The towers of the city of New York are among the tallest in the world, but if it is up to Thomas Ludwig (46), they will all be a fraction higher. He displays his solar panels on the roof of his office, so high that a sofa, barbecue or even a hammock can fit under them. “If it rains, we can take shelter here.”
Ludwig built the structure himself with his company Brooklyn SolarWorks, which he has been running since 2015, with 70 architects, engineers and designers. All the panels on its roof together provide enough energy for eight New York households.
He walks to the edge of the building and points to the other side of the street: even more panels. ‘They come from us too. Finally things are moving in the right direction.’ Ludwig hopes the solar panels will spread like a virus and soon cover all million buildings in the city, he says.
With the climate news from Washington, his dream may just come true.
Phone red hot
Following previous Senate approval, the House of Representatives also approved the Inflation Reduction Act on Friday, which makes $369 billion available for climate change. “This law will keep our planet alive,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Sixty billion dollars, in the form of tax breaks, will flow to clean energy companies. Half of this is intended for the development and manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and the extraction of minerals necessary for this. Private individuals will receive a tax refund over the next ten years if they install solar panels, wind turbines and heat pumps.
Since the law was passed, the phone at Brooklyn SolarWorks has been red hot, says director Ludwig. When the climate is in the news, he always sees an immediate increase in interest in solar panels. “But with this news, now that that climate investment is really coming…”
Ludwig, who had been busy gesturing at the large table of his transparent conference room until now, falls silent for a moment. He muses through the window and looks out at all those graffiti-sprayed roofs that he would like to tackle tomorrow. ‘This is really very big’, he says, ‘nothing like this has ever happened before’.
In the ‘solar coaster’
The historic agreement has a long, difficult history. As early as 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen sounded the alarm in Congress about the dangers of climate change. “The greenhouse effect has been discovered and is now changing our climate,” he said. In the years that followed, a number of major climate laws were proposed, but one failed in the Senate, the other in the House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change with the many heat waves and floods became increasingly visible to Americans.
Ludwig, who has been working in the solar energy sector for fifteen years, follows the political discussions closely. He knows better than anyone that public money is indispensable for the transition to clean energy. New Yorkers who install solar panels have been getting tax breaks for years, but that amount has dwindled over the years and there was concern that the scheme would disappear altogether. So the Climate Act is good news for the 645 solar companies operating in the state.
‘We were in a solar coaster‘ laughs Ludwig – a kind of rollercoaster for people in the clean energy sector. They got on the roller coaster when Joe Biden became president and announced major climate investments. If the negotiations went well in recent months, their arms went up in the air. But every time, when no agreement was reached, the arms went down again.
New Yorkers get just over 3 percent of their energy from sunlight – which is also the average for the entire US – while New York has an above-average number of sunny days, 244 versus 205. Part of the problem is the height of the buildings. Installing solar panels on so many high towers is expensive and a lot of hassle. The buildings are old, electricity systems are corroded and the legislation makes any adjustment to the roof a hellish task.
Now that money from the government is released, Ludwig can step out of his solar coaster with relief, he says.
Not just for the elite
According to researcher Neha Patankar of Princeton University, “the hundreds of billions of dollars are going to revolutionize.” Patankar works at the Zero Lab, a collective of clean energy scientists.
“The cost of clean energy will drop dramatically for consumers,” she says. The United States will get a facelift: new wind farms and solar parks will be built in many places. In 2020, 10 gigawatt hours of solar energy was generated in the US, and that is expected to increase to 50 gigawatt hours per year over the next five years. According to the White House, the US had 240 million solar panels two years ago. In 2030, with the help of the climate investment, there could be 960 million.
What makes this law extra special, say both Patankar and panel builder Ludwig, is that clean energy will soon no longer be just something for the elite. Companies that install solar panels in neighborhoods where poverty prevails receive additional tax benefits. “People who in a thousand years hadn’t thought that they could generate their energy from sunlight, will soon do so,” says Ludwig.
It was high time the Americans, long the world’s biggest climate polluters, took drastic action against global warming, climate experts say in unison. In addition, it “gives US diplomats more credibility when they ask other countries, such as China and India, to do the same,” he wrote The New York Times last Friday.
The White House thinks the CO2emissions by 40 percent by 2030. But many climate researchers think that percentage will be even higher. “It’s groundbreaking,” says Patankar. “This law is going to change the United States forever.”
Correction: An earlier version of this piece said that it generates 10 and 50 gigawatts of solar power, which has been changed to 10 and 50 gigawatt hours. The unit of power is watts, but the unit of energy in this context is watt-hours.