Strategizing Solar Sheds

In 2004 I organized a workshop named “Mapping NY Resources” funded by a small grant I procured from the Crop and Soil Sciences Department at Cornell.  The idea of the workshop was to get some of the most interesting minds in NY who thought about different natural resources to convene a kind of collaborative mapping sensibility.  Expanding on the idea of watershed protection for water use, the goal was to begin to layer different resource maps (cropland, forestland, sunlight, wind, water) to begin integrating what I called “Energy Sheds” to meet the energy demands (heat, electricity, food, transportation) of the distributed population.  One of the speakers was Richard Perez from the University of Albany.  He talked about solar maps – maps that indicate historical sunlight patterns across regions to estimate solar capture potential.

But then what Richard pointed out, was a relationship of solar potential to peak energy loads.  Notably, that peak energy load in upstate NY occurs in the winter when there are less daylight hours, lower intensity, and snow covering panels.  In contrast, the peak energy load in New York City occurs in the summer, when the light is longest and strongest.  Therefore, it would behoove State policy makers to advocate for solar panel installation in NYC.  Solar panels in NYC provide the best simple return-on-investment and also support the complex infrastructure required to meet our very expensive peak load.

Everyone talks about how expensive solar is.  And yet, people may choose a more expensive car for aesthetic reasons.  Solar may not be the most cost-effective way to get your energy but that is because there is no discussion about the ethics of energy. Solar has so many aesthetic and ethical benefits.  Namely, it is capturing today’s sunlight, Today!  Fossil fuels are a trust fund of solar energy that took millions of years of biological photosynthesis to accumulate.  Unless we change our pattern of behavior, we will blow that massive trust fund in 300 years.  Yes, in history, we are the Energy Generation with little regard for future generations, say nothing of the environmental impact our fossil-blow-out-party is causing.  No matter how ‘inefficient’ one might label a solar panel, it has a lot of intrinsic benefits.  Maybe the best panels only capture 20% of the solar energy that hits them, but that is 20% more than we had before, which is also that same quantity of reduction of non-renewable fossil energy demand.

Solar panels distributed across our neighborhoods shore up the electric grid in a number of ways.  First, they provide energy during the day when most energy is consumed.  Second, given that most electricity production occurs in remote locations at large scale, we lose 7-15% of that electricity through friction on the powerlines.  Solar electricity connected to the grid is going to be used in the vicinity of production and not subject to grid loss.  Except for production pollution, they don’t give off CO2 everytime you plug in.  They don’t require cooperation with other countries, and once you’ve purchased them, no embargo will stop them from running.  Solar panels provide a beginning for a more distributed electrical grid system that makes our social system more resilient and less susceptible to natural disaster or terrorist attack on the few large plants (NYS has 62 electric generating plants).  Solar panels are a kind of independence.