To transition its economy into one powered by renewable energy—not fossil fuels—the US will need to build millions of acres of solar capacity. Doing so at the speed necessary to match the urgency of the challenge will require the government to plan and coordinate in ways only it can, as authors from Roosevelt and the Climate and Community Institute argue in a new report.
“The uncoordinated, largely privately driven approach to solar development and deployment is not moving fast enough,” write Johanna Bozuwa, Dustin Mulvaney, Isabel Estevez, Adriana DiSilvestro, Kristina Karlsson, and Sunny Malhotra. Part of the inefficiency is that “no entity currently has the authority—and therefore the mandate—to develop a vision that cuts across the jurisdictional boundaries of the many agencies” that would have to be involved in an energy transition.
The federal government can step in with a coordinated, nationwide approach that:
- Identifies high-benefit, low-harm solar sites through whole-of-government land-use and site planning;
- Coordinates with state, local, and Tribal governments;
- Embeds community, worker, and environmental benefits into the process; and
- Expands support for public and nonprofit solar companies—which are free from the hindrance of needing to generate profits.
The report finds that there are roughly 226 million acres of low-harm, high-benefit land available for solar deployment—and the US only needs between 3.5 and 15 million acres for the green transition. “While land use and solar siting will present a challenge,” the authors write, “it is ultimately a problem that can be resolved.”
Read more from the new report, and for further discussion about what the public sector can do to end fossil fuel production, join Roosevelt for a webinar on October 9.
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