California needs to think creatively and find ways to put more solar energy in already built-out places, including rooftops and parking lots.

Editorial: California needs a lot more solar. Why not put panels along highways and parking lots?

California is racing to build enough solar panels, wind turbines and battery storage to meet its carbon-cutting mandates and prepare its electrical grid for worsening heat waves and growing energy demand.

But increasing renewable energy by covering far-off, undeveloped areas with solar and wind farms raises its own environmental concerns. That’s why California needs to think creatively and find ways to put more solar energy in already built-out places, including rooftops and parking lots, canals and agricultural fields, so we can slow the climate crisis without harming sensitive land, like the habitat of threatened Joshua trees or Mojave Desert tortoises.

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Source: Los Angeles Times

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The researchers used a statistical model to discover the suite of technologies that would minimize land impacts.

We need an area the size of Texas for wind and solar. Here’s how to halve it.

Imagine that all 462 billion watts of electricity consumed in the United States last year were supplied by a single source of power, rather than a mixture of different technologies. This is how much land each power source would require.

If nuclear power plants generated all U.S. electricity, that would occupy 469 square miles of land, including the land for mining uranium, storing spent fuel and connecting to the electricity grid.

That’s about the size of Madison County, Idaho, population 53,000.

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Source: The Washington Post

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Landfill solar projects not only help cities meet ambitious renewable energy targets, but they can also reduce local power bills and generate revenue for city coffers by leasing out idle land.

US cities turn old landfills into solar parks

Running low on suitable land for solar power projects, officials in the US city of Annapolis homed in on a spacious site they had long written off as useless – the old municipal rubbish dump.

The 25-hectare landfill closed in 1993 and “just sat there as a liability”, said David Jarrell, public works director in Annapolis, the state capital of Maryland.

Today, capped and covered with grass, the plot accommodates more than 50,000 solar energy modules with a total capacity of 18 megawatts (MW).

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Source: RTE

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A one-stop-shop solar solution lowers energy costs and raises cash on hand.

How to increase NOI while reducing capex & carbon emissions with solar

Commercial solar is in the middle of a surge. The total number of solar capacity installed by US businesses more than doubled between 2019 and 2022, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. Meanwhile, states and localities are readying new penalties on carbon emissions, and energy prices continue to be vulnerable to global disruptions.

But while solar’s time is increasingly “now”, property owners and developers who take a do-it-yourself approach can quickly find themselves adrift amid all the complexities, says Blair Herbert, CEO of Coast Energy. Instead, having a partner who works as a one-stop-shop to navigate the regulatory, installation, financing and operational hurdles can help owners and developers gain real NOI benefits more efficiently.

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Source: GLOBE ST.

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Growing the crop under a canopy of solar panels has given the fruit, citron of Calabria a new lease of life in southern Italy.

These Italian farmers are saving an ancient fruit with solar power

The citron of Calabria in southern Italy had almost died out from extreme weather and lack of economic value. But growing the crop under a canopy of solar panels has given the fruit a new lease of life – with lessons for many climate-stressed crops.

On a warm late winter morning, Antonio Lancellotta, a 35-year-old farmer, shows me around one of his family’s unorthodox 1.8-acre (7,280 square metre) greenhouse in Scalea, southern Italy. Rows of lush citron trees (Citrus medica), heavy with white flowers fill the space. Yet, above the trees, at about 12.5ft (3.8m) above the ground, alternating lines of transparent plastic sheets and photovoltaic panels roofed the field. The Lancellotta family was one of the first in Italy to experiment with “agrivoltaics”, where crops are grown underneath solar panels.

“Look at the quality of this citron,” Lancellotta says, holding a large heart-shaped yellow fruit. “Perfect.”

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Source: BBC

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The flat, open, sunny roofs of medium and large warehouses and distribution centers are perfect locations for solar panels.

Report: The huge solar potential of American warehouses

Solar power is getting cheaper and more efficient all the time, and America should take advantage of untapped solar energy opportunities, including the billions of square feet of warehouse rooftops across the country.

Solar power is the fastest growing form of energy in the United States, thanks in large part to its low and rapidly dropping price and to supportive public policies in some parts of the country. But the United States has the technical potential to produce 78 times as much electricity as it used in 2020 just with solar photovoltaic (PV) energy. To quickly and sustainably achieve a future of 100% renewable energy, America must take advantage of untapped solar energy opportunities.

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Source: Environment America

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The attachment rates of storage systems to distributed solar in CA are projected to increase from around 11% today to over 80% by 2027

Interest in energy storage booms after implementation of NEM 3.0

California’s recent transition to a new framework to compensate customers who generate their own energy and export a portion of it back to the grid is leading to a flurry of interest in battery storage and is expected to significantly increase the number of batteries that are attached to solar systems over the next few years, industry experts say.

Companies like Sunrun and sonnen are introducing products and offerings that include energy storage, intended to derive the most value out of the new framework. Sunrun, for instance, recently launched an offering called Sunrun Shift, that enables customers to store excess rooftop solar energy for use when electricity prices are the highest.

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Source: Utility Dive

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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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