Indiana is expected to add a lot of solar power in the next five years — roughly equal to more than five Hoover Dams. Most of that will be on the ground — something some rural Hoosiers don’t like.
There could be another option — put solar on hundreds of millions of square feet of unused space on top of big box stores and warehouses.
Untapped real estate for solar
At Sweetwater Sound's distribution center in Fort Wayne, employees test out guitars before boxing them back up to sell.
There’s a lot of activity. Boxes zoom from place to place on overhead conveyor belts while forklift drivers make their way through traffic on the floor.
But it’s nothing compared to the energy on the roof. There, more than 260 solar panels help power the building. Tyler Gerardot maintains them for the company.
“We do try to use what we can here and then what is leftover and not used by Sweetwater we send back out to the grid and that helps kinda reduce the price for everybody that gets a chance to use it,” he said.
Johanna Neumann is with the nonprofit Environment America Research and Policy Center. She said companies are starting to put solar on warehouses like this one and big box stores like Ikea — but very, very slowly.
“The roofs of superstores and warehouses really are perfect for solar — because they're flat, they're sunny and right now all they're doing is keeping the rain out," Neumann said.
Neumann said if all the warehouses and big box stores in Indiana put solar on the roof it could power more than 20 percent of all the homes in the state.
There are also advantages to generating energy close to where it's used. Neumann said 9 out of 10 Americans live within 10 miles of a Walmart. If they all had solar and battery storage, she said Walmarts could become resilient community hubs.
“In the event of a tornado or in the event of a hurricane, Walmart still has power and it still has light, and it has refrigeration and could become the place where people go to charge their phones and where they can go to get cool water," Neumann said.
State laws can reduce barriers to solar on big box stores, warehouses
So, why aren’t more businesses doing this? Neumann said there are a number of reasons. She said solar would undoubtedly save a big, energy-hogging store like a Target money in the long run — but there’s still an upfront cost.
“So anything that doesn't pay back within two to three years, they can struggle to justify to their shareholders," Neumann said.
Solar on a warehouse, on the other hand, would probably generate more energy than what the warehouse itself can use. Unless it can sell that energy to someone — like a utility or a community solar project — Neumann said it might not make financial sense.
That’s where Indiana lawmakers can make the difference.
“So if there are state incentives that are put in place to help encourage solar on the built environment — like super store roofs and warehouse roofs — you can change the business calculation of the solar developers," Neumann said.
Things like higher rates for net metering. Those are the credits folks with solar panels get on their electric bills for sending excess energy back to the grid. Indiana’s large, investor-owned utilities lobbied to pass a law eight years ago to phase down higher net metering rates. Reinstating them would help big box stores and warehouses pay off their solar panels faster.
It certainly worked for Sweetwater — which got a better net metering rate from its rural electric cooperative. All together, the company said having solar saves it more than $160,000 a year.
But Jeff Ostermann, Sweetwater’s chief people and culture officer, said that’s not what drove Sweetwater to do it. He said the company has always tried to be an environmental steward — it’s something customers want to see.
“We were excited to be able to do it and I think what we found out in the process is it was actually way more accessible for us than maybe what we had even initially realized. And I think others who would be looking at it — other organizations — may very well find the same thing," Ostermann said.
To avoid the worst effects of climate change, scientists say we need to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. That means transitioning toward cleaner sources of energy, like solar, fast.
Solar developers say a patchwork of local laws in Indiana make putting large solar farms on the ground difficult. Indiana’s warehouses and big box stores may be a creative way to get some of that solar back on the roof.
Rebecca is our energy and environment reporter. Contact her at rthiele@iu.edu or follow her on Twitter at @beckythiele.