The recent announcement that a 652-acre, 100-megawatt solar farm will be built six miles east of Greenwood is good news in many ways.
The facility, which can provide enough power for 20,000 homes, will create 350 jobs during construction. The project will provide affordable electricity to Mississippi’s Cooperative Energy, a group of a dozen rural electric power associations located throughout the state serving 427,000 homes in 55 Mississippi counties. It also will provide much needed property tax income for rural Carroll County.
The farm is one more sign that environmentally friendly solar systems have become competitive with fossil fuels. They are an economic reality.
The facility, which should be completed by 2022, will be the biggest solar project in the state. It is being built by British company Renewable Energy Systems, which has built over 12 gigawatts in renewable energy systems around the world.
Last year over 125 gigawatts of wind and solar energy capacity was installed worldwide, twice as much as new fossil fuel plants. If that pace continues, wind and solar energy could replace all fossil fuels, including those used for transportation, in 25 years.
In reality, improvements to wind and solar energy generation are far from complete. But they are quickly becoming cheaper and more efficient. That means the pace of installation will probably become much more rapid in the future, shortening that 25-year timeline dramatically.
For those worried about global warming, the solution is already happening. Of course, fossil fuels will still have a role as a baseload provider, but new storage systems could alter even that scenario.
The Greenwood solar facility also shows we have plenty of land in Mississippi for solar panels. If 652 acres can provide power for 20,000 homes, that’s one-third of an acre per home. That means 33,000 acres could power all the homes in Mississippi. That’s less than 1 percent of the total land area of Mississippi.
After the disastrous Kemper power plant failure, it’s good to see a power company moving in the right direction for a change.
