Midwest Solar Explosion

Watch our interview with the man who knows more about Midwestern solar than most of us: Christian Roselund, US Editor of PV Magazine USA.

The Midwest is home to large open spaces, farms, former industrial cities and famously friendly people, yet there is only around 2.3 GW of solar deployed across 12 states in the Midwest; or less than 4% of the U.S. total. Nearly half of that is in one state, Minnesota.

Now with the advent of FEJA, Illinois is adding 2.8 GW of community solar, DG and utility scale projects in the next few years. New legislation like the Path to 100 could catapult Illinois past MN. But numerous Midwestern states have BIG solar projects on the books.

A Midwest boom is coming! PV magazine found 44 GW of large solar projects in the queues of the three grid operators that divide up the region: PJM Interconnection, MISO and SPP. Furthermore, at last count 200 MW of community solar projects were in the design and construction phase in Minnesota, and developers have put in applications for 1.8 GW of community solar projects in Illinois’ program – more than 10 times what administrators had originally designed the program for. Join us June 25 with Christian Roselund and host Tim Montague for a lively interview about the Midwestern solar market. 

Christian Roselund serves as U.S. editor for pv magazine, and runs the pv magazine USA website. He has written about renewable energy for German Energy Transition, The Guardian (UK), IEEE Spectrum and Energy Learning, the online journal of the European Energy Centre.