Community Solar in Maryland
A cross-agency Idea?
Community Solar in Maryland
Download the community solar proposal sharing state highway and utility rights-of-way where practical?
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Maryland Community Solar was signed into law in the form of HB1087 and SB398 to provide a preliminary pilot program to explore the viability of community solar to let shaded home owners still invest in solar power. But the problem is now, and will be more so in the future, as to where to put these solar gardens? With the explosive growth of solar installations, all rooftops with sun exposure will eventually have solar panels for the owner/occupants, and so fewer and fewer existing structures will be available for community solar. So the question becomes, where to put community solar?
Where to put them? Since the State of Maryland is taking a progressive approach to clean energy, a good starting point might be existing state lands. And there comes to mind, all the small bits and pieces of otherwise unusable footage in some of the state highway and utility rights-of-way. The above interchange at the intersection of Route 100 and Route 103 is a good example. There are over 5000 miles of state highways in Maryland and in all that acreage, there are surely some potential sites for small solar gardens that can be used with multiple mutual benefits. Dave Brosch of EarthSky Community Solar suggests an ever greater potential exists in the nearly 2000 linear miles of utility rights of way as shown at right. These swaths are 150 to 250' wide and are IDEAL for community solar investment! Even if only 10% of that was used, it would be over 1GW of capacity, suitable for almost 1 million homes to buy into community solar. The benefits to everyone are legion!
The Benefits are Legion:
Impediments: Typical bureaucratic impediments... "We can't do that..." "You cannot put anything in the rights-of-way...", "Its dangerous... What if the power lines fall?...".
Counter Arguments: "Why not?", "Why Not?", and "Have you challenged your engineers to solve that problem?" Our Engineers got us to the moon 45 years ago! Challenge the Engineers, they can always find a solution. Then, decide on the practicality.
Cross Agency and Discipline Initiative: This outside-the-box initiative would require a think-positive approach and significant cross agency participation between the State Highway Administration(SHA), the Maryland Department of the Environment(MDE), the Maryland Energy Administration(MEA) and the Public Service Commission(PSC) and State Attorney's office among others. But the starting point would be at SHA where planners can readily identify potential sites among those many thousands of miles of state rights-of-way.
Making solar gardens work: Presumably, the state could make these sites available, and contractors could bid on construction. Consumers in the state would invest in the projects and receive a monthly credit on their power bills. Each individual's investment does not need virtual net meteriing since a single meter at each site would report overall energy produced and that is distributed proportionally to consumer participants via the utility. Consumers could sell out at any time if they moved or had to change service providers.
Solar Energy is now very cost effective with installation costs even lower than coal or gas. The growth in solar is off the charts. The 2010 chart here shows the 12:1 drop in panel prices over the last decades and 3:1 drop in just the last few years. Solar panels are now less than 75 cents a watt!. The world exponential growth in production of solar PV panels now is so high, I had to scale down the chart by 25-to-1 just to fit in the 2015 global production as shown here. The utilities are doing it big time. See the Utility scale Solar map (which does not even include home solar)) and also the utility scale wind map but cannot be done at home.
Home Solar Constraints: Home solar is a fantastic deal, but only 66% of Marylanders are in single family detached homes and only 17% of those have good sun without shade, leaving less than 11% that can take advantage of solar without access to Community Solar. This image of a community in Severna Park is from the solar piers page that shows how most homes have too much shade to be practical. In their case, some can add solar panels on piers to drastically increase solar production in the vast waterfronts of Maryland shoreline property owners. A similar 100% increase is possible if we let Community Solar work for EVERYONE.
There are many other constraints on Maryland Residents such as those in apartments or condos or simply their roof is too small. The typical house roof usually cannot provide all of the squarefootage to meet all of the home's energy requirments. So not only those homes with shade, but many with insufficent roof area will be looking to invest in Community Solar... and this will required land!
Environmental Benefits of Solar:
The benefits to Maryland of this kind of Community Solar Initiative is not just the creation of jobs in the solar energy sector and allowing more homes to go solar, but the environmental benefits are legion as shown below.
Carbon and Particulate reduction:
The above two images show the pollution-elimination impact of just one solar home project. Each
3'x 5' panel eliminates about the same amount of pollutants in a year as about 8 mature
trees remove in a year. This means a 42 panel array is equivalent to
the environmental benefits of about 300 trees compared to coal.
But even more telling is to look at not just the pollution impact of coal electricity,
but also the sheer magnitude of environmental distruction.
...
Unseen Impact of Coal Electricity: In the image to the far right are 4 tons of coal which is about the energy equivalent of the 10 MHhrs of energy our house requires per year. Not only do we energy-consuming-&-wasteful Americans not see this tonnage, we also do not see the 80 tons of trees, topsoil, habitat and dirt that has to be pushed off a mountain top in West Virginia and into the nearby valleys and streams just to get to that coal. This 80 tons of decimation of the environment PER YEAR for my one house is shown in the near image to the right which shows four 20 ton freight cars needed to move that debris. The next image below right is just one of the hundreds of mountains and habitat in West Virginia being destroyed for our coal energy addiction... Folks, this approach to our environment IS NOT SUSTAINABLE!
Moving Forward:
The time is now to go solar! and not just those with hot summy roofs, but all of Marylander's willing to invest in their future. We cannot continue to send billions of dollars a day overseas to buy polluting oil for our energy needs when it is right there outside our door. Also think in terms of our total energy footprint and consider how this solar-roads initiative can serve as a leading example to our electrification of transportation in our future. EV's are the perfect marriage with clenan renewable solar energy. Please see all of the EV Misinformation that abounds on this topic.
Bob Bruninga, PE
lastname at usna dot edu
Boots on the ground!
If you find other locations within the right-of-way fence, then send them in and we will post them here. Yes, there may have to be a few trees cut down, but remember the two images above where EACH solar panel eliminates the same CO2 and particulates as EIGHT mature trees. In every respect, in this application, the solar panels are a net gain towards our future.
Preparation: Although I like to manipulate the 3D views I get from GoogleEarth and then bring into PAINT to add notes as shown above, you can also simply save your URL from maps.google.com and send it to me an I will post it like these below: