Climate risk mitigation requires rapid decarbonization of energy infrastructure, a task that will need political support from mass publics. Here, we use a combination of satellite imagery and voter file data to examine the political identities of US households with residential solar installations. We find that solar households are slightly more likely to be Democratic; however, this imbalance stems primarily from between-neighbourhood differences in partisan composition rather than within-neighbourhood differences in the rate of partisan solar uptake. Crucially, we still find that many solar households are Republican. We also find that solar households are substantially more likely to be politically active than their neighbours, and that these differences in political participation cannot be fully explained by demographic and socioeconomic factors. Our results demonstrate that individuals across the ideological spectrum are participating in the US energy transition, despite extreme ideological polarization around climate change.

减轻气候风险需要对能源基础设施进行快速脱碳，这一任务需要公众的政治支持。在这里，我们结合使用卫星图像和选民文件数据来检查具有住宅太阳能装置的美国家庭的政治身份。我们发现太阳能家庭更可能是民主家庭。但是，这种不平衡主要来自党派组成方面的邻国间差异，而不是党派对太阳的吸收率方面的邻里差异。至关重要的是，我们仍然发现许多太阳能家庭是共和党人。我们还发现，与邻国相比，太阳能家庭在政治上的积极性可能要高得多，而且政治参与的这些差异不能由人口和社会经济因素充分解释。