This story was produced by The Virginia Mercury and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
The Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments passed a resolution this November that sets a goal of having solar panels installed on 250,000 rooftops in the Washington, D.C. metro region, an area encompassing the nation’s capital, Northern Virginia and parts of Maryland, by 2030.
Members of the energy industry say meeting the target will take some work given the number of rooftop arrays Virginians have installed so far, but programs are in place to help put panels on roofs as well as an increasing number of funding opportunities.
“We all read the papers, we all discuss with our constituents,” said Takis Karantonis, a member of the Arlington County Board and chair of MWCOG’s Climate, Energy and Environment Policy Committee. Climate change, he said, “is one of the number one concerns that people have right now, and they are asking us to lead.”
In 2020, MWCOG approved a Climate and Energy Action Plan that called for the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, one of the primary drivers of climate change, by 50% from 2005 levels. Last week, climate scientists reported that average global temperatures on Nov. 17 had exceeded the global average for the preindustrial 1850-1900 period by 2 degrees Celsius, an amount long seen by researchers as a key warming threshold.
Among other goals to reduce emissions, MWCOG’s climate plan calls for about...
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