Solar power is saving lives

The negative effects of pollution kill people. Solar power provides only a small portion of US electricity, but it is growing incredibly fast. This is exciting to people for all sorts of reasons. Those who value energy conservation, less pollution and sustainability are excited about solar energy’s potential to help us to be less dependent upon fossil fuels. But it's worth stepping back occasionally and reminding ourselves of the original and still greatest benefit of solar: namely, that it displaces fossil fuel electricity. The truth is, burning fossil fuels to create electricity kills people, so displacing fossil fuel power directly saves lives.

A study shows solar power decreasing in price

The Department of Energy developed a special initiative to expand solar energy production. In 2010, the Obama administration started talking about ways to make solar power competitive with traditional electricity generation. Out of those talks came the Department of Energy's Sunshot Initiative, an ambitious plan to accelerate solar development and deployment. The program's goals: to drive the cost of solar power down to 6 cents a kilowatt-hour by 2020, which would help expand solar to 14 percent of US electricity by 2030 and 27 percent by 2050.

To assess the program's progress at its halfway point, and lay out a roadmap to 2020, the DOE commissioned a series of studies, gathered under the banner "On the Path to Sunshot."There are eight of them, on all sorts of fascinating topics. Of particular interest is the report that does something Sunshot never tried to do in its initial vision study: quantify the environmental and public health benefits of hitting those targets.

Benefits of existing solar 

Annual reduction of 17 million metric tons of CO2, which is, based on the central estimate of the social cost of carbon, "equivalent to an annual global benefit of $700 million."
Annual reductions of "10,000, 10,300, and 1,200 metric tons of SO2, NOx, and PM2.5, respectively ... which provide annual domestic air quality benefits of $890 million."
Annual water "withdrawal and consumption savings of 294 billion gallons (0.8% of power sector total) and 7.6 billion gallons (0.5% or power sector total), respectively, with much of those savings located in drought-impacted California."

If you want to move into the future and join the solar revolution, or if you want to find out what solar panels are right for you, go to HahaSmart.com and try our price checker tool. You can see how much a system will cost, and how much you can save over the next 20 years. 

For more information relating to going solar, don't forget to visit our solar blog section for more handy guides and articles.