How Much PACE Volume Exists, and Where
PACENation, the industry’s own data clearinghouse, reports commercial PACE (C-PACE) financing at roughly $13.5 billion across 3,837 projects from the program’s 2009 inception through December 2025. Residential PACE (R-PACE) totals roughly $9.1 billion across 371,000 home upgrades from 2015 through December 2023. PACE financing works differently from a typical solar loan: it attaches to the property through a special assessment repaid alongside property taxes, rather than getting funded through a lender-charged dealer fee like the roughly 22% fee embedded in most solar loans, and it can transfer to a new owner at resale rather than requiring payoff.
Why Renewable Energy Is a Ceiling, Not a Solar Number
PACENation’s published use-of-funds breakdown does not isolate solar from the broader categories it reports in. Commercial PACE spending splits 55% energy efficiency, 17% renewable energy, and 15% mixed-use projects. Residential PACE splits 32% energy efficiency, 29% renewable energy, and 28% resilience. Solar sits somewhere inside each renewable-energy share, but PACENation’s data does not say how much of that share is solar specifically versus other renewable-energy upgrades, so the 17% and 29% figures should be read as an upper ceiling on solar’s piece of PACE volume, not a solar-specific total. PACENation’s data also does not break total volume out state by state, so a state-level usage ranking is not available from this source.
The Numbers
Commercial PACE (C-PACE) financing totals roughly $13.5 billion across 3,837 projects from the program’s 2009 inception through December 2025.
Residential PACE (R-PACE) financing totals roughly $9.1 billion across 371,000 home upgrades from 2015 through December 2023.
Commercial PACE spending breaks down as 55% energy efficiency, 17% renewable energy, and 15% mixed-use projects; the renewable-energy share is a ceiling on solar’s share, not a solar-specific figure.
Residential PACE spending breaks down as 32% energy efficiency, 29% renewable energy, and 28% resilience; the renewable-energy share is a ceiling on solar’s share, not a solar-specific figure.
PACE assessments repay through property taxes rather than through a lender-charged dealer fee, the roughly 22% fee typically embedded in a standard solar loan.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.