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Rooftop solar adoption is critical for residential decarbonization and hinges on its value to households. Climate change will probably affect the value of rooftop solar through impacts on rooftop solar generation and cooling demand, but no studies have quantified this effect. In this study, we quantified household-level effects of climate change on rooftop solar value and techno-economically optimal capacity by integrating empirical demand data for over 2,000 US households across 17 cities, household-level simulation and optimization models, and downscaled weather data for historic and future climates. We found that climate change will increase the value of rooftop solar to households by up to 19% and increase techno-economically optimal household capacity by up to 25% by the end of the century under a Representative Concentration Pathway 4.5 scenario. This increased value is robust across cities, households, future warming scenarios and retail tariff structures. Researchers, installer

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Data availability

The individual hourly cooling behaviour data can be obtained from Ecobee upon request38. The future TGW climate data are from the US Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information39 and are publicly available. Other data sources are provided in Methods and Supplementary Information. The household-level VOS and optimal solar capacity data are available via Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.25296250.v1 (ref. 64).

Code availability

The codes (python...