What's driving solar energy adoption in Brazil? Exploring settlement patterns of place and space

The energy transition is forcing power systems to face exceptional transformations, with the rise of the distributed generation systems, and the urge of prosumers. This paper aims to investigate the influence of settlement patterns on residential photovoltaic adoption in Brazil, under a cross-section structure, using the Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimator. Other key drivers are also included as control variables in the analysis. I benefit from a rich dataset of economic, social, housing, and environmental variables for 310,120 census sectors. Variables such as rural/urban dummies or population/housing density, used in previous papers to test for association between settlement patterns and residential PV adoption poorly represent the real relationship between these dimensions. The results of this paper ratify a U-shape relationship between urbanization degree and household solar power uptake. Satellite areas in the surroundings of great urban centers are more likely to present households equipped with photovoltaic systems in Brazil. Besides, the number of housing units, average income, solar resource potential, gender, education, ethnicity, age, housing type, and housing size play an important role in the explanation of the dynamics of household photovoltaic adoption. Policy design must take into consideration these effects in order to democratize photovoltaic home uptake.