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Study: Home Buyers Will Pay a $15,000 Premium for Solar Panels

  • February 23rd 2015

by Lark Turner

Study: Home Buyers Will Pay a $15,000 Premium for Solar Panels: Figure 1

Buyers are willing to pay a premium for homes with solar panels, a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy found.

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory looked at 22,800 home sales, about 4,000 of which had solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, between 2002 and 2013 to determine its findings. It concluded that buyers were willing to pay an average of $15,000 for a home with solar panels.

“Home buyers are consistently willing to pay PV home premiums across various states, housing and PV markets, and home types,” the authors wrote.

The New York Times reported that because the study had a larger sample size than previous analyses, experts find it more reliable.

Though the study looked at how much money the solar panels would fetch based on wattage (the verdict: about $4 per watt), the authors also found that home buyers might be paying extra for the privilege of having any solar panels at all, no matter their size.

“This might indicate that a green cachet exists for photovoltaic homes in our sample,” the authors note. “In other words, buyers might be willing to pay something for having any size of PV system on their homes and then some increment more depending on the size of the system.”

See other articles related to: solar panels

This article originally published at https://dc.urbanturf.com/articles/blog/study_buyers_will_pay_a_premium_for_solar_panels/9561.

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