America, much like Australia at the moment, is in the grip of a political climate that is not altogether supportive of the renewable energy industry.
But this has not stopped American businesses, who – much like Australian businesses – are turning to solar and other renewables by the hundreds.
The latest tally of on-site solar installations by US corporations was published last week, revealing the nation’s third-largest year, even despite the politics – and a noted shift towards major companies procuring renewables from off-site, large-scale projects.
According to the report – called Solar Means Business 2017 and published by the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) – America’s top corporate solar users added 325MW of installed solar capacity in 2017 alone, an increase of 43 per cent on 2015.
These companies, many of them members of the Fortune 500, have installed more than 2.5GW of solar across 7,400 individual installations nationwide, the report says – enough to power 402,000 US homes.
As you can see in the graph above, leading the charge of solar corporates in the US in 2017 was Target, which added 40MW of new rooftop PV capacity for the year, to take its total to an impressive 205MW.
In second place was Walmart, which boosted its total to 149.4MW installed on its retail chain, followed by Prologues (120.7MW), Apple (79.4MW), Kohl’s (51.5MW), Costco (50.75MW), General Growth Properties (50.2MW), IKEA (44.8MW), Macy’s (35.2MW), and Amazon (33.6MW).
Another chart, below, shows the Top 10 corporations with the highest number of their retail outlets, factories, warehouses and other offices to have solar installed on-site. Not surprisingly, IKEA leads on this front, and has done for six years in the US.
Sophie is editor of One Step Off The Grid and deputy editor of its sister site, Renew Economy. Sophie has been writing about clean energy for more than a decade.
