Accelerating Solar Deployment: Strategy for a Faster and More Equitable Energy Transition

New York, NY — To achieve 100 percent clean electricity by 2035 and zero carbon emissions by 2050, the United States will need to deploy solar energy across millions of acres, potentially an area as large as West Virginia. Despite the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels, the pace of renewable energy deployment has remained too slow, in part due to the lack of a strategic approach to land use and site planning, prompting calls for a vision to cut past the obstacles hindering progress. 

Planning to Build Faster: A Solar Energy Case Study, a new report from the Roosevelt Institute and the Climate and Community Institute, uses solar energy as a case study to explore the dynamics of quickly developing and deploying clean energy on a national scale. The report advocates for investment in nationwide coordination in siting and developing solar infrastructure. Authors Johanna Bozuwa, Dustin Mulvaney, Isabel Estevez, Adriana DiSilvestro, Kristina Karlsson, and Sunny Malhotra argue that a planning approach is crucial for accelerating deployment and ensuring equitable outcomes in the energy transition, something the private sector cannot achieve with the necessary speed or fairness. 

“There are nearly 226 million acres of high-benefit, low-harm area available for solar deployment; the US only needs between 3.5 million to 15 million to meet solar deployment targets, ” the authors write. “While land use and solar siting will present a challenge, it is ultimately a problem that can be resolved.

“The proposal for democratically rooted, nationally coordinated solar deployment we sketch here may feel ambitious. However, much of what we propose is not new policy, but draws from historical precedents, best practices from the literature, and community demands. Together, these measures can begin to align the US energy system with a progressive, post-neoliberal paradigm that recognizes the strategic nature of energy as a public good.”

The report suggests that the federal government fill four key roles to ensure a successful nationwide solar deployment: 

1. Conducting whole-of-government, nationwide, multi-scalar land-use and site planning to identify high-benefit, low-harm solar sites across the country and organize deployment efficiently;
2. Coordinating between federal, state, Tribal, and local governments to ensure that national planning coheres with local priorities; 
3. Embedding community, worker, and environmental benefits into solar deployment and development to build trust and support for the energy transition; and
4. Creating and expanding support for public and nonprofit solar deployment companies, unburdened by the need to generate profits for shareholders.

This report builds off of a 2023 Roosevelt Institute and Climate and Community Institute report: A Progressive Take on Permitting Reform: Principles and Policies to Unleash a Faster, More Equitable Green Transition.