The U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) has proposed canceling a monthly report that tracked the volume of solar panels shipped into the United States.
The proposed cancellation was announced in a Federal Register filing, which allows public comments through October 27, 2025. More broadly, the filing seeks comment on a proposed three-year extension of the EIA’s Electric Power Surveys (EPS). The EPS includes 10 surveys of entities involved in the production, transmission, delivery, and sale of electricity, including the EIA-860M and Electric Power Monthly surveys, which are regularly covered by pv magazine USA.
In the filing, the EIA stated:
EIA proposes to discontinue Form EIA-63B, Photovoltaic Module Shipments Report. EIA has determined that the value of the data collected by the survey no longer exceeds the burden of collecting and publishing it.
The document noted that across the 10 surveys, the EIA annually communicates with an estimated 29,989 respondents, who file about 101,177 responses. These responses require about 251,092 “burden hours” to manage. At the program level, the EIA values burden hours at $94.99 each, bringing total program costs to about $23.85 million annually. The filing did not provide specific time estimates for EIA-63B.
By contrast, the solar module shipments report (EIA-63B) represents only a fraction of the EPS program cost. When the last three-year filing was submitted in 2022, EIA-63B was still active. At that time, the report listed 57 respondents out of 21,488 total, accounting for just 0.2% of the agency’s $16.5 million estimated program costs. That proportional share equates to around 10 staff hours per week, costing roughly $44,000 a year.
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Taco strikes again
I’ll do the compiling of data for 2 million a year for them. I’ll start tomorrow if they want
They don’t want to collect data that shows that many people are still putting solar in their homes or using solar to fulfill business needs since it contradicts their short-sighted and frankly false narrative that solar should be abandoned so we can go all in on coal and oil.
I can guarantee you none of the billionaires in the Trump administration have ever been anywhere near a coal, oil, or even gas plant, so they frankly couldn’t care less what it costs in terms of the health of those neighboring these plants – let alone the cost to the environment.