Institute working papers — contributions to the conversation on questions worth looking at carefully, written in the same source-cited, board-readable format as the Institute's financial work.
On American solar deployment, and the tools already sitting in federal law, regulation, prototype, and precedent that would put the pieces together.
America does not need to build more solar — it needs to connect the solar it can already build. The panel stopped being the problem a decade ago. Solar is stuck on connection queues, transformers, and installation cost — and every tool required to fix each of those already exists as a working system, a right in a federal tariff, a rule FERC has issued, a prototype the government built, or a body of law Congress passed for a different object. The work is alignment, not innovation. This paper walks the five fixes, the three that need no new law, and the one that needs an appropriation but not any new authority.
Executive summary, one-page plain-language summary, and five companion papers (The Wire Not the Acre, Thirteen Hundred a Watt, Molecules and Electrons, The Solar Block, Where This Goes) are in editorial review and will be published as they reach the Institute's standard.
A practitioner case memo — the format used elsewhere on the Institute — is written for the CEO and the Board on a live transaction. It is precise, dated, and narrowly targeted.
A working paper is written for a different reader: the agency staffer, the standards body member, the congressional staffer, the journalist, the party who files after you in an open docket, and the reader who wants to see the argument itself rather than the answer to a specific deal question. The tone is more argumentative because the audience needs the argument. The disclosure standard is the same as everywhere else on the Institute: source-cited, honest about scope, and clear about the author's position.
These papers do not cross-sell anything on the site. They are not marketing. They are not a lead into a paid product. They exist because someone should write them, and the Institute is a place that can.
These papers are educational and analytical working papers of the Baratelli Institute. If you cite them — in a filing, a rule comment, an academic paper, or a piece of journalism — the recommended format is:
Baratelli, P. A. (2026). The Deployment Plan: How to Scale American Solar. The Baratelli Institute. https://baratelliinstitute.com/policy-discussions.html
Docket filings should verify current status of the underlying rules and dockets referenced. The papers reflect the record as of early July 2026.