Chicago Plants the World’s Largest Urban Solar Farm
Chicago’s sprawling south side, once thrumming with steel mills and factories, is now covered by large swaths of weedy land strewn with the rubble of faded industries. But last year, a 40-acre patch not far from what was once home to the famous Pullman rail car factory sprouted a crop of 32,000 solar panels. The photovoltaic arrays move automatically to follow the sun, a glistening aberration in an otherwise drab and decrepit landscape. This is the country’s — and perhaps the world’s — largest "urban solar farm," and since December it has been generating up to 10 megawatts of clean electricity to help power a metropolis better known for its archaic dirty coal plants. Industry executives, environmentalists, and city officials — who don’t always find themselves on the same side of an issue — hope it will inspire other solar plants throughout polluted Rust Belt cities. Today Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and Exelon CEO John Rowe will lead an official unveiling of the plant. Daley has touted it as part of the city’s plan to take action on climate change and hailed it as a job creator in tough economic times. The Chicago plant hired a handful of permanent employees and about 200 union construction jobs, 44 percent of which were awarded to minorities. Large solar plants of 5 megawatts or more are common in Europe and the southwestern United States but usually aren’t built in highly populated areas. Denis Lenardic, the Slovenia-based editor of widely respected annual reports on the solar industry, said the Chicago project is likely the largest of its kind in the world. Advocates hope the Chicago project shows that solar plants don’t have to be massive and remote — they can be built on abandoned industrial sites or unused land owned by water treatment plants. Putting solar plants close to transmission lines and power users is highly efficient and improves the availability of power for local users in case of downed lines or other problems on the grid. Though not as sunny as the American southwest, the Chicago area’s solar resources are roughly equivalent to or even better than those of Germany and Spain, the world leaders in solar generation. The swiveling panels at the Chicago plant, built by SunPower Corp. and billed as "the most powerful on the planet," generate 30 percent more energy than typical fixed-base panels. The Chicago plant’s maximum capacity of 10 megawatts isn’t much in the larger scheme of things — enough for just 1,500 homes in a city of three million. And during the winter, generation is usually below capacity. But proponents would like to see a host of similar solar farms peppering pockets of empty land in metropolitan areas, providing 5 megawatts here, 10 megawatts there, adding up to a significant energy output. SunPower vice president of public policy Julie Blunden describes them as potential "urban infill." Neighbors of the south side plant say they are thrilled with the investment and symbol of green energy in their back yard. "You hear so much about NIMBYism, here we actually got YIMBYism. We were very welcomed by the community," Blunden said. "We came in and provided clean energy and some jobs, using local labor and local steel." As clean energy has become more desirable and cost-competitive, solar panels have sprouted on the rooftops of houses, government buildings, and big box stores in major cities. This type of solar power is called "distributed generation," with panels providing electricity for a given building or complex and often sending energy back to the grid if the panels generate more than the building uses. Solar plants, by contrast, generate electricity that goes directly to the grid and is sold by a local utility. In northern Illinois, the electricity from Exelon plants is distributed by ComEd. Illinois previously got just 3.3 megawatts of electricity from solar, meaning the Exelon project increased state solar capacity four-fold. Solar generation is driven in part by state renewable energy portfolio standards. Illinois’s standard mandates that 25 percent of the state’s electricity must be generated from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2025. Six percent of that must come from solar by 2015. That would mean about 750 megawatts of solar power, or more than 70 plants like the south side one in the next five years. The Illinois Power Agency, a government body, is responsible for buying power from different generation companies to make sure that the state complies with the RPS. But larger-scale projects like the one on Chicago’s south side will only become commonplace if they end up being cost-effective, experts say. Exelon was counting on three types of government incentives to make the Chicago solar plant viable. A federal loan guarantee fell through, but company officials say they are still committed to the plant as an experimental "demonstration project." Whether they would build more in the future remains to be seen. "The economics are such that we need the federal incentives," said Exelon senior vice president Tom O‘Neill. "Without these incentives, the cost structure exceeds the revenue." Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Midwest program, said it’s only logical that the government back clean energy. Coal-fired power plants might seem cheaper, but actually, fossil fuels such as coal come with all kinds of hidden costs in the form of air pollution, human health problems, and global warming, he said. Henderson appreciates the symbolism of cutting- edge energy generation on the city’s now-ragged far south side, which once produced luxury rail cars for the nation. "Pullman was very innovative in its time," he said. "This is a way of doing something innovative now within a place that drove the transformation of our transportation system in the 19th century. How do we take that legacy and turn it into a point of productivity again? It’s recycling at the most important scale."
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Chicago Plants the World’s Largest Urban Solar Farm
Sunny Claim on Solar Power Checks Out
Part of an occasional series. Read more >> The Claim "The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar." –Bernie Sanders, Senator, I-Vt. ( source ) The Context The independent senator from Vermont recently introduced clean energy legislation (pdf) with the goal of putting 10 million new solar electricity systems and 200,000 new solar water heating systems on American rooftops within 10 years. Despite what critics say, he doesn’t think any state is too cloudy to benefit. The Evidence Utilizing rooftop photovoltaics alone, 10 percent of every state’s electricity sales (using 2007 numbers) could be met, according to studies from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Energy Self Reliant States report (pdf) published by the New Rules Project nicely synthesizes data from a study produced by (pdf) the National Renewable Energy Laboratory , which evaluates the current technical potential of rooftop photovoltaics. Besides telling us that one-tenth of each state’s energy needs could come from rooftop solar, this report shows that 15 states could, right now, produce more than 25 percent of their electricity demand with the basic available photovoltaic technology. Experts caution that we still need to develop other renewable technologies to meet America’s energy needs (including wind, geothermal and concentrated solar power), but rooftop solar systems could play a significant role in reducing the need for carbon-based fuels to produce electricity. A map on Page 10 of the Energy Self Reliant States report (Page 15 in the pdf) shows that Sanders’ confidence in the solar capabilities of each state is well founded. The Verdict The facts back up Bernie’s sunny claim.
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Sunny Claim on Solar Power Checks Out
This Is How We Will Live in 2029
With this issue, OnEarth is launching an occasional series that will examine what our world will look like in, say, the year 2029. And we begin with our cover story, "Selling the Sun," by Michael Behar . The topic of solar energy may seem a bit ho-hum. If solar is so great, so promising - as we’ve been told all these years - why hasn’t it really caught on? Why aren’t there solar panels on every roof in America? The sun is free, right? Behar found some intriguing answers lodged inside the brain of Jigar Shah . Shah is not a scientist. He’s a businessman, an entrepreneur - and a visionary. He understood that a fundamental obstacle to the widespread adoption of solar energy was not primarily technological (although there are still significant hurdles here), but economic. The key is to remove the financial roadblocks: his customers don’t have to buy expensive equipment that can take years to budget and pay off, that require endless hassles to obtain and maintain. No, the company he founded, SunEdison, takes care of all that. His customers simply sign on the dotted line, stand back as panels are installed, and then pay their (solar) electric bills like every other Tom, Dick, or Harriet. Suddenly, solar becomes affordable - and competitive with conventional forms of energy. This groundbreaking business model, along with falling prices for raw materials and, inevitably, federal limits on fossil-fuel carbon emissions, convinces Shah and others that we are finally seeing the true beginning of the solar era. Contributing editor Craig Canine has also seen the future. Although, to be honest, in Europe and Asia that future already exists: it’s called high-speed rail. But in the United States, it has yet to arrive - until right around now, give or take a couple of decades. It’s a matter of simple necessity. If we are to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to preserve a livable planet, we will have to travel fewer miles in cars and planes. We will have to take trains - sleek, fast, luxurious, quiet, efficient, punctual, electric-powered machines that will transform our hoary concepts of rail travel. What we eat could soon be revolutionized too. Richard Manning examines one particularly controversial and difficult item in our diet: beef. Let’s face it - the razing of our lands to produce vast amounts of corn for cattle feedlots and our polluting, fuel-intensive farming methods, all orchestrated to produce a juicy steak or a medium-rare burger, are clearly unsustainable. Most Americans are not going to stop eating beef. But Manning shows us that we can have the beef without the environmental havoc. Natural, grass-fed beef can break into the mass market for exactly the same reason solar energy can: it has become profitable for those who produce it. More profitable, in fact, than the cruel and destructive practices of the past. OnEarth will continue to explore the ways our world will soon change. If all of us make the right choices, we’ll be able to say: you know, 2029 was a pretty damned good year. And you will have heard it here first.
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This Is How We Will Live in 2029