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US President Donald Trump was quite on brand when he launched his war against Iran on February 28, sending global fossil fuel prices spiraling upwards. That was no surprise. After all, the entirety of Trump’s “American energy dominance” plan is based on jacking up costs for consumers, by throttling back on low-cost wind and solar power in favor of more expensive fossil energy resources as well as nuclear, too. Nevertheless, the people have spoken. Wind and solar (especially solar) still account for the lion’s share of added capacity on the nation’s grid, and now the balcony solar movement is adding another powerful factor to the small-scale end of the solar industry.
Small Scale Solar: The Invisible Revolution
The US Energy Information Agency regularly tracks the addition of utility-scale generating capacity to the nation’s electricity grid, meaning facilities with a capacity of more than 1 megawatt. Smaller-scale arrays can fly under the media radar, but EIA reports on those resources, too.
Combined, all those small arrays pack a big punch, as summarized in the latest report emailed to CleanTechnica from the Sun Day Campaign. The Sun Day Campaign notes that as of February of this year, EIA calculates that small-scale solar accounts for a cumulative total of 60,197.9 megawatts (a little more than 60 gigawatts) of installed generating capacity in the US, with about 10% of that coming online within the previous 12 months alone.
