Major solar developers, conservation groups, agricultural organizations, environmental and environmental justice groups, and tribal entities have announced an agreement to advance large-scale U.S. solar development while championing land conservation and supporting local community interests.
The agreement is the result of a 20-month “Solar Uncommon Dialogue” convened by Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), and The Nature Conservancy (TNC).
Over the next 10 years, U.S. solar energy output is expected to increase five-fold. The rapid increase in utility-scale solar also means that the industry must address various issues, including agricultural land conversion, wildlife and habitat impacts, and community engagement. The Solar Uncommon Dialogue agreement stresses that the development of large solar projects must be transparent, equitable and efficient and acknowledges that this will require many trade-offs.
Signatories to the Solar Uncommon Dialogue agreement have committed to improving large-scale solar development based on the “3Cs”: climate, conservation, and community.
- Climate emphasizes minimizing carbon emissions through clean energy sources, like solar energy and other tools, including natural climate solutions;
- Conservation seeks to minimize impacts on natural and working lands; and
- Community commits to equitable distribution of renewable energy project benefits.
The signatories are convening six working groups that will address key issues and opportunities including community engagement, siting-related risk assessment and decision-making, energy and agricultural technologies, tribal relations, and policy solutions.
These working groups will focus on advancing the 3Cs via improved public participation practices, solar siting mechanisms, regulation, financial incentives, information tools, and other means. The goal is to create best practices that solar companies, local governments, and other stakeholders can use to effectively site solar projects.
“Major U.S. solar projects are critical to fighting climate change but are increasingly opposed across the nation due to significant community and land conservation concerns,” said Stanford energy scholar Dan Reicher, who launched and leads the Solar Uncommon Dialogue. “It’s exciting how motivated the parties are to avoid these conflicts and develop high-impact solutions – a triple play for climate, conservation, and community.”
The post SEIA and Partners Balancing Boom in Solar with Need for Conservation appeared first on Solar Industry.
SEIA and Partners Balancing Boom in Solar with Need for Conservation
Decent and intelligent people respect the rights of parents to homeschool their children, but there are two reasons for concern: a) socialization, failure to expose children to their peers, so that they may make friends and come to understand the norms of society, and b) the quality of the education itself.
Almost all homeschooling in the United States is conducted on the basis of a radical rightwing viewpoint, normally a blend of evangelical Christianity and Trumpism.
There’s a theory that most people underestimate the positive effects they’ve had on other people.
Yes, that’s the theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it’s also the core of the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” in which a music teacher who deemed that his life had been a failure because he never completed writing a great symphony, is gently and beautifully corrected. Please see below.
The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not
In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.
I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”
“Exactly.”
I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.
He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”
Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.
“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.
“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”
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I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.
Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.
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