
Only exceeded by China, the U.S. is the world’s largest producer of greenhouse gases, with the largest source of emissions coming from electricity generation. America is changing its course and the U.S. solar energy industry is leading the way on this new road; a path to a clean energy future.
Yesterday, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the Clean Power Plan, which sets the first ever federal limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants. This is a historic step in America’s clean energy future and a strong show of confidence in the capability of the country’s newest energy vehicles: renewables.
This strong action on climate change, however, is not a “leap of faith” for the solar industry. Solar energy is no longer a niche technology or a futuristic energy source. Thanks to improved technology and cascading prices, solar is already powering American homes and businesses today.
Communities, homeowners, businesses and utilities have made solar one of America’s fastest-growing energy sources with more than 20 gigawatts of total installed capacity. Smart policies like the Clean Power Plan will help the country to continue replacing its aging and dirty energy engine with even more 21st Century technologies.
To ensure solar’s full potential was realized in the policy, SEIA spent the past several years meeting with the White House and EPA officials to educate them about the current state of the solar market and the solar industry’s growth potential. Additionally, SEIA submitted robust comments, providing the EPA with the most up-to-date solar cost and deployment data for all market segments.
In just the first three months of 2015, residential solar system installations showed tremendous growth—the best quarter for the segment ever. The top U.S. commercial solar users also have more than 569 megawatts of solar power at 1,110 different facilities.
As solar prices continue to fall, more and more Americans are turning to solar to cut costs and avoid carbon emissions. Solar in the utility-scale pipeline has also reached unprecedented levels, with the segment totaling 63 percent of all solar capacity in 2014.
As part of a balanced energy portfolio, energy providers are using solar to improve grid reliability and provide significant relief to existing energy infrastructure by reducing transmission losses and relieving grid congestion. The speed of solar deployment, along with the modularity of solar, is also helping energy providers meet incremental generation needs. For instance, concentrating solar power (CSP) plants, combined with thermal energy storage, can produce electricity when needed, long after the sun goes down.
By the end of 2016, there will be enough solar energy in the U.S. to power 8 million homes, offsetting nearly 45 million metric tons of carbon emissions. At this pace, a whopping 50,000 more megawatts of solar power is projected to come on-line before 2020.
The Clean Power Plan will only make solar’s growth more rapid, as all 50 states seek clean, affordable, reliable and carbon-free solutions under the plan’s emissions targets.
The solar industry is confident that there is potential for more of America’s power grid to fuel up with more solar. SEIA spoke, and the EPA clearly listened. Thanks to efforts of SEIA and its member companies, the Clean Power Plan includes:
- carbon reduction goals for states that are 9 percent tougher than originally proposed;
- all solar technologies as compliance options for states;
- 30 percent more renewables as compliance options than originally proposed;
- a renewable energy incentive program that will spur early investment in solar energy; and
- more flexibility to help states implement solar energy policies to meet their emissions goals.
Solar energy is available within every geographic region of the U.S., making it the most sensible compliance option under the Clean Power Plan. In fact, the industry is already seeing a broad spectrum of adopters across the country, with 25 states installing more than 10 megawatts and 20 states installing more than 100 megawatts of solar capacity just last year.
States that choose to go solar are not only standing up to the challenge of curbing carbon emissions while keeping pace with America’s growing energy demand, but they are also choosing to invest in job growth.
The solar industry has added 100,000 new jobs in the last decade. Today, the U.S. solar industry employs nearly 174,000 Americans—more than tech giants Apple, Google, Facebook and Twitter combined—and pumps nearly $18 billion a year into the economy.
The Clean Power Plan presents a tremendous opportunity for renewable energy development, and solar is poised to be the No. 1 solution as America cleans up its power grid.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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