The site of a cranberry bog in Carver, Massachusetts now serves double-duty as a community solar plant after receiving Permission to Operate approval on November 26.

The Carver Solar project, owned by New York-based solar developer and operator Syncarpha Capital, sits on 28 acres leased by E.J. Pontiff Cranberries Inc. in an overall 765-acre plot otherwise used for cranberry bogs.

According to Syncarpha Capital, the community solar installation has a 7.1 MW-DC capacity, along with a 4 MW, 2-hour battery storage system, with the generated energy to be shared among local residents and institutions. The energy will be distributed to recipients by energy provider Eversource Energy via the state’s solar incentive program known as Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART).

Around 350 low-income residents, as well as Tufts University and Milton Academy, will receive discounted solar energy credits through the project, which is expected to generate around 9,500 MWh of clean energy in its first year of operation.

In addition to generating solar energy, the Carver Solar project features a battery installation that will help store energy collected from the solar panels, making it easier to meet energy demand during peak times. Ultimately, this helps build grid resilience to power outages.

Another benefit of establishing community solar is that it allows multiple households, businesses and institutions to access clean energy from one source, rather than households needing to pay for individual solar installations. Community solar can make clean energy more accessible, particularly to low-income households.

According to Solar Gardens, an energy provider by Syncarpha Capital, its community solar projects do not require enrollment fees. Instead, participants receive credits toward their energy bills for using the community solar.

The U.S. Department of Energy reported that as of June 2024, there are about 7.87 GW of community solar projects operating in at least 44 states and Washington, DC. Customers receive a median net present value savings of around $0.27 per watt (W-AC), with total savings varying by project.

Community solar can also be beneficial by incorporating dual-purpose land strategies, Syncarpha Capital reported, or by transforming otherwise unused brownfields into clean energy projects. For example, the site of an old landfill in New York was recently transformed into a community solar site, and in Michigan, some former coal sites are being transitioned into solar hubs and wildlife areas.

“The Syncarpha team thrives on tackling challenging projects and delivering innovative solar and storage solutions that benefit communities while respecting and preserving local land use,” said Clifford Chapman, co-founder and CEO of Syncarpha Capital. 

The Carver Solar project is not without controversy, though. As Axios reported, farmers can be skeptical of installing solar on farmland, because it can make it more difficult to operate machinery around solar panels and there are concerns over whether solar could become more profitable than growing food, leading to shortages. 

A local group known as Carver Concerned Citizens expressed concerns particularly over how solar installations could affect cranberry bogs, noting that the wooden poles for solar panel installation may be treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA). The group said these poles could contaminate the cranberries and local drinking water.

Previously, the group campaigned for the removal of chemically treated poles from separate projects under Pine Gate Renewables. Carver Conservation Commission voted in 2021 for the poles to be removed and replaced by alternatives such as pre-cast concrete, Wicked Local reported.

In response to the rise of solar installations on agricultural lands, Carver Concerned Citizens said in a Facebook post in 2022, “Carver is home to a wide range of small family farms that could be threatened by irresponsible solar development. Let’s make sure that our farms keep producing food!”

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Solarcycle, a company handling end-of-life solar panels, is opening a new solar panel recycling facility in Cedartown, Georgia. 

According to the company, the upcoming 5-gigawatt facility will span 255,000 square feet and will eventually have the capacity to recycle around 10 million old solar panels annually, or as much as 30% of the country’s retired solar panels by 2030.

To start, the facility will handle recycling of around 2 million solar panels per year and will scale up to meet growing demand. It will utilize Solarcycle’s process to recover up to 99% of photovoltaic materials from retired panels and is especially useful for bifacial panels. According to Solarcycle, many recycling facilities use the same technology to recycle monofacial and bifacial panels, leading to a less efficient system that doesn’t recover as many high-quality, useful materials.

In addition to opening the solar panel recycling facility, Solarcycle will operate a solar glass manufacturing facility next door that will use the recycled and recovered materials from retired solar panels to make new solar glass. It is expected to be the first facility of its kind in the U.S. to manufacture glass for crystalline-silicon (c-Si) photovoltaics. The project was made possible partly through funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, under which Solarcycle received $64 million in Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credits, CleanTechnica reported.

“The new recycling facility is move-in-ready and will be operational mid 2025. The adjacent glass factory will be operational in 2026,” the company said in a press release.

“By scaling recycling and solar glass manufacturing through a vertically integrated process, we are filling a critical gap in America’s solar supply chain and closing the loop for domestic solar manufacturing,” said Suvi Sharma, CEO and co-founder of Solarcycle.

The manufacturing facility will use recovered materials from the recycled facility next door to produce solar glass, then sell that solar glass to U.S.-based solar manufacturers to boost the country’s solar supply chain, Solarcycle explained. For instance, in October 2024, Solarcycle announced a partnership with manufacturer Runergy Alabama to recycle the manufacturer’s old panels and supply it with new solar glass made at the facilities in Georgia, Waste Dive reported.

Together, the two Solarcycle facilities will employ around 1,250 full-time workers, according to Solarcycle.

“As Georgia continues to lead the nation in attracting jobs from emerging industries, we’re thankful SOLARCYCLE is moving up creation of these opportunities in northwest Georgia, benefitting that entire region’s economy,” said Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. “I want to thank our local and state partners who made this accelerated growth in Polk County possible, and I look forward to its impact in the years to come.”

As CleanTechnica reported, the recycling facility is slated to begin operations by mid-2025. The solar glass manufacturing facility, which is expected to produce about 5 to 6 gigawatts of solar glass per year, is expected to be operational by 2026.

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In 2019, a group of major companies from around the world agreed to form the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW), an alliance that set out to reduce the amount of plastic flowing into the environment by around 15 million metric tons by the end of 2023. 

But according to a new report by Unearthed, a Greenpeace investigative journalism team, the initiative members have actually produced more than 1,000 times the amount of plastic than they’ve cleaned up in the 2019 to 2023 timeframe.

The report found that the initiative was established by American Chemistry Council (ACC), a trade association, and a PR company. According to Unearthed, the project aimed to “change the conversation – away from short-term simplistic bans of plastic.”

The Unearthed team examined data provided by Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy firm, and found that five companies that are major players in the alliance, including Shell, ExxonMobil, TotalEnergies, ChevronPhillips and Dow, were producing more plastic in just two days than the total amount of plastic the alliance has cleaned up since 2019. 

As Mother Jones reported, these companies produced 132 million metric tons of polyethylene and polypropylene alone in the 2019-2023 timeframe, not including other types of plastics or the plastic produced by other member companies in the alliance. 

“The recycling schemes they’re promoting can barely make a dent in all the plastic these companies are pumping out,” said Will McCallum, co-executive director at Greenpeace UK, as reported by Mother Jones. “They’re letting the running tap flood the house while trying to scoop up the water with a teaspoon. The only solution is to cut the amount of plastic produced in the first place.”

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AEPW got rid of its target to divert 15 million metric tons of plastic waste last year. According to Packaging Insights, the alliance achieved only 0.2% of its targets and said that the 15 million metric ton benchmark “was just too ambitious.” 

As a Planet Tracker spokesperson told Packaging Insights, the alliance’s goal to invest $1.5 billion in plastic waste cleanup over a five-year timeline was just a drop in the bucket compared to the $400 billion going toward expanding plastic manufacturing. So far, members have only invested around $375 million, Unearthed reported.

“It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of greenwashing in this world,” Bill McKibben, environmental campaigner, told Unearthed. “The oil and gas industry — which is pretty much the same thing as the plastics industry — has been at this for decades.”

The Unearthed investigative report comes during the latest round of global plastics treaty negotiations in Busan, South Korea. Alliance members, along with the ACC, have been present for the negotiations and have argued against plastic bans, saying that plastic waste, not plastic production, was the problem.

A 2023 report estimated that without a strong global plastics treaty, plastic consumption could increase from 261 million metric tons in 2019 to 451 million metric tons by 2050. Plastic production already doubled from 2000 to 2019, and the amount of plastic waste could triple by 2060, a 2023 study by the World Economic Forum found.

Aileen Lucero, an EcoWaste Coalition campaigner, told Unearthed, “To fix this planetary health crisis, we need to address the underlying problems of hazardous chemical inputs in plastic manufacturing and the unbridled production of disposable plastics.”

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In Switzerland, highway noise barriers surrounding the Oberland Autobahn near Wangen-Brüttisellen will soon provide solar power.

Last year, Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office made the surfaces of highway noise barriers free and set out to cover 350 of them in solar panels. Swiss officials estimated that the arrays could generate 100 gigawatt hours of clean energy per year, CleanTechnica reported.

The project is now kicking off with the first two privately owned solar arrays for the A15 Oberland motorway, which will be completed over the first half of 2025. As TA Zurich reported, these photovoltaic installations are expected to provide about 500,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per year.

The first solar arrays will be operated by Lima Solar AG, which has had to overcome several hurdles before starting the installation, including finding low-cost, low-glare panels that won’t distract drivers.

However, despite the hurdles, the company has now paved the way for other noise barrier solar projects to move forward at a faster pace.

One ongoing challenge involves connecting the private solar arrays to the electric grid, particularly in more rural areas, and establishing a marketplace for the generated power. As TA Zurich reported, covering the noise barriers alone would only provide a limited amount of clean energy for residents.

However, Switzerland passed a law in 2023 requiring new buildings with 3,300 square feet (300 meters) or more of roof space to install solar panels. In 2024, Zurich passed a law requiring solar panels on buildings, new or old, with roofs at least 3,300 square feet by 2040.

By installing more panels in already developed spaces that are otherwise unused, Switzerland is incorporating more efficient and affordable ways to install solar.

There has been promising research on the benefits of adding photovoltaic installations along highways to power local communities and support EV charging infrastructure.

A study published in November 2023 found that deploying solar panels on highway noise barriers along highways in the Netherlands could provide around 200 gigawatt hours per year of energy. Further, the study determined that solar energy along highways, both on noise barriers and on public lands around highways, could supply enough power for highway EV charging stations to charge more than 300 electric vehicles per day, which would meet about 80% of expected demand by 2030.

According to a study published in August 2024, installing solar panels overtop of highways could be an effective way to reduce both emissions and traffic accidents. The report found that installing highway solar panels globally could reduce carbon emissions by about 28%. By putting solar arrays over highways, the researchers of that study estimated a reduction in global traffic deaths by about 10.8%, because the solar panels would protect the highways from precipitation.

As the project along the Oberland Autobahn revealed, there are still challenges to low-glare solar panel costs and delayed governmental approval processes, but as more companies work to establish these types of systems, the cost and time to complete the projects is expected to decline.

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Using data from NASA Satellites, a research team of international scientists has observed a sudden drop in freshwater that started in 2014 and has persisted since then.

The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites revealed a drastic decline in global terrestrial water storage, or TWS, between May 2014 and March 2016. The scientists warned that those water levels have still not recovered as of 2023. They shared their findings in a study published in the journal Surveys in Geophysics.

From 2015 through 2023, surface and groundwater levels were about 290 cubic miles below the average stored freshwater levels from 2002 through 2014, NASA reported. According to Matthew Rodell, a co-author of the study and a hydrologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the amount of water lost from 2015 onward was about 2.5 times the volume of Lake Erie.

The freshwater depletion was driven by drought and exacerbated by the 2016 El Niño event and the increasing modern agricultural and municipal demand for water. The team behind the study also predicted that global warming is playing a part in the declining freshwater levels.

The start of the declining freshwater can be drawn to a record-setting drought in northeastern South America, and water levels struggled to recover as droughts continued to hit all over the world, with massive droughts affecting Australasia, South America, North America, Europe and Africa, the authors reported.

Then, in 2016, one of the strongest El Niño events on record further affected precipitation and affected freshwater recovery, which has remained stalled as more droughts take hold globally. As UNICEF reported, there continues to be a record-breaking drought in the Amazon region since 2023, even worse than the drought that kicked off the freshwater depletion in 2014. This ongoing drought and others around the world affect public health, food security, transportation and more essentials.

Scientists noted that global warming could be to blame for the declining freshwater levels, because the phenomenon can lead to more intense, frequent droughts and can amplify evapotranspiration, where more water from plants and soil moves back into the atmosphere. Further, when precipitation patterns change and lead to more rainfall, the freshwater levels cannot be properly restored.

“The problem when you have extreme precipitation is the water ends up running off,” explained Michael Bosilovich, co-author of the study and NASA Goddard meteorologist. “Warming temperatures increase both the evaporation of water from the surface to the atmosphere, and the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere, increasing the frequency and intensity of drought conditions.”

Scientists are unsure whether the lower freshwater levels will recover. There has also been concern that they could continue to decline, especially as European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) has predicted 2024 to be the hottest year ever recorded.

“We don’t think this is a coincidence, and it could be a harbinger of what’s to come,” Rodell said.

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