Promoting sustainable development by optimizing city-level solar photovoltaic deployment

Abstract Motivated by carbon neutrality, the large-scale installation of low-carbon solar photovoltaic (PV) will be accelerated in the coming decades. Large-scale PV also signficantly contributes to the sustainable development goals (SDGs), however, where and how much PV need to be installed to promote SDGs need to be thoroughly answered. Here we comprehensively assessed and compared the multiple benefits and SDGs progress under different city-level PV deployment scenarios, by incorporating a set of environmental-resource-social factors. We find different goal-oriented deployment scenarios result in enormous variations in PV distribution as well as tradeoffs/synergies between SDGs in different cities. The water-saving-oriented scenario witnesses the greatest carbon-air quality-water co-benefits, as well as the biggest improvement in SDGs. While the greatest promotion in employment-related SDG is realized at the expense of compromising the environmental-water benefits under the job creation-oriented scenario. SDGs in less developed cities gain greater improvement than that of rich cities under all scenarios. This study underscores the necessity of considering the spatial heterogeneity and the underlying trade-offs between various SDGs and regions when formulating energy transition strategies.