What I’m reading: Agrivoltaics, US solar boom, global EV deployment, and California dreaming
Today’s newsletter is the latest roundup of nuggets I’ve unearthed from my daily reading. These roundups will return to Fridays in the coming weeks, with the next installment arriving before the Christmas break. Enjoy!
One of Biden’s legacies: energy-efficient, comfortable affordable housing: If you haven’t tracked daily press releases and announcements from federal agencies over the last four years, you likely have missed just how successful the Biden administration has been in advancing climate action across the country. Here’s one of many such examples. The AP’s Jennifer McDermott reported last month that the US Department of Housing and Urban Development had notched a milestone: the last $30 million of more than $1 billion had been spent under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Green and Resilient Retrofit Program to modernize and upgrade older buildings for thousands of low-income renters nationwide.
“If there’s anything that this billion dollars has done, in addition to doing the work that those of us know needs to be done to deal with the impact of climate change, it’s given people who live in those buildings hope, so that they can live comfortably, and hope that they can live safely,” HUD acting Secretary Adrianne Todman told McDermott.
Agrivoltaics are booming – and promoting biodiversity: Recent research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) documents the explosive growth of so-called “agrivoltaics” in the US. The term refers to “the practice of bringing together agricultural activities and photovoltaics (PV) – using the same land to harvest solar energy and reap agricultural benefits, like grazing, crop production, increased pollinator habitat, and soil health.” In 2020, US agrivoltaics sites covered 27,000 acres and produced 4.5 gigawatts (GW) of solar energy, according to NREL. By November 2024, US agrivoltaics covered 60,000 acres and produced 10GW of solar energy.
Solar arrays are compatible with ecosystem restoration, too. In a series of studies funded by the US Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office and undertaken by NREL, along with federal and state partners, researchers documented the benefits of so-called “ecovoltaics” projects: “colocating PV and ecologically-beneficial planting practices.” The studies found “it is possible to establish native prairie under solar panels and, by doing so, provide soil benefits and habitat for wildlife and pollinators.”
Record-breaking year for US solar: Boosted by incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as the expiration of tariffs targeting solar panels made in Southeast Asia, the US solar market is projected to have a record-breaking year in 2024, with more than 32GW of project additions, according to the American Clean Power Association’s latest Solar Market Monitor report. The report finds that solar capital costs should continue to decline over the next decade, with a 14% reduction by 2035 projected. The competitiveness of new solar is making it possible to deploy gigawatt-scale projects even outside the powerhouse US solar markets of California and Texas. For example, Oregon officials approved Sunstone Solar, which will include 1,200 megawatts of solar power and 7,200 megawatt-hours of battery storage, The Oregonian’s Gosia Wozniacka reported last week.
IRA incentives are making it attractive to manufacture solar panels in the US again, too, as Canary Media’s Eric Wesoff recently reported. “As a testament to the effectiveness of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), domestic solar module manufacturing capacity has nearly quintupled since 2022 — courtesy of new or expanded factories in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Texas that benefited from the law’s tax credits. The U.S. added a record-breaking 9.3 gigawatts of new solar module production capacity in the third quarter alone,” writes Wesoff.
Global ZEV fleet advances: Americans’ preference for trucks and SUVs makes it hard to achieve big gains quickly but the US vehicle fleet is getting more efficient and cleaner. According to the latest data from the US Environmental Protection Agency, model year 2023 vehicle fuel economy reached a record high (27.1 MPG), while greenhouse gas emissions dropped to record low levels (319 grams of CO2/mile). Americans are increasingly opting for electric vehicles, too. Combined sales of hybrid vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and battery electric vehicles in the US increased from 19.1% of total new light-duty vehicle sales in 2Q 2024 to a record 21.2% in 3Q, according to estimates from Wards Intelligence tracked by the US Energy Information Administration.
Outside the US, the transition to electric vehicles is happening even faster, especially in the world’s leading markets. Over the past two and a half years, internal combustion engine vehicles’ share of the global market declined from 78% to 63%, while EVs’ share increased from 10% to 17.4%, according to New AutoMotive's latest Global Electric Vehicle Tracker. In Norway, the EV transition is nearly complete, with battery electric vehicles accounting for a remarkable 93.6% of new car registrations in November. And in China, the world’s largest vehicle market, EV sales “have reached a tipping point,” Bloomberg reported last month. “They’ve accounted for more than half of retail passenger vehicle sales in the four months from July, according to the China Passenger Car Association, a trend that’s poised to send appetite for transport fuels into a decline that will have a major impact on the oil market.”
Electric buses in India, electric ferries in San Francisco: “Talk about mission impossible. Your assignment: Electrify India’s fleet of public buses, which transport 128 million people a day. The economics are harrowing,” writes Bloomberg’s Lou Del Bello. Mahua Acharya figured out a way to make the impossible happen. As the head of a government-owned company called Convergence Energy Services Ltd., or CESL, Acharya devised a scheme under which five large Indian cities, including New Delhi and Kolkata, partnered on two large acquisitions of battery electric buses, “the Grand Challenge, an act of financial alchemy that would ultimately put 12,000 on the road for little upfront cost.” Read the full story to see how Acharya pulled it off.
Closer to home for me here in the San Francisco Bay Area, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) announced last month that the Port of San Francisco was awarded $55 million under the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Ports Program to establish “the first zero-emissions fast ferry network in the country.” The grant funding “will support electrification infrastructure at the Downtown San Francisco Ferry Terminal, construction of a 400-passenger zero-emission vessel, establishment of a Mission Bay Ferry Terminal, and support of a regional maritime workforce development program.”
What happens to DOE’s Loan Programs Office under Trump? I knew the Biden administration was serious about climate action the day it announced the hiring of clean energy entrepreneur Jigar Shah to run the US Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office (LPO) in March 2021. LPO went dormant during Donald Trump’s first term. But under Shah’s leadership, the office has emerged as a formidable player in the clean energy economy. “The LPO is a secret weapon in Biden’s climate portfolio,” as Semafor’s Tim McDonnell aptly put it last week, “a relatively small and obscure agency that sits on a huge pile of cash with the aim of underwriting innovative clean energy projects that are considered too risky for private investors.” McDonnell noted the – as of his writing – “up to $41 billion in conditional commitments to about 20 projects the office is now racing to finalize before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.”
But what happens to Shah’s revived LPO with Trump returning to the White House? “Especially with the Department of Energy, you want to have government efficiency. I think the Loan Programs Office, and everything can be really scrutinized, because we’re 36 trillion in the hole,” Rep. Bob Latta (R-Ohio), a candidate to run the House Energy and Commerce Committee, told E&E Daily’s Nico Portuondo. “Ahead of the election,” noted Portuondo, “the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for the next Republican president, said the loan office should be ‘eliminated or reformed.’”
Bonus: California dreaming: I decided to launch this newsletter partially because so much of what is driving the energy transition has roots in my home state of California. A big new feature from journalism legend James Fallows captures this dynamic brilliantly. Despite decades of reporting from across the US and overseas, especially China, Fallows hasn’t forgotten what makes the state where he was born and raised so special. “I’m happy to report that the America taking shape on its Pacific coast is again inventing solutions far more rapidly than conventional wisdom has accounted for. Whoever guides national politics, California deserves new attention as the ‘reinvention state’ rather than a ‘resistance state,’” writes Fallows in a Wired dispatch focused on the construction of the state’s high-speed rail system, the rollout of its CalVolunteers program, and the global reach of GIS pioneer Esri (a company founded and headquartered, it so happens, in Fallows’ home town of Redlands).
“California is America, but sooner,” the USC sociologist Manual Pastor has said, as recounted by Fallows. Yes, and in the months to come, I’ll be watching for the next big innovation to advance the energy transition that emerges in California, first.
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