoption rate. Examining the variables of cost, baseload power and intermittency, and land use, we evaluate the tradeoffs among policy support for utility-scale, commercial and residential solar systems. We argue that utility-scale solar power makes far more sense if there is adequate grid integration, so that such installations can be placed in locations that minimize land use tradeoffs. By focusing policy support on a few large solar installations, governments can vastly increase the solar contribution to electricity generation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".