Tomorrow is so I thought I would take the opportunity to provide a quick, mid-year update on our solar array.
Occidental's 1 MW solar array is 12.6 years old. Since "first-light," on March 4th, 2013, the array has produced 21.65 GWh of electrical energy, 11.57% of the college's usage over the same time period.
On the financial side of things, our electrical bills have been lower due to the energy generated by the solar array. To date the array has saved the college $4.2 M. As is happening nationwide, LADWP prices have been rapidly escalating. That, coupled with a sunny summer and a working array (!), has yielded 3 months of record, >$50k per month, savings. Accounting for lost opportunity cost (endowment growth) the array will pay for itself within 2 years.
According to the website " is a day of action...celebrating the power of clean energy." There is a lot to celebrate! If
you would like a break from all the dreary news, I recommend Bill McKibben’s book, “Here Comes the Sun - A Last Chance for the Planet and a Fresh Chance for Civilization.” His book is filled with renewable energy success stories and hope for the future. My favorite is the growth of solar energy story which I summarize here.
For scale our solar array has a max output of 1 million watts = 1 megawatt = 1MW. In the world had installed 1 GW =
1000 MW of solar power, the equivalent of one nuclear power plant. By 2010 we were installing 1 GW of solar power every
month. By 2015 it was 1 GW per week. And in 2023 it was 1 GW per day! So much for exponential rate growth, what about the total? By 2022 the total installed solar capacity was 1000 GW = 1 terrawatt (TW). By 2024 that had doubled to 2 TW. For scale the (2023) about 3 TW of electrical energy on average. Mark Jacobson, who has studied global renewable energy needs for years, that we would need 20 TW of solar power, along with other renewables, to provide all of the world's energy needs by 2050. There is a ways to go but the trajectory is promising!
The exponential growth of solar is hard to comprehend, even for experts. This illustrates the failure of the International
Energy Agency experts to take seriously the historical trend when making predictions for the future. The black curve shows the actual deployment of solar worldwide. Each colored line shows the yearly prediction by the IEA going forward.
So this Sun Day, I hope you can take a moment to appreciate the exponential growth of clean energy.