Today, the United States is running a natural experiment in electricity generation, with a patchwork of policies and power grids.

America needs clean electricity. These states show how to do it.

If humans escape climate scientists’ gloomiest projections, if we buy ourselves time to adapt to higher seas and fiercer heat waves, we will likely use more electricity than we do now, and we will make it without emitting greenhouse gases.

Today, the United States is running a natural experiment in electricity generation, with a patchwork of policies and power grids. To eliminate electricity’s greenhouse gas emissions, it makes sense to ask: What can we learn from the states that make cleanest power?

The chart below shows how the United States has made electricity for the past twenty years, represented as the percentage of power generated from each fuel source. To show how their relative usage has shifted, the fuels are stacked each year from top to bottom in order of percentage.

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Source: The Washington Post

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Solar panels' lifespan is 25-30 years and companies are looking to recycle the valuable, reusable materials and keep panels out of landfills.

As millions of solar panels age out, recyclers hope to cash in

In Odessa, Texas, workers at a startup called SolarCycle unload trucks carrying end-of-life photovoltaic panels freshly picked from commercial solar farms across the United States. They separate the panels from the aluminum frames and electrical boxes, then feed them into machines that detach their glass from the laminated materials that have helped generate electricity from sunlight for about a quarter of a century.

Next, the panels are ground, shredded, and subjected to a patented process that extracts the valuable materials — mostly silver, copper, and crystalline silicon. Those components will be sold, as will the lower-value aluminum and glass, which may even end up in the next generation of solar panels.

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Source: Grist

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Researchers found that 6,256 cities across 124 countries could, in theory, meet all their electricity demand from solar panels deployed on nearby water reservoirs.

Floating solar panels could completely power thousands of cities

Thousands of cities around the world could power themselves entirely with solar panels floating atop water reservoirs, according to new research. It’s a relatively easy way to generate renewable energy locally while also conserving water.

Solar arrays suspended over water, or floatovoltaics, work similarly to those spread out over land. The panels sit on a raft instead of on parking lots, rooftops, or other grounded mounts. But they haven’t been deployed in many places around the world yet and only produced as much electricity as less than 1 percent of the world’s land-based solar farms in 2020. Now, a new study published in the journal Nature Sustainability shows just how much potential cities could tap into with this emerging technology.

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Source: The Verge

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TX has 7.7GW of capacity additions planned for 2023, a solar development queue larger than CA’s 4.2GW pipeline.

Chart: Who’s the leader in utility-scale solar — California or Texas?

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Sometime in May of this year, those cowboys in Texas are expected to have officially added more utility-scale solar to their electric grid than the hippies in California have added to theirs, ending the Golden State’s perennial lead in this contest.

At the start of 2023, California was ahead of Texas by about 1,000 megawatts. Texas had 14,806 megawatts of utility-scale solar capacity as of December 2022, according to state grid operator ERCOT, while California had 15,967 megawatts as of January 5, 2023, according to state grid operator CAISO.

But Texas is simply building solar faster than any other state. It essentially doubled its capacity from 2019 to 2020 and again from 2020 to 2021, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. The pace of Texas’ capacity additions in the last few years is making California look uncommitted to this whole renewables thing.

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Source: Canary Media

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NGOs and governments have implemented renewable energy plans in different communities in the Amazon with positive results.

Electricity day and night: Solar power is changing isolated Amazon communities

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Growing up, Maria de Fátima Batista often studied in the dark, using a candle or lantern for light because the riverine community where she lives in Brazil’s Amazon did not have electricity.

Today, aged 58, Batista, her family and the rest of the Terra Firme community, which sits by the banks of the Madeira River in Rondônia state, now have 24-hour electricity via solar panels and batteries, installed last year by local firm (re)energisa, the renewables arm of Brazil’s Energisa Group.

Her grandchildren don’t need a candle or lamp to study when it gets dark; she freezes foodstuffs, including the baked goods she sells, and the community now communicates in real time with local authorities.

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Source: MONGABAY

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Lightsource bp has built a pair of solar farms in CO that double as carbon sinks and help to preserve 3,000 acres of shortgrass prairie, too.

New solar farm is a carbon sink & prairie preserver, too

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A movement is afoot to quash utility-scale solar development on farmland in the US, but the case for rural solar keeps expanding in new and different directions. In the latest example, Lightsource bp has built a pair of solar farms in Colorado that double as carbon sinks and help to preserve 3,000 acres of shortgrass prairie, too.

Solar developers like farmland because it is relatively flat, treeless, and exposed to sun. Roads and transmission infrastructure are pluses, too.

As for local opposition, that is a matter of local concern. However, if the objections come down to aesthetics and appropriate use of land, that is a matter of historical perspective. Farms look bucolic enough on the outside, but beneath those amber waves of grain is formerly virgin land that has been stripped of its natural state, robbed of its biodiversity, commercialized, and industrialized for generations with machines, herbicides and pesticides.

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Source: Clean Technica

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US big-box stores can provide some 109,000 acres of solar-panel-ready rooftop, enough to produce more than 50m MW hours of electricity a year.

The untapped solar power potential of big box stores

Solar energy offers a cheap, renewable source of electricity that could reduce and, eventually, eliminate our need for greenhouse gas-emitting power generation plants. But solar farms as they are currently envisioned come at a cost: acres and acres of land that could otherwise be used for food production or rewilding, creating biodiverse wildernesses that preserve nature and function as carbon sinks. But why choose between saving biodiversity and stopping global warming when a third option exists, one (and sometimes two) floors up?

The United States’ obsession with Big Box stores—the Walmarts, Targets, Ikeas, and Home Depots that are as much consumption-as-entertainment as bulk buying opportunities—provides some 109,000 acres of prime, solar-panel-ready rooftop real estate, according to a 2016 calculation by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s enough to produce more than 50 million megawatt hours of electricity a year—and power 5.2 million households—assuming 477 megawatt hours per year, per acre for utility scale photovoltaics.

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Source: TIME

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Replacing coal power plants across the United States with renewable energy projects would reduce carbon emissions and require less water.

Replacing US coal plants with solar and wind is cheaper than running them

Replacing coal power plants across the United States with renewable energy projects would reduce carbon emissions and require less water.

Add to the list: It would also save money.

Nearly all existing US coal plants require more cash to operate than the cost of replacing them with new wind or solar projects, according to a report published Monday by San Francisco-based climate think tank Energy Innovation.

The finding is in line with past research by BloombergNEF that determined building new solar and wind farms is cheaper than operating existing coal or gas power plants in much of the world.

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Source: BNN Bloomberg

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Solar panels can provide valuable habitat for wildlife – and potentially benefit both the land and farmers.

Win-win: how solar farms can double as havens for our wildlife

Australia’s renewable energy transition has prompted the construction of dozens of large-scale solar farms. The boom helps reduce Australia’s reliance on fossil fuels, but requires large areas of land to be converted to host solar infrastructure.

Solar farms are mostly built in rural areas. This has raised concerns about a potential decline in both agricultural production – as arable land is used for solar energy production – and wildlife habitat.

But there are ways to expand solar infrastructure so both nature and people win. We’ve already seen this in so called “agrivoltaics”, where land under and around solar panels is used to grow crops and graze livestock. But what about “conservoltaics”, combing conservation and solar energy?

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Source: The Conversation

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The scientists claim that, for an average annual generation for solar of 1,370 kWh/kW, 38 million hectares would be needed.

Solar may cover the world’s electricity demand with 0.3% of its land area

Solar energy could theoretically cover the world’s electricity demand by just 0.3% of its land area. This is one of the main conclusions of new research by a group of academic institutions, led by Aarhus University in Denmark. The researchers claim that raw materials and land availability will not present real barriers to PV in its race to dominate the global energy landscape.

The scientists claim that, for an average annual generation for solar of 1,370 kWh/kW, 38 million hectares would be needed. They noted that the world has a total area of 13,003 million hectares.

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Source: PV Magazine

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