Solar Access Texas started with a question: if solar panels and batteries can save Texas households thousands of dollars a year, why do so few families — especially in lower-income and rural communities — actually install them?
Part of the answer is information. Figuring out whether solar makes financial sense for your specific home requires modeling your electricity use, local sunlight, equipment costs, battery behavior, and utility rates — hour by hour, over 20 years. Solar companies run these numbers, but their tools aren't public, and their answer is rarely neutral.
The research behind the tool
In 2024, our founder Jason Wang — then a student at Jordan High School in Fulshear, TX — built an optimization model for solar photovoltaic (PV) plus battery energy storage systems (BESS) and published it at IEEE PVSC 54, one of the world's leading solar research conferences.
The model simulates all 8,760 hours of a year: how much energy the panels generate, when the battery charges and discharges, and when the home buys from or sells back to the grid. It then searches across hundreds of system-size combinations to find the one that maximizes long-term savings or minimizes payback time.
From paper to platform
A research paper doesn't help a family in a colonia near the border or a rural household outside Lubbock. A free, bilingual web tool can. That's what Solar Access Texas is becoming: we've ported the model to Python, and we're connecting it to real data from NREL (sunlight), the U.S. Census (community demographics), and ERCOT (the Texas grid).
Our roadmap runs through Fall 2027: an interactive calculator, partnerships with community organizations, an incentive-program database, and eventually an AI assistant that walks any Texan through the solar decision in plain English or Spanish.
If you're a community organization, mentor, or homeowner who wants to be part of this — we'd love to hear from you at contact@solaraccesstx.org.