Biden-Sanders task force calls for installing 500 million solar modules in next five years

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A report from the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force calls for the installation of 500 million solar modules in the next five years.

Solar module sizes vary widely these days — but that’s hundreds of gigawatts of solar and several times the current U.S. appetite for PV.

The report covers renewables, energy storage, energy efficiency and clean transportation. The report also covers criminal justice reform, climate change, health care, closing the racial wealth gap and explicitly, “Undoing the Harms of the Trump Administration and Righting the Wrongs.”

When it comes to renewable energy, here are the task force’s aims.

  • Dramatically expand solar and wind energy deployment through community-based and utility-scale systems. Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America onshore and offshore wind turbines.
  • Cut red tape: promote fast and easy permitting for rooftop solar and energy retrofits
  • Launch a battery storage and clean energy transmission line moonshot: super charge investment in innovation and deployment of American made battery technology and clean energy transmission lines.
  • Improve transmission planning: increase transparency and fairness in power markets for clean energy. Develop and implement a long-term transmission plan to deliver more renewables.
  • Adopt scaled-up tax credits for renewable energy projects that meet certain labor standards.

The plan upends four years of fossil-fuel favoritism and acknowledges, “Climate change is a global emergency.”

The Biden-Sanders task force finds:

“We have no time to waste in taking action to protect Americans’ lives and futures. From Houston, Texas, to Paradise, California; from San Juan, Puerto Rico, to Davenport, Iowa, the last four years have seen record-breaking storms, devastating wildfires, and historic floods. Urban and rural communities alike have suffered tens of billions of dollars in economic losses. Dams have failed catastrophically in Michigan. Neighborhoods have been all but wiped off the map in Florida. Farmers’ crops have been drowned in their fields across the Midwest. Thousands of Americans have died. And President Trump still callously and willfully denies the science that explains why so many are suffering.”

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