"From Walmart to Ikea, a report finds that the rooftops of big-box stores offer enough solar potential to power the equivalent of 8 million American homes"
"Expansive, flat and abundant, the rooftops of big-box stores in the United States could produce enough solar energy to meet half their electricity needs, according to a report released Thursday. Walmart leads the way in rooftop solar potential, followed by Target and Home Depot.
“There’s massive potential across the entire country for big-box stores to produce solar,” said Wade Wilson, an author of the report from the nonprofit Environment America Research and Policy Center and the nonpartisan research organization Frontier Group. “These are big rooftops that need to be taken advantage of, and we need to start using them.”
Using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Wilson and his colleagues calculated that there are roughly 7.2 billion square feet of roof space on superstores in the continental United States. NREL estimates that about two-thirds of the roofs on large buildings overall are suitable for solar."
