The incentives driving more solar onto the town dump

Programming note: Next week will be a special email for The Planet You Save members about our latest selection in our low-impact reading club — get it by becoming a paid member and support the newsletter here.

After that I’ll be taking a week off from the newsletter. See you back here in April (!). With the change of seasons I’m curious to know what climate stories in your backyard are on you mind. Let me know by replying to this email.

For this busy week, I’m sharing a recent story I published that continues some earlier work I did for this newsletter, and some really good stories from around the web.

‘Reverse Commuting’ for solar

Last week I published a story in Governing about a topic I first got interested in through this newsletter: putting solar farms on landfills. The story covers how new & returning federal tax credits could lead to even more of solar landfills. But the call has to be made by local governments:

As director of the Indianapolis’ Office of Sustainability, Morgan Mickelson has renewable energy goals to meet. But sourcing cleaner energy requires making both a financial and local community case to leadership.

The city explored a potential virtual power purchase agreement from a solar developer in Texas. It made more sense financially, but the downside was no additional benefit or connection to the city of Indianapolis itself.

“We’d be farming out jobs, we’d be investing in another locality outside of Indiana,” Mickelson says. “I’m looking at all the different angles to get more solar in general. But at the end of the day, we also need to see all those intersectional benefits of creating jobs for our community and relying less on coal here locally.”

Mickelson hasn’t decided for sure that Indianapolis should pursue a solar landfill, but she’s intrigued because it could have those benefits.

You can read the whole story here.

More local climate stories

• How Washington raised $300 million for climate action from polluters
• With “electrify everything”, you’re going to need a lot more electricians: Chicago-area partnership casts a wide net to recruit and train the electricians of the future
• The first zero-emissions fuel cell ferry arrives in San Francisco
• With enforcement in questions, are companies flouting New Mexico’s landmark gas flaring rules?
• Local, national groups sue after the Biden administration approves the Willow oil project in Arctic Alaska
• Your iPhone is helping the grid get cleaner, but you probably haven’t even noticed
• Maryland is moving towards joining California to ban new gas car sales