Earth Matters: Solar car parks can generate gobs of electricity and avoid some NIMBY fights

If you covered Kansas with solar panels, you could annually generate more than twice as much electricity as the entire Western Hemisphere consumes now. This would, of course, play havoc with the wheat crop (the Jayhawkers are the nation’s No. 1 grower), the corn crop, the soy crop, and other sun-loving crops. Agrivoltaics—the simultaneous use of farmland with elevated solar panels—shows great promise but is barely underway. And those mentioned Kansas monocrops do not thrive in shady environments.

Of course, nobody is proposing that we inundate Kansas with solar panels. But it’s not hard to find headlines like Neighbors fight solar farm plan in RI high court and Sunblocked: Resistance to Solar in Farm Country and U.S. solar expansion stalled by rural land-use protests and How Do Neighbors of Solar Farms Really Feel? A New Survey Has Answers. The survey found that people generally are positive, but the views of those living close to the largest projects lean toward the negative.

Not too surprising since there are always legitimate concerns with any industrial-sized project. As in, what will this do to our property values, our peace and quiet, our health? And then there is the self-indulgence of purist NIMBYism. What will this do to my view? Negotiations in such matters can be amiable or rancorous. This is also true about solar farms. But in addition to the usual questions regarding any project, solar, like wind, has faced decades of objections based on rumors, bias, and propaganda and that is a subspecies of climate science denial. So it gets extra scrutiny.

By no means does every community oppose solar farms in their vicinity. Done right the benefits significantly outweigh any drawbacks, and those drawbacks are mild compared with CAFOs, which are approved with regularity.

However, generating power on a rural solar farm and transmitting most of it many miles away for urban or suburban use as the preferred method makes no sense when solar car parks can be established right in cities with hookups directly to the grid, or microgrids. Not only can putting solar canopies on parking lots everywhere generate prodigious amounts of electricity—we’re talking about more than a quarter of the current U.S. total from all sources—doing so can also provide shade to cars, EV charging stations with juice from those solar panels, and revenue for whoever owns the car park.

Solar car parks are now the law in France. By 2028, solar canopies must be installed on at least 50% of any car parking lot of more than 80 spaces or face fines. France hopes to see 11 gigawatts of solar capacity in this manner, which would expand the country’s total capacity from all sources by 8.3%.

The Biden administration’s plans for 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 were designed, among other things, to spur the building of 760-1,000 gigawatts of solar capacity. Right now, it appears we’re headed for a record-breaking 32 GW this year. At that rate it will take 25-30 years to hit a goal with a 10-year deadline. Part of the reason is local opposition to rural solar. What we need is a law like France’s.

You can see how having a law pays off. Disneyland Paris has the largest solar car park in Europe, 11,200 parking spaces, and every one of them under a solar canopy. The project cranks out 36 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually, enough for 17,400 households. At Disney World in Orlando, there are 32,000 parking spaces, not one of them covered by a canopy. This is so even though Disney World has a 270-acre solar farm some distance away.

Joshua M. Pearce specializes in solar photovoltaic technology and sustainable development at Western University in Canada. One target for solar car parks, he says, are shopping centers. He pointed out to Richard Conniff that if Walmart deployed 11.1 gigawatts of solar canopies over its 3,571 Supercenter car parks in the United States, this alone would provide more than 346,000 solar-powered EV charging stations. And provide as much generating capacity with just that as French officials hope to do throughout the whole country.

It’s not that solar car parks aren’t on anybody’s radar in the United States. In Denver, for instance, solar canopies were built with city money at a dozen schools. These generate most of the electricity these campuses consume. At my alma mater in Boulder, in 2009, the university installed its first solar car park, and it has installed two others since then with still more in the pipeline. The city of Santa Cruz built two solar car parks in 2012. Rutgers University recently built solar parking facilities at its Piscataway, N.J., campus, with an 8-megawatt capacity. There are scattered other examples at airports and campuses. But the uptake has been slow even though one study estimates that even solely with solar car parks being adopted at a relatively low level, the United States could generate nearly a third more electricity than it now does. This is not small potatoes.

The Inflation Reduction Act includes incentives as well as grants for such projects. These are obviously at risk from you know who. For now, however, substantial federal tax investment credits for solar projects are still available. They may survive the slash-and-burn attack President-elect Donald Trump has threatened because they are popular among elected Republicans in districts that have benefited from IRA funding. Or they may not survive. Just how far the new administration will go to eviscerate the Biden administration’s crowning legislative achievement is something about which we’ll just have to wait and see.

Whatever happens, passing a canopy law like unitary France’s clearly isn’t going to fly in America. Even Democrats winning a future national trifecta aren’t going to stomp into local government jurisdictions with a mandate like that. But this doesn’t mean solar car parks are out of the question. They offer far too many benefits, including a lessening of community conflicts by reducing the need for farmland and unique deserts as hosts of solar arrays. For at least the next four years, state and local governments need to do the heavy lifting when it comes to innovative climate-related policies. Solar canopies constitute a case where local government control over property taxes, zoning, and permitting can play positive roles. And it can also at least partially replace the federal tax credit should that get the ax.

For instance, the Maryland Energy Administration’s Solar Canopy and Dual Use Technology Grant Program offers grant to non-profits, businesses, and other entities to add solar canopies. Five years ago one of these grants enabled IKEA to install a 1.5-megawatt solar canopy with EV charging stations at its Baltimore store.

But these are just dribbles when we need a deluge of such projects. And the only way that is going to happen is with grassroots pressure. In that light look at two examples. Washington state now provides modest tax abatement to the builders of solar canopies on car parks. In California, however, even with a Democratic supermajority in office the legislature stripped similar language to Washington’s from a bill that authorized underutilized government land along highways be used for solar arrays. There needs to be some more arm-twisting in Sacramento. But, seriously, tax abatement is weak tea. California is the car state, for crying out loud. It ought to set an example as the car canopy state, too. A mandate with some sweeteners seems the right approach.

—Meteor Blades

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

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What Project 2025 Would Do to the Environment – and How We Will Respond. Earth Justice has studied proposed Project 2025 tactics, including undermining government staff charged with safeguarding health and environmental protections, and are prepared to defend the environment and communities from what comes next, no matter how long it takes.
Formaldehyde Cancer Risk in Your Neighborhood. Formaldehyde contributes more to outdoor cancer risk than any other toxic air pollutant in the U.S. Look up your address to see risks from the chemical on your block and where it comes from.

GREEN BRIEFS

Mass Deportation Could Majorly Affect U.S. Food Supply

Reporting on the impact of President-elect Donald Trump’s plans to deport millions of immigrants, Jennifer Bamberg at Investigate Midwest takes note of the impact this could have on farming. While many Americans may shrug off or even delight in seeing mass deportation, a Peterson Institute study found this could affect agricultural labor and lead to a 10% increase in food prices, which, based on polls and the recent election is something they wouldn’t respond to so casually.

Although undocumented workers are only 5% of the total U.S. labor force, according to the U.S. Census Bureau and and analysis from the Pew Research Center, those working in the nation’s food supply chain make up at least 16%. In Idaho, it’s estimated that 90% of dairy farmworkers were born outside the U.S.

“If we lost half of the farmworker population in a short period of time, the agriculture sector would likely collapse,” Mary Jo Dudley, the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, told Bamberg. “There are no available skilled workers to replace the current workforce should this policy be put into place.

—Meteor Blades

BLACK COMMUNITIES MAY BE HURT WORST BY TRUMP’S ENVIRONMENTAL ROLLBACK

Thanks to the never-ending impacts of long-banned real estate red-lining and other racist policies, Black communities in highly polluted areas could be headed for severe consequences because of President-elect Donald Trump’s anti-environmental and climate science-denying agenda.

Trump has threatened to demolish or at least wreck the Biden administration’s Justice40 initiative, which was designed to give priority to underserved communities when it comes to climate investments. As the incoming president made clear in his first term, he is determined to undermine pollution regulations, cut subsidies to renewable energy projects, expand America’s record-breaking oil and gas production, all of which disproportionately affect Black communities.

At Capital B, Adam Mahoney writes:

Joe Biden’s presidency had its climate-related missteps, but it also delivered historic wins that are slowly easing the burden of pollution and severe weather. Trump promises to reverse these victories, as his environmental agenda most aligns with the desires of fossil fuel companies. Big business’ calls for an increase in climate change-causing carbon pollution by billions of tons will have untold impacts on temperatures, storms, and the health of our soil, water, air, and bodies, climate justice advocates told Capital B.

But they’re ready to fight.

“We have known the hope of promises made, the joy of promises kept, and the bitterness of promises broken,” said Beverly Wright, the founder of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, one of the oldest Black environmental groups in the nation. “Our commitment is unwavering.”

—Meteor Blades

BLUESKY POST

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Failure of Busan talks exposes fossil fuel barrier to U.N. plastics pact by Matteo Civillini at Climate Home News. The Busan, South Korea, plastic negotiations failed earlier this week because a vocal minority of defiant, well-coordinated petrostates killed off the majority’s efforts to generate agreement to end plastic pollution. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in an October report, only through “stringent policies to curb production and demand,” combined with better waste management, could the world “nearly end plastic leakage to the environment by 2040.” Nearly all plastic is made using plant-heating fossil fuels and, as production is projected to double or triple in the next 25 years, that spells trouble for efforts to limit global warming and stem the flood of plastic waste clogging up the Earth’s oceans and littering its land. But a group of self-defined “Like-Minded” countries led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and Iran—which also includes most Arab states and quietly counts on support from India—don’t want to close the door on a key economic sector. In Busan, they pushed back strongly against any attempt to include provisions to cap plastic manufacturing in a legally binding U.N. pact.

agricvoltaics — Agrivoltaics makes dual use of farmland, generating electricity while simultaneously raising livestock and growing some shade-tolerant crops.

Small US State Launches Game-Changing Agrivoltaic Project by Tina Casey at Clean Technica. In New Jersey, where farmers are already squeezed for space, farms are also getting smaller. That trend is also consistent with the potential for agrivoltaic projects to maximize the use of space. The 2022 census showed that the amount of acres farmed in New Jersey fell in accord with national trends, but the number of farms rose by 115 to hit 9,998. In contrast, the number of farms in the U.S. fell by 7%. Agrivoltaic projects can also complement the state’s growing agritourism sector. Despite the interruption of the COVID-19 outbreak, farmer revenue from agritourism in New Jersey topped $29 million in 2022, up from $18 million in 2017. Against this backdrop, in October the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities announced the launch of the new Dual-Use Agrivoltaics Pilot Program. Billed as one of the first dual-use agrivoltaic programs in the country to be implemented on a statewide basis, the three-year program is aiming at a total of up to 200 megawatts over the next three years. That’s just for starters.

This Is What the World’s First All-EV Car Market Looks Like by Kari Lundgren at Bloomberg Green. In Norway, Toyota Motor Corp. is going from one electric-powered model to five to better compete with Tesla Inc., fuel stations are ripping out pumps to make space for chargers, and even nursing homes in the rural interior have switched to battery-powered cars despite months of arctic cold. All are signs of the dramatic shift that has put the Nordic country on the cusp of becoming the first market in the world to all but eliminate sales of new combustion-powered cars. “It’s cold here, there are mountains, long distances to drive,” Yngve Slyngstad, the former head of Norway’s $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund, said on the way to his electric car in downtown Oslo. “There are so many reasons EVs shouldn’t have been a success here, and yet we’ve done it.” It’s a transition that happened with remarkable speed. [...] Norway had advantages that helped propel the transition — not the least being its oil and gas wealth — as well as successive governments that were aligned on the need to reduce transport emissions. But its cold climate and low population density were hurdles.

Solar panels on the central office building of the Ocean Springs School District in Mississippi.

How cities can help COP30 succeed by Mark Watts at C40 Cities.Despite the underwhelming outcomes from COP in Baku, multilateralism remains the most critical tool we have for addressing climate breakdown. The Paris Agreement was a tremendous achievement, and, as we enter its 10th anniversary year, we must redouble our efforts to achieve its goals. Doing so will require fresh impetus and new thinking — something cities, regions and states are eager to provide. As Laurence Tubiana, one of the main architects of the Paris Agreement, recently argued: “effective multi-lateralism must include more than just nation states.”. That is necessary if future COPs are to “shift from negotiation to implementation,” as called for by the Club of Rome in an open letter to U.N. leaders. The fastest and most effective way to kick-start such a transformation would be to put city and other subnational leaders at the forefront of future climate talks. On the frontline of the climate crisis, mayors and other local leaders are accepting accountability, showing collaborative leadership and delivering tangible action — qualities that have been woefully missing from recent COP negotiations.

New England labor unions call for faster offshore wind buildout by Carrie Klein at Canary Media. A coalition of unions in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts calls for the states to raise their ambitions for offshore wind, expanding the current installation goal of 9 gigawatts to 30 GW by 2040 and 60 GW by 2050. The region has little space for solar farms or onshore wind turbines, but its productive winds and relatively shallow waters have made it an appealing target for offshore wind development. Unions see potential for the emerging industry to provide well-paying jobs that would attract and benefit their workers — and also help offshore wind succeed in the long term. “We looked at the way this industry was starting to develop and thought to ourselves: How can we work as a labor movement to make sure we’re making this an industry that is not only going to benefit the climate but benefit our members?” said Patrick Crowley, president of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which represents roughly 900,000 union members across the three states. Crowley and the AFL-CIO partnered with the Climate Jobs National Resource Center and unions in Massachusetts and Connecticut to put together the new report, which outlines how the industry can expand with organized labor at the forefront.

Massachusetts Cranberry Bog Hosts Community Solar Plant by Paige Bennett at Ecowatch. The Carver Solar project, owned by New York-based solar developer and operator Syncarpha Capital, sits on 28 acres leased by E.J. Pontiff Cranberries Inc. in an overall 765-acre plot otherwise used for cranberry bogs. According to to company, the community solar installation has a 7.1 megawatt-DC capacity, along with a 4 MW, 2-hour battery storage system. Electricity will be distributed to recipients by energy provider Eversource Energy via the state’s solar incentive program known as Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART). Around 350 low-income residents, as well as Tufts University and Milton Academy, will receive discounted solar energy credits through the project, which is expected to generate around 9,500 MWh of clean energy in its first year of operation.

RESEARCH, STUDIES & reports

ECOPINION

Rampant consumerism is bad for the planet. “Underconsumption core” offers an alternative by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist. In one of Julie George’s most popular TikTok videos from this past summer, she highlights some of the quality items she owns and cherishes — a few nice pieces of jewelry, a single pair of Ray-Bans, a nearly empty bottle of YSL perfume. It feels luxe and aspirational, like so many popular influencer videos do. But George’s video is not an attempt to get you to buy the items she shows off, or a celebration of the new. It’s an example of a different sort of trend that’s been sweeping social media — 2024’s new take on minimalism: “underconsumption core.” [...] Creators see it as a counter to the prevailing norm of excessive consumption increasingly driven by social media — a norm that contributes to a slew of environmental ills, from the (increasingly low-quality) raw materials used to churn out a steady stream of new products, to the emissions from shipping items around the globe, to the waste that clogs landfills (or ends up burning in deserts).

An artist’s conception shows the layout for the Natrium reactor demonstration project in Kemmerer, Wyoming. — An artist’s conception shows the proposed layout for the Natrium reactor demonstration project in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Congress wants to turn the nuclear regulator into the US industry’s cheerleader—again by Victor Gilinsky at The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Congress overwhelmingly approved the ADVANCE Act in July to accelerate licensing of “advanced” reactors. These consist mainly of fast reactors, which are radically differ from those operating today, and include “fusion machines.” There were no public hearings on the act, and it shows every sign of having been written by interested parties and with little vetting. The Energy Department and industry are promoting fast reactor demonstration projects, the prime being TerraPower’s Natrium project in Wyoming. The project broke ground in June but still awaits a full construction permit. No commercial reactors of this type are operating today. TerraPower foresees selling hundreds of such reactors for domestic use and export. The new law is largely directed at clearing the way for the rapid licensing of such reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It does so in part by providing additional resources but also—more ominously—by weakening the agency’s safety reviews and inspections in the name of efficiency. The act’s insidious approach is, first, to direct the NRC to modify its “mission statement” to add a provision that its licensing and safety reviews will “not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy to society.” The addition sounds innocuous: No one is going to defend unnecessary work. But the message is clear.

Octopus — What rights should a creature with ambiguous self-awareness, like an octopus, be granted? But what about hornets and cockroaches?

How should we treat beings that might be sentient? by Lindsey Laughlin at Ars Technica. If you aren’t yet worried about the multitude of ways you inadvertently inflict suffering onto other living creatures, you will be after reading The Edge of Sentience by Jonathan Birch. And for good reason. Birch, a professor of philosophy at the London College of Economics and Political Science, was one of a team of experts chosen by the U.K. government to establish the Animal Welfare Act (or Sentience Act) in 2022—a law that protects animals whose sentience status is unclear. According to Birch, even insects may possess sentience, which he defines as the capacity to have valenced experiences, or experiences that feel good or bad. At the very least, Birch explains, insects (as well as all vertebrates and a selection of invertebrates) are sentience candidates: animals that may be conscious and, until proven otherwise, should be regarded as such.

Could financial markets incorporate the value of nature? by Riki Fujii-Rajani and Alberto Rossi at Brookings. Environmental degradation arises from what economists refer to as the externality problem: The failure of individuals directly involved in a transaction to account for the indirect costs borne by society. An example of this would be a landowner cutting down a forest without considering its role in absorbing greenhouse gases. [...] Addressing externalities involves incorporating societal costs into the price of goods and services created in the economy. Ideally, we would estimate and price the carbon emitted during production, the loss of biodiversity caused by water pollution, the depletion of oxygen from deforestation, and so forth. The underlying idea is to value forests, lakes, and other natural resources not only for the goods they can be turned into but also for the value they provide to society when they remain in their original natural form. For instance, plants absorb the CO₂ in the atmosphere and release oxygen through photosynthesis. So, in principle, it is possible to calculate the price of CO₂ emissions by estimating the cost of planting trees to offset them. However, valuing other environmental externalities is more complex.