Climate scientists have been warning us for decades about the dangerous consequences of climate change. The more frequent and intense storms the United States experienced in 2017, from extreme wildfires on the Pacific coast, to devastating hurricanes in the south/southeast, and now a bombogenesis ravaging the Northeast, have shown us more than ever before that climate change will likely be the greatest global threat our generation faces. Lets take a look back at some of this years major disasters.
Although health is among the most basic of human needs, access to reliable and safe health care is not distributed equally geographically, with displaced populations and many residing in rural areas especially lacking access. About one billion people globally rely on healthcare facilities that lack electricity. Solar energy has the power to change this and to facilitate the process of bringing quality healthcare to vulnerable populations everywhere.
The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) has released a series of articles and studies last month that look at the rise of solar energy in American K-12 schools. There are now 5,489 K-12 schools in the United States that use solar energy, nearly double the total solar capacity that was installed at schools in 2014 say SEIA. The movement to solar is most likely due to the 67% reduction is cost in solar installations over the past 10 years. This reduction in installation cost is from the government tax and incentive programs that have encourage individuals, commercial businesses as well as government municipality to install solar panels. The Department of Energys Sunshot Initiative Program is one example of a federal initiative to reduce the cost of solar by 75% to make it a competitive source of energy in the market.
The Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) met for the 23rd time at the Bonn Climate Summit in Germany earlier last month. COP has met once a year since 1995 as an international forum to discuss and measure goals related to climate change. COP23 got very little international news coverage amidst recent national news stories in the United States, but it took place from November 6th- 17th to discuss the implementation of the COP21 Paris Agreement of 2015.
Urban spaces are full of rooftops with the capacity to host PV systems for solar energy collection. New York City has recently recognized this and in 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his goal of powering 100% of the citys government buildings and operations with renewable energies. The plan on how to reach this goal has been developing for the past few years. New York City Public Housing Authority (NYCHA), one of the largest housing authorities in the nation, has a lot of rooftop space for solar and in 2017, a new goal was developed to install 25 megawatts of solar panels atop the city's public housing buildings, enough capacity to power 6,600 households. In January of 2018, the Housing Authority will start reviewing bids from companies to start the project.
