Why putting solar panels beside highways is a no-brainer

Published

2 years ago

August 31, 2023

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California could generate enough electricity to power 270,000 homes by putting solar panels in the empty land next to highway interchanges in just 3 Southern California counties, according to a new report released today by Environment California and The Ray.

There is a lot of “dead” space between highways, which is currently not used for much of anything. It’s not a usable space for wildlife, either, due to the proximity of so many cars.

But what it does get is a lot of sun, especially in Southern California, where there are a lot of highways and a lot of sun.

The report highlights the benefits of using this empty land beside highways for electricity generation and totals up the potential energy available from all suitable areas in the counties of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Ventura.

And there is a lot of potential space combined across these three counties. Every highway interchange and every offramp will generally have some space for an installation like this. Here are some maps of potential sites examined by the report:

Put together, it’s a total of almost a gigawatt of potential solar power just from empty land.

Better yet, these locations are often near transmission lines and are already owned by the state, which makes developing the space for large solar projects easier than contracting or leasing with several property owners for land, building transmission lines to virgin desert areas, and so on.

Here’s an example of just one highway interchange in San Diego next to State Route 163:

This installation would have 1.86 MW of capacity, enough to power 180 homes. And that’s just one interchange, with many more that are ripe for these opportunities.

While the analysis covered just three counties, those counties are rather sprawling and populated with many people and highways, meaning there are plenty of highway interchanges covered by the report’s area.

But other counties with plenty of sun and plenty of highways, like Orange, San Bernardino, and Santa Clara, were not covered. Nor were the rest of California’s 58 counties. So, if the state were to find opportunities in every county, there would be far more free energy available.

There is currently a bill working its way through California’s legislature, known as SB49, introduced by Senator Josh Becker, who represents San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. Environment California has a page where Californians can contact their representatives and ask them to support the bill.

This isn’t just a no-brainer for California (as even Caltrans acknowledges) but for other states as well. In 2021, the Federal Highway Administration suggested that states do this very thing, and the Biden administration considers it a “game-changer” for meeting net-zero goals.

The Ray has a tool for mapping similar beside-highway solar opportunities across the country. Some states have already started putting solar panels beside highways, with installations existing in Georgia, Oregon, Maine, and others.

This is just one of the areas in which Environment California has advocated for solar panels. Another analysis shows that 5 million homes could be powered by putting solar on the roofs of warehouses in the state (and surely the warehouses themselves as well), allowing us to turn unproductive flat roofspace into a useful energy generation opportunity without having to clear additional land for solar farms. Add in parking lots and superstores, and you could make a pretty big dent in emissions from electricity generation without a whole lot of effort.

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Environment

I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

Published

6 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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I found this cheap Chinese e-cargo trike that hauls more than your car!

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!

Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.

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To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.

Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!

Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.

The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.

The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!

I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.

That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.

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Environment

OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

Published

7 hours ago

July 5, 2025

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OPEC+ members agree to larger-than-expected oil production hike in August

The OPEC logo is displayed on a mobile phone screen in front of a computer screen displaying OPEC icons in Ankara, Turkey, on June 25, 2024.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Eight oil-producing nations of the OPEC+ alliance agreed on Saturday to increase their collective crude production by 548,000 barrels per day, as they continue to unwind a set of voluntary supply cuts.

This subset of the alliance — comprising heavyweight producers Russia and Saudi Arabia, alongside Algeria, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates — met digitally earlier in the day. They had been expected to increase their output by a smaller 411,000 barrels per day.

In a statement, the OPEC Secretariat attributed the countries’ decision to raise August daily output by 548,000 barrels to “a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories.”

The eight producers have been implementing two sets of voluntary production cuts outside of the broader OPEC+ coalition’s formal policy.

One, totaling 1.66 million barrels per day, stays in effect until the end of next year.

Under the second strategy, the countries reduced their production by an additional 2.2 million barrels per day until the end of the first quarter.

They initially set out to boost their production by 137,000 barrels per day every month until September 2026, but only sustained that pace in April. The group then tripled the hike to 411,000 barrels per day in each of May, June, and July — and is further accelerating the pace of their increases in August.

Oil prices were briefly boosted in recent weeks by the seasonal summer spike in demand and the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, which threatened both Tehran’s supplies and raised concerns over potential disruptions of supplies transported through the key Strait of Hormuz.

At the end of the Friday session, oil futures settled at $68.30 per barrel for the September-expiration Ice Brent contract and at $66.50 per barrel for front month-August Nymex U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude.

Environment

Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Published

21 hours ago

July 4, 2025

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Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more

Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.

The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.

As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.

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After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:

We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.

Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast: