Jacqueline Hettel Tidwell

Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states. These disparities, frequently referred to as the local-national gap, reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. This dataset is an attempt to bridge the local-national gap regarding solar PV adoption in the state of Georgia (U.S.A.). This dataset is an aggregation of variables from seven different publicly-available sources that was designed to help researchers interested in the context underlying solar adoption on the local scale of governance (e.g. the county level). The SolarView database includes information necessary for informing policymaking activities such as solar installation information, a historical county zip code directory, county-level census data, housing value indexes, renewable energy incentive totals, PV rooftop suitability percentages, and utility rates. As this is a database from multiple sources, incomplete data entries are noted. Despite a global push in the development and implementation of widespread alternative energy use, significant disparities exist across given nation-states with regard to local adoption. It is becoming increasingly apparent that individual communities do not necessarily share the same energy wants and needs with one another, and as noted in multiple studies of energy development projects [1,2] the alignment of value systems between energy sources and local needs play a significant role in how—if at all—these sources are used [3]. The social and physical distances between where people live their daily lives and where governments define national priorities are a critical, yet only recently-explored, phenomena. A burgeoning area of research, studies of this 'local-national gap,' seek to establish a space for national policy analyses and studies of individual motivations with community-level dynamics. These disparities reflect both technical and economic factors, as well as the social, political, and ecological gaps between how communities see energy development and national/global policy goals. Known as the " local-national gap, " many nations struggle with fostering meaningful conversations about the role of alternative energy technologies within communities. Mitigation of this problem first requires understanding the distribution of existing alternative energy technologies at the local level of policymaking. Moreover, access to datasets that respect these gaps and make clear their strengths and limitations in addressing such issues are not as publicly visible as they are needed to be in order to address such pain points. As described in Tidwell, Tidwell, and Nelson (2018) [4], there is a state within the United States of America that proves to be an interesting case study for investigating issues of local adoption of national renewable energy policy: Georgia. The Energy Information Administration positions Georgia as a leader in biomass energy production and an emerging space for the deployment of