Friday, March 20, 2015

Urban Solar for California



Grist has a report about a new Stanford University study on the potential for putting "utility-scale solar development" into already-developed areas, even urban areas, rather than in open countryside. The advantage, environmentally, is that we wouldn't be sacrificing our wild areas in order to develop our solar capacity.

I can't access the study itself, published in Nature Climate Change. But Grist's summary contains one great number: according to the study, the solar capacity that we could potentially install in our developed areas would produce 20,000 terawatt-hours of power, which is more than three times California's electrical demand. How cool is that?

That extra capacity is particularly exciting for people, like me, who still dream of bringing manufacturing back to California.

Photo: Gabriel Millos, Creative Commons 2.0 BY-SA