Gov. Baker helps open Bristol Community College’s 3.2 MW solar array covering 800 parking spaces over 5 acres
Here’s an extremely common, and extremely dumb, attack against solar power, repeated in a local op-ed in today’s New Bedford Standard Times:
As of today, there are more than 4,297 MW of power generation which either has come off line or will be retired by 2017. In order to replace this with solar, for example, approximately 21,485 acres of space will be needed.
Your response is supposed to be whoa that is a YUUUUUGE</Trump voice> area!! Except Massachusetts is over 5 million acres. The area listed here for solar would be just 0.4% of available land. We’re talking about 33 square miles, smaller than the area of the town of Rochester (population 5,232). You’re telling me we don’t have that much available just in roadsides & medians, empty fields, capped landfills & contaminated land? C’mon.
But what makes this argument so transcendently dumb is that solar panels don’t even need new space. We put plenty of solar panels on already-used land, like rooftops & parking lots.
America has over 10,000 square miles of rooftops, most sitting completely unused & prime real estate for solar. I can’t find a number for Massachusetts, but New York City alone has an estimated 40 square miles of rooftops.
If you don’t like solar power because you profit from polluting energy, or because your political party has aligned itself with polluters & therefore you must attack it because the other team likes it, fine. Say that! But absurdly stupid arguments about available land make us all dumber.
The Massachusetts legislature skipped town for the holidays without lifting our solar cap. Please take a moment to tell our legislators that in 2016, we need a strong new state commitment to clean energy.
Maybe with the occasional exception where it just isn’t feasible, but we should be at the point where installing solar panels on the roofs of new buildings whether residential, commercial, or public is just as obvious and routine as hooking them up to the nearest utility pole is now. Building codes should require this; energy companies should get in on the ground floor and make a killing; tax incentives and subsidies should heavily favor those property owners who switch and those businesses who sell this energy.
Yes but.
First, yes but except in cases where it’s nonsensical. Roof faces the wrong way. Roof is shaded by large trees, neighboring building, etc. Roof isn’t suitable due to material choice (e.g. slate). There may be other reasonable exceptions.
Second, yes but what about going halfway? PV is expensive. Relative to the price of a home in a leafy Boston suburb it isn’t, but there are plenty of sub-$200,000 homes in MA. A full PV installation is tens of thousands of dollars. It’s too big a hurdle for some. A step in the right direction is to amend the building code so that, except in conditions listed above, roofs have to be built solar ready. That means they can structurally support the PV and rack, that there is a chase for the wiring to head into the building, that the blueprints make all of this clear, etc. I authored a resolution to do exactly this for Town-owned buildings in my Town. No, every time we build new or substantially renovate a roof, it’s made PV ready unless there’s a great reason to make an exception. This way, even if PV isn’t the right choice at the time of the roof work, it’s much easier to install it a few years later at a lower total cost.
So, yes!, with nuances, and perhaps get started by going halfway.
…but I would hope that we try to avoid circumstances that trigger exceptions. After all, you would never say it’s just not feasible to hook an establishment to the wires. You’d make sure it was feasible.
What is PV? Maybe it should be subsidized or something, but hopefully it can be a wash costwise compared to standard electric hookup.
There are two kinds of residential solar energy technologies: “Solar Thermal” (collectors that use solar energy to warm a heat transfer fluid, then extract the added heat for domestic hot water and space heating), and “Solar PV” – (collectors that use large arrays of photo-voltaic cells to directly convert solar energy to electricity).
Solar Thermal is far less expensive than PV, but has more limited utility in New England. Energy storage is more difficult for solar thermal, and there is no infrastructure comparable to the electric grid for supplying excess energy harvested by one residence to a different consumer. Excess electricity can be stored in a battery; there are only very limited analogous stores for excess thermal energy.
Even in New England, solar thermal is often a cost-competitive alternative for domestic hot water. It can supplement conventional space heating, by using even the limited solar energy available during the day to pre-heat thermal transfer fluid that is then brought to the required temperature by a conventional hot-water boiler.
The approaches proposed by stomv (and apparently implemented in Brookline) go a long way towards enabling solar thermal installations as well as solar PV (Solar Thermal requires pipe, rather than cable, chases).
Both Solar Thermal and Solar-PV should be part of any sustainable energy plan.
Baker administration pumps $30 million into solar panel installations: http://www.betaboston.com/news/2015/12/17/baker-administration-pumps-30-million-into-solar-panel-installations/
Note this is part of existing state law, not a proactive move from Baker.
Because I’ve had to deal with days of lost connection to the grid I’ve made a few adjustments which are easy to copy. You can take some small solar garden lights, charge them during the day and use them at night. I retrofitted lamps with clips and you can put the lights in there and unless you look under the lampshade you wouldn’t know it. Solar for < $10.
Solar phone charger: http://amzn.to/1YvUhgG
Doesn’t work as well in the winter, but it also serves as an external charger, so if you run to the coffee shop to charge your devices, you can charge this up to save yourself a 2nd trip. Also works for camping trips, etc.