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Community Solar Farms Taking Off in 2015 [Chart]

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Community Solar Farms Taking Off in 2015 [Chart]

Community Solar Farms Taking Off in 2015 [Chart]

Total installations of community solar farms to jump sevenfold in two years.

The Chart of the Week is a weekly feature in Visual Capitalist on Fridays.

Through the last five years, on average there was only 13 MW of new community solar farm installations per year in the United States market. To put this in perspective, the country as a whole put in 6.2 GW of solar in the year of 2014. This basically gives the “community concept” of solar power the equivalent of a big fat zero on the scoreboard so far.

GTM Research, a division of Greentech Media, anticipates that in 2015 that community solar farms will finally break new ground with 115 MW of new installations, doubling cumulative capacity. Then, over the following five years, a grand total of 1,663 MW of community solar is expected to be installed and operational in the United States with 80% of all installations occurring in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota.

Community solar farms are a concept that tries to address some of the typical drawbacks of rooftop photovoltaic installations. For example, residential rooftop installations must have several factors align for optimal energy production: rooftop size and shape, the microclimate on property, adjacent buildings or trees, aesthetics, building codes, and zoning restrictions must all cooperate.

In community solar farms, people pool their resources together to own panels or a percentage of solar power production at a given location. This concentrates production all in one place where none of the above concerns are an issue, and energy production is maximized. The company or organization operating the solar farm has the expertise to install and maintain panels which also helps optimize results.

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How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the U.S.

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Voronoi graphic visualizing U.S. reliance on Russian uranium

How Much Does the U.S. Depend on Russian Uranium?

This was originally posted on Elements. Sign up to the free mailing list to get beautiful visualizations on natural resource megatrends in your email.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a ban on imports of Russian uranium. The bill must pass the Senate before becoming law.

In this graphic, we visualize how much the U.S. relies on Russian uranium, based on data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA).

U.S. Suppliers of Enriched Uranium

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Russian-produced oil and gas—yet Russian-enriched uranium is still being imported.

Currently, Russia is the largest foreign supplier of nuclear power fuel to the United States. In 2022, Russia supplied almost a quarter of the enriched uranium used to fuel America’s fleet of more than 90 commercial reactors.

Country of enrichment serviceSWU%
🇺🇸 United States3,87627.34%
🇷🇺 Russia3,40924.04%
🇩🇪 Germany1,76312.40%
🇬🇧 United Kingdom1,59311.23%
🇳🇱 Netherlands1,3039.20%
Other2,23215.79%
Total14,176100%

SWU stands for “Separative Work Unit” in the uranium industry. It is a measure of the amount of work required to separate isotopes of uranium during the enrichment process. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

Most of the remaining uranium is imported from European countries, while another portion is produced by a British-Dutch-German consortium operating in the United States called Urenco.

Similarly, nearly a dozen countries around the world depend on Russia for more than half of their enriched uranium—and many of them are NATO-allied members and allies of Ukraine.

In 2023 alone, the U.S. nuclear industry paid over $800 million to Russia’s state-owned nuclear energy corporation, Rosatom, and its fuel subsidiaries.

It is important to note that 19% of electricity in the U.S. is powered by nuclear plants.

The dependency on Russian fuels dates back to the 1990s when the United States turned away from its own enrichment capabilities in favor of using down-blended stocks of Soviet-era weapons-grade uranium.

As part of the new uranium-ban bill, the Biden administration plans to allocate $2.2 billion for the expansion of uranium enrichment facilities in the United States.

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