
Solar power is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the country, and now mom and pop shops can take part in the boom.
Solar panels are usually seen on the roofs of residential buildings, schools, large companies or government institutions, but now, SolarCity is expanding its services to small and medium-sized businesses, or SMBs, the company announced. This move essentially allows local businesses to cut ties to their utility and save money against rising electricity costs with renewable energy.
SolarCity is first offering this service to SMBs in California with plans to expand to the east coast and other territories early next year. The company said it will initially design solar energy system sizes between 30 - 500 kilowatts of generation capacity for SMBs with approximately 5,000–50,000 square feet of available flat roof space.
With more than 28 million small and medium-sized businesses in the country—or 99 percent of American businesses—it's a move that's tapping into a very large and potentially profitable market that's worth at least $10 billion a year, according to U.S. News.
However, very few local businesses have been able to harness the sun's energy affordably.
Why? As SolarCity pointed out in a statement, "Solar projects for small and medium sized businesses have traditionally been very difficult to finance because SMBs do not have the formal investment grade credit ratings of large corporations, and also have no commercial equivalent to the FICO scores that are often the basis of consumer financing."
SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive also told Fortune, “The truth is that small and medium businesses have been neglected by the solar industry over the past five years.”
To solve this problem, SolarCity will finance the upfront cost of panels to SMBs like it would under a traditional solar lease or power purchase agreement. These solar contracts are usually cheaper (and much cleaner) than the electricity produced by the local utility.
SolarCity is also utilizing the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program, which allows business to pay the solar payment on its property tax bill. PACE, a popular program which exists in about a dozen states, provides building owners the financing for upgrades on energy efficiency, renewable energy (like solar panels) and water conservation. The Golden State recently allowed businesses to use the PACE program through the state's CaliforniaFIRST initiative.
SolarCity, the largest solar installer in the country, will also tap into its vast network of local installers to fit panels onto SMB's roofs instead of going through a more expensive third party, which will cut costs even further.
The solar company also boasts that its lightweight solar panel mounting system can "fit 20 to 50 percent more solar panels on each roof surface" and allows workers to install panels significantly faster.
Overall, SMBs will pay 5 to 25 percent less for solar than for power from their local utility under SolarCity's new service, the company claims.
"When you fly into any airport, you see these industrial areas—what are small warehouses with small businesses in them—and there’s no solar," Rive told U.S. News. “We now have a solution that makes it cost-effective."
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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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Noreen Nunez lives in a middle-class neighborhood that rises up a hillside in Trinidad's Tunapuna-Piarco region.