Baltimore – From laundromats and baseball stadiums, to homes and cars, solar energy is already enhancing energy security and reducing pollution in America. A new Environment Maryland report outlines a vision for using the sun to meet 10 percent of the United States' total energy needs by 2030.
"The sun provides more energy in an hour than all the coal and oil being burned in power plants do in a year," said Shea Kinser, Clean Energy Associate with Environment Maryland. "This solar energy is limitless and pollution free. Solar power is also increasingly cost competitive with these older, dirtier sources of energy."
Building a Solar Future: Repowering America's Homes, Businesses and Industry with Solar Energy examines a wide variety of solar technologies and tools, including photovoltaics, concentrating solar power, solar water heaters, solar space heating, and passive solar design.
Masonville Cove Environmental Education Center in southeast Baltimore installed solar panels on the roof of one of their classroom buildings. Michael Sakowski, a board member of the Baybrook Coalition, noted that Center "…uses solar energy to directly heat its water, which then allows the approximately 4 kilowatts of peak energy that is generated by its solar panels to occasionally meet the entire energy needs of the building, thus resulting in a surplus of energy, which can be fed back into the grid."
The report finds that by achieving a 10 percent goal for solar energy, within two decades the sun could provide more energy than the U.S. currently produces at nuclear power plants, more than half as much energy as the U.S. currently consumes in American cars and light trucks, or nearly half as much energy as we currently obtain from burning coal. Solar energy can play a major role in weaning the nation from dangerous, polluting, unstable and, in many cases, increasingly expensive forms of energy.
The report also profiles various applications of solar energy currently in use across the country, such as:
• Walmart's use of skylights in some of its big box stores has cut energy costs by 15 to 20 percent by reducing the need for electric lighting.
• Laundry facilities, hotels, hospitals and even baseball's Boston Red Sox have adopted solar water heating to reduce their consumption of natural gas for water heating.
• A Frito-Lay plant in California uses solar concentrators to provide heat for cooking snack foods.
• Solar energy can be paired with advanced energy efficiency techniques to create zero net energy homes, which produce as much energy as they consume. Zero net energy homes have already been built in parts of the country, are possible in all climates, and often save money for consumers over time.
• As more plug in electric cars and trucks enter the marketplace, solar energy will power our nation's transportation system as well.
Mike Hartley, Clean Energy Programs director at the Maryland Energy Administration, spoke about Maryland's use of solar energy. "The Maryland Energy Administration recognizes the numerous benefits of solar energy systems and is pleased to be able to offer grant programs for residential, commercial, and public facilities to install solar photovoltaic and solar water heating systems. Furthermore, the O'Malley Administration's solar renewable portfolio standard bill as well as other legislation currently before the General Assembly heeds the findings of this report by providing more incentives for Marylanders to reap the benefits of solar energy and additional green collar jobs," he said.
Environment Maryland called on the Maryland General Assembly to act on several pieces of legislation being considered this session that would help the state increase its use of solar power. First, several bills to improve Maryland's net-metering statute would make sure that homeowners or businesses that produced excess energy with a solar power system would get monetary credit for that energy, incentivizing the decision to go solar. Second, legislation to enable municipalities to make loans to citizens for clean energy and efficiency projects would help make these projects, like solar installation, more affordable for more of Maryland's citizens. Finally, legislation to ramp up the implementation of the state's solar carve-out in its renewable portfolio standard would require utilities to buy more solar energy sooner in order to maintain demand for solar power and meet the goal of 2% of Maryland's energy coming from solar power by 2022.
Building-a-Solar-Future-vMDE.pdf