Solar systems are predominantly installed on rooftops in urban settings, where open land is scarce but multi-level buildings are aplenty. Often, the roof space on these structures isn’t large enough to host solar systems that can cover a building’s entire energy footprint, so they’re supplemented with renewable energy credits (RECs) generated by out-of-city solar systems.
Onion Flats, an architecture firm, wanted to buck that trend and maximize PV output without having to subscribe to RECs on its Front Flats apartment building project in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The solution was installing solar panels on the roof, as well as on the majority of the east-, west- and south-facing walls of the building. In total, the solar system generates 176 kW, which is more than the Front Flats needs — and that’s by design.
Like an onion, Front Flats has layers
Philadelphia design-build architecture firm Onion Flats installed a 176-kW solar system with a rooftop canopy and wraps around the east-, west- and south-facing walls of its Front Flats apartment building. Onion Flats
Being in a state and city not known for solar incentives, the Front Flats project is an anomaly, both in appearance and size.
“I wouldn’t call this a solar city,” said Tim McDonald, CEO of Onion Flats. “The renewable energy credits in Pennsylvania suck, but you go across the bridge to New Jersey and it’s a different world. There’s not a real incentive financially to push it. We push it because we think that’s where we need to be.”
From the second story up, the 28-unit apartment building’s windows are slightly obscured by bifacial solar panels protruding from its exterior walls. Those vertical panels on the east, west and south façades meet the horizontal modules held by canopy supports on the roof. Tenants have rooftop access, where shade gardens are planted, and McDonald said the bifacial module shell still allows natural light into the building and offers additional visual privacy.
The Tennessee Valley Authority said Monday that the new 100-megawatt solar facility in Obion County, Tn. will supply carbon-free energy to Google’s data centers in Clarksville, Tn. and Hollywood, Al.
Florida-based solar developer Origis Energy is using TVA’s nationally recognized Green Invest program to develop the solar farm.
“The Green Invest program helps customers like Google meet their long-term sustainability goals with new renewable energy projects,” officials said. “In the past two years, Green Invest has generated $1.4 billion in economic activity in TVA’s service area.”
(The Center Square) – Proposed legislation enabling electricity credits for community solar panels may just benefit Pennsylvania’s struggling farmers the most.
At least, so say the clean energy groups testifying in favor of House Bill 531 this week. The proposal, under consideration in the House Consumer Affairs Committee, would allow residents to invest in solar panels installed on open land and receive a credit on their electricity bill as if the units were on their own roofs instead.
“There is no question that HB 531 would help farmers to diversify their profits and productivity, and take advantage of the unused open space on hillsides, on the roofs of barns, chicken houses and other structures,” said Chad Forcey, executive director of the Pennsylvania Conservative Energy Forum. “On the land itself, farmers can take advantage of temporary development enhancements. Soybeans, pollinator-friendly crops and even beehives can flourish underneath solar panels.”
Leslie Elder, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access, said investors will move forward with more than 220 “shovel-ready” projects in over 40 counties – as soon as the bill passes. The deals have already secured between $3 and $4 million in land leases for farmers.
She said the legislation provides a lifeline to farmers, hit hard by tanking milk prices and broken supply chains.
The Pennsylvania Farm Bureau likewise lent their support to the legislation in 2019, recognizing that agriculture can “play a key developmental role.”
“This is a case where there is strength in numbers,” Consumer Affairs Committee Chairman Brad Roae, R-Crawford, said. “When people work together and pool their resources, they often can accomplish more together than they ever could while they were apart.”
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By Michele S. Byers, New Jersey Conservation Foundation
If there’s any doubt that New Jersey is the Garden State, visit a local farm stand or a farmers’ market. This time of year, you will find some of the world’s most delicious produce: fresh Jersey tomatoes, peaches, sweet corn, peppers, blueberries, melons, squash and much more.
What makes them so good? One key ingredient is excellent soil. New Jersey has some of the best agricultural soils on Earth, perfect for growing a wide variety of foods.
These “prime” and “statewide important” soils are an incredibly precious natural resource that should never be taken for granted or squandered.
That’s why a proposed law to encourage large utility-scale solar projects without provisions to keep it off our best farmland and open space is a bad idea, no matter how well intentioned it may be.
The proposed legislation, S-2605, would toss out New Jersey’s existing solar siting policies, including provisions to restrict solar on farmland and redirect it to sites like brownfields, landfills, rooftops and parking lots.
The proposed law would not only make it easier to build large, utility-scale solar arrays on the state’s best farmland, it would also allow forests to be clear-cut to make way for solar projects, which makes no sense. Forests store the equivalent of 8% of New Jersey’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Make no mistake, encouraging solar energy is essential and is a critical part of New Jersey’s clean energy future.
By using a mix of solar, offshore wind and other clean technologies, this state we’re in plans to transition to 100% clean energy by 2050 for its power supply. Reducing the state’s reliance on fossil fuels is critical to combating climate change.
But solar energy projects must be built in the right places. And high quality farmland and forests are most definitely not the right places.
There are at least two sides to every debate. To weigh in on this one, send your proposed op-ed to editor@eviropolitics.com If your response is shorter than an op-ed, simply use the comment block.
As the coronavirus pandemic devastates the state’s already flailing oil and gas industry, solar energy production is on a trajectory for record growth.
There are now 17 solar facilities in Texas, including 13 that can produce at least 100 megawatts of power, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. COURTESY DUKE ENERGY
Nancy Nusser reports for The Texas Observer, Aug 13, 2020, 8:00 am CST
On Garland Richards’ ranch in West Central Texas, silicon solar panels spread for two square miles in a shimmering blue expanse that resembles a lake. The Holstein solar farm, which began operating in July in Nolan County, is as long and broad as a small town. The farm has 709,000 solar panels that generate 200 megawatts of electricity, enough to power about 40,000 homes.
Richards leased a tract of his land for the solar farm in hopes that the revenue will pay the taxes on the rest of his property—10,000 acres of cattle country that’s been in his family since the 19th century. “I want to be able to hand the land down to the next generation,” Richards says. “If I can make enough on 1,300 acres to pay the taxes on 10,000 acres, it’s worth it.”
For decades, the 68-year-old former cowboy and his family relied on oil wells that Exxon drilled on the property, which sprawls between San Angelo and Abilene. “But now the oil is depleting, and the market is depleting as well,” he says. In April, oil prices dropped into negative territory for the first time in history as the coronavirus pandemic battered the already beleaguered oil and gas industry. “When oil is negative $47 a barrel, solar looks pretty good,” Richards says.
Garland Richards. COURTESY FORT CHADBOURNE FOUNDATION
With intense sun and vast tracts of empty land that can accommodate the huge scale of major solar farms, West Texas has long been primed for rapid solar development. Texas’ free market approach to electricity production and loose regulation of development encourages big electricity projects of any kind, including solar. With technological innovations, the cost of developing solar farms has dropped about 40 percent in Texas in the last five years, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). And once a solar farm is built, it’s inexpensive to operate compared to gas and coal-fired plants, because its fuel is free.
Federal tax credits have further cut the cost of developing solar farms. Meanwhile, demand for solar electricity has increased as both the public and corporations have embraced it as a means of battling the climate crisis. In response, solar farms have begun to proliferate in West Texas. There are now 17 solar facilities in Texas, including 13 that can produce at least 100 megawatts of power, according to SEIA. “Solar has just started to come on big in the last two to three years,” says Rich Clark, an engineer and board member of Solar Austin, a renewable energy nonprofit in Central Texas. “It’s a huge wave that’s coming.”
The solar surge follows the whirlwind growth of the wind industry in West Texas, where the landscape is dominated by towering propeller-like turbines that stretch for miles. For example, Nolan County, with fewer than 15,000 residents, is home to three of the largest wind farms in the world, and it’s recognized globally as a wind energy powerhouse.
According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the nonprofit that oversees Texas’s electrical grid, the state’s utility-scale solar capacity (the big solar farms that connect to the grid) is expected to increase 150 percent this year to 5,777 megawatts. Next year, installed solar capacity is expected to grow more than 130 percent to 13,449 megawatts, according to ERCOT, which relies on information provided by developers.“They’re looking to purchase solar because it makes economic sense to them. That’s when I feel like you’ve hit that turning point in Texas.”
Momentum has slowed slightly since COVID-19 began spreading across Texas in March, quarantining workers and disrupting supply chains. But unlike the oil and gas industry, the solar industry has not been devastated. “There have been impacts,” says Charlie Hemmeline, executive director of the Texas Solar Power Association. “But big picture, 2020 was slated to be solar’s best year in Texas, and we’re still on track for that to be the case.”
In the last 10 years, Texas had lagged behind other states in terms of solar development, according to SEIA rankings since 2010. But in 2018 and 2019, Texas ranked second in the nation for the amount of solar capacity installed during the year. “It’s really been a sea change for Texas,” says George Hershman, president of California-based Swinerton Renewable Energy, which has eight solar farms in Texas. He says the state “is becoming our biggest solar market.”
Some of Texas’s largest companies, including heavy polluters in the petroleum sector, have begun switching to solar and investing in its development. In 2018, ExxonMobil agreed to use solar and wind power to draw oil from the Permian Basin. Bloomberg reported that it was the biggest renewable deal ever signed by an oil company. In 2019, Facebook agreed to finance construction of the 4,600-acre Prospero solar farm in Andrews County in West Texas. This year, Bank of America announced that it had partnered with the Texas-based Reliant Energy to get electricity from a West Texas solar farm. And Dow Chemical signed an agreement to use a South Texas solar farm to supply its Gulf Coast petrochemical plant, the largest facility of its kind in the western hemisphere.
“When you have these major companies that are not focused on environmental issues deciding to purchase solar, that’s really important,” says Clark, of Solar Austin. “They’re looking to purchase solar because it makes economic sense to them. That’s when I feel like you’ve hit that turning point in Texas.”
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Bill would support solar arrays that feed utility companies, not homes or businesses
Proposed legislation aims to expand utility-scale solar projects by using the state’s existing farmlands.
Tom Johnson reports for NJ Spotlight
The state wants to sharply ramp up efforts to build utility-scale solar projects in New Jersey, a strategy that could result in opening up existing agricultural land to huge new solar farms.
Under a bill (S-2605) now under consideration by lawmakers, a policy initiated during the Christie administration of steering new solar projects away from farmland would be scrapped. That would open up land to accommodate large solar projects that supply power directly to the grid.
Without more utility-scale solar projects that provide at least 10 megawatts (MW) of solar power and the land to locate them, the state will not achieve its goal of transitioning to 100% clean energy by 2050, according to proponents of the bill.
“It ain’t going to happen unless we change our policies,’’ said Sen. Bob Smith, the sponsor of the legislation and chairman of the Senate Environment and Energy Committee, which kicked off debate on the issue during a hearing in Trenton. No action was taken on the bill Wednesday.
“It is complicated,’’ Smith (D-Middlesex) conceded.
Utility-scale solar projects are widely viewed as the most cost-effective way of delivering solar power, largely because of the economies of scale associated with building bigger projects rather than putting solar panels on a residence or on warehouse rooftops.
The Murphy administration’s energy master plan identifies solar energy as one of the primary ways New Jersey can convert to using cleaner energy. By mid-century, that plan suggests 34% of the state’s energy needs will be produced by solar. Today, solar accounts for only 5% of its power.
The legislation aims to expand utility-scale projects by using existing farmlands where such projects might be more easily located in the nation’s most densely populated state. It probably would require roughly 25,000 acres to achieve the 3,000 MW of utility-scale projects the bill projects to build by 2030, according to Smith.
Why many environmental groups are opposed
Many environmental groups oppose opening up farmland to big solar projects, calling the bill premature and unnecessary, given that the state Board of Public Utilities (BPU) is currently engaged in an extensive discussion with solar advocates over how new solar projects will be financed going forward.
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