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Good morning and happy Friday,
This week, the Fed juiced hopes for increased investment in renewables with a jumbo rate cut; but as industry participants fret about the impact of the election on the IRA, Speaker Mike Johnson has signaled he’s open to keeping
some green energy tax credits, and indeed many in his party support clean energy incentives, but House Republicans are split on the issue.
In other news, energy think tank Ember forecasts the world is on track to add 593 GW of solar power in 2024, nearly 30% more than last year’s installations; here in the U.S. generation is projected to rise 3% this year, driven by solar and natural gas. That’s great, but it may not be enough – ICF projects a 9% surge in U.S. electricity demand by 2028, which could increase electricity costs by almost 20%.
New data shows the U.S. utility solar market has grown 34% since Q2 2023, while the latest National Solar Jobs Census finds, among other things, that union workers in the solar industry increased 3% from 2022 to 2023.
And former veep Al Gore’s green asset management business released its eighth annual Sustainability Trends Report this week. It says modernizing the power grid is “the critical issue to get the energy transition moving faster in the big, developed economies.”
Read on for more.
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Yes, and.
An article in Heatmap this week looks at the expansion of renewables in rural areas with a particular focus on opposition to solar projects sited on agricultural land, a view that is prevalent despite the fact that studies show the total amount of land impacted would be quite small. Here are some soundbites:
While SEIA’s recent survey found that 70% of farmers are “open to large-scale solar,” the article notes that concern about loss of farmland is a driver of local opposition, and that “many large farm owners are just plain hostile to land use changes that could...impact their ability to grow more crops.”
One of Heatmap’s interesting findings is that “agricultural employment can be a useful predictor of whether a community will oppose the deployment of renewables.” The author surmises this is “likely because the kind of agriculture requiring expensive machinery, costly chemicals, and physical and financial infrastructure…indicates that farming is the economic cornerstone of that entire community.”
- Savion’s Oak Run solar project in Ohio is highlighted as “ground zero” for the future of renewables. The project, which could be as large as 800 MW, will have crops in between the arrays, “making it the nation’s largest agrivoltaics site if completed.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Not either-or. The fact is that renewable energy and farming are more than just compatible – they’re mutually beneficial for a host of reasons, ranging from improving the economics of family farms so they can stay in business, to enhancing soil health and boosting crop yields on adjacent land. As the director of the Solar Energy Technologies Office said, “agrivoltaics offer ‘a really exciting strategy because it doesn’t make this an either-or. It’s a yes, and.’”
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Public Lands & Solar Power
At the end of August, the BLM released a proposed update to its Western Solar Plan. Although the update was developed “with substantial public input” and has received support from environmental NGOs such as The Wilderness Society and The Nature Conservancy, some stakeholders in Utah have concerns. Here are some points to ponder:
The proposed plan makes more than 31 million acres of public lands across 11 western states available for solar development and encourages focus on previously disturbed lands while avoiding protected areas, sensitive cultural resources and important wildlife habitat.
The Utah Office of Energy Development is worried that solar development could compete with – and displace – geothermal energy, but the BLM says it “recognizes the potential overlap between solar and geothermal resources in Utah.”
- Another concern, raised by the Center for Biological Diversity, is that placing solar farms near the shoreline of the Great Salt Lake could “endanger the 12 million birds that rely on the saline lake and its wetlands” if they “confuse shiny solar panels for bodies of water when flying over the desert” due to the “lake effect.”
⚡️ The Takeaway
Still under review. The current proposal seeks to facilitate the Biden Administration’s goal of achieving a 100% clean electricity grid by 2035. The BLM expects that the plan will lead to “about 700,000 acres across the 11 states being developed for solar energy.” A representative of the Bureau notes that “the plan is currently being reviewed by affected governors, including Utah Gov. Spencer Cox,” which “offers an additional opportunity for Utah to provide input before the final plan is approved.”
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Suck It Up
Creating low-carbon fuel isn’t novel, nor is the notion of removing carbon from the atmosphere through sequestration. But the idea of sucking carbon out of the air to use as fuel is a new one for us – here’s what we learned:
The fuel in question is for aircraft – sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF for short. A recent article describes how one firm, Air Company, is seeking to “captur(e) carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and combining the CO2 with hydrogen to create paraffins – colorless, oily liquids that it says can be dropped into conventional jet engines.”
The NYC-based startup announced this week that it raised $69 million in funding, money it will use to build commercial production facilities to expand production of its SAF.
Interestingly, Air Company first got into the “spirit” of things making vodka from captured carbon dioxide. Many martinis later, one assumes, it “tweaked its technology to produce another coveted, crystal-clear liquid: sustainable aviation fuel.”
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It’s still early days on the SAF front. As the article notes, “In 2023, 24.5 million gallons of SAF were used to fuel U.S. flights. That’s a fraction of the roughly 69 million gallons of fossil jet fuel the country burns every day.”
It’s a goal well-worth pursuing, however: “Jet fuel combustion is responsible for 2 percent of global CO2 emissions linked to energy use.” And, it’s important to find ways to produce SAF that don’t involve biofuels, says WRI, otherwise ’sustainable’ aviation fuel could become anything but.
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