We will follow this up with a story of Georgetown, Texas going 100% renewable as we look to a fast shift away from fossil-fuel. The below story is intriguing in that you would not expect the Buffalo/Niagara area to have sufficient sun to power a lot of energy.
Buffalo Niagara region has ‘admirable’ showing for solar power
By national standards, the Buffalo Niagara region is a pretty sluggish market for solar energy.
But compared with other big cities in the northeastern U.S., the Buffalo Niagara region is far from a laggard.
A report issued Friday ranked the Buffalo Niagara region 38th among the 65 biggest U.S. cities for overall solar panel installations – a middle of the pack showing that also illustrated the wide gulf in solar activity in hotbeds like California and places like Buffalo.
The 3 megawatts of solar energy capacity that was installed in the Buffalo Niagara region at the end of last year was 10 percent of the solar capacity in San Francisco and less than 2 percent of the installed capacity in Los Angeles, according to a report from the Environment New York Research and Policy Center.
But by northeastern standards, the report also showed that Buffalo is keeping pace with most other Rust Belt and mid-Atlantic cities, where solar energy has been slower to catch on than in places like California, Hawaii, Nevada and Arizona.
The report placed Buffalo sixth among cities in the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions based on the amount of solar power capacity installed per person within a particular area. The Buffalo Niagara region had 12 watts of solar capacity per person in service at the end of last year, which was less than one-sixth the installed capacity in the northeast’s leading city for solar installation – Newark, N.J. – which had 78 watts of per capita installed capacity. Nationally, Buffalo ranked 31st for per capita installed solar capacity.
Heather Leibowitz, Environmental New York’s executive director, said the Buffalo Niagara region’s showing was “admirable,” but she said the region could do more to encourage solar development by setting ambitious goals for solar energy installations and adopting policies that promote the growth of solar energy.
“Buffalo has made a lot of progress,” she said. “With prices going down and concern about global warming going up, solar power is growing rapidly in our state.”
New York has a program, called NY-Sun, in place to increase the amount of solar energy systems installed. Over the past two years, the program has led to the installation of more than 300 megawatts of new solar capacity, with a goal of installing 3,000 megawatts by 2023. The state also is in the process of reworking its utility regulations, in part, to account for the growth in renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind.
New York also is trying to turn the state, and the Buffalo Niagara region in particular, into a hub for solar industry research and manufacturing. While the research has largely been centered in Albany and Rochester, one of the keystones in the manufacturing push will be the SolarCity solar panel factory now under construction at the former Republic Steel site on South Park Avenue in Buffalo.
That plant, along with its local suppliers, is expected to lead to the creation of about 2,900 jobs in the Buffalo Niagara region and is the centerpiece of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion initiative.
“It can help make Buffalo a center for this,” Leibowitz said.
Across the country, solar power installations have been growing rapidly as system prices have dropped, efficiency has improved, and the expiration of a 30 percent federal tax credit looms at the end of 2016.
Solar installations jumped by 30 percent nationally to a total of 6.2 gigawatts of capacity. Solar energy accounted for almost a third of all new electric generating capacity that came online across the country last year, according to a report by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. In all, the nation’s 20 gigawatts of installed solar energy capacity is enough to provide power for 4 million homes.
GTM Research expects the U.S. solar market to grow by another 31 percent this year, with costs continuing to drop, an attractive political and regulatory environment and the availability of low-cost capital, said Shayle Kann, GTM Research’s senior vice president.
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