US cities bought enough renewables to power 1 million homes in 2021 – but not where you’d expect

US cities bought record amounts of renewables last year, and enough power nearly 1 million homes, according to the latest update from a clean energy tracker on Wednesday.

In 2021, there were 290 transactions for renewables, a 55 per cent increase on the previous year. The number of local governments taking the plunge also leapt from 124 to 155, across 38 states.

Following the Covid pandemic, and passage of the $55bn infrastructure law in November, more public authorities are making forays into renewables and away from planet-cooking fossil fuels.

And while cities are vast sources of carbon emissions, they can also be powerful proponents of climate action, found the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, the world’s most authoritative assessment on the crisis. By mid-century, two-thirds of the global population are expected to live in urban centres.

In total, the new clean energy generation was more than 4,300 Megawatts (MW) – up 4 per cent on 2020 – and enough to power about 941,000 households a year.

“Many local governments have prioritized a green and equitable recovery,” said Yuning Liu, a senior associate in urban transformation at RMI , a nonprofit working to accelerate the clean energy transition, during a press briefing.

Local governments who are first-time buyers of green power made up much of the action, at 71 per cent in total. Moreover, these transactions were being made across states where renewable power is still in its nascence including in Georgia, Mississippi and Oklahoma.

Many of the purchases were for solar projects including a floating solar array in Batesville, Arkansas which will be one of the largest in the country.

Solar is also increasingly being installed on “brownfields” – areas which include contaminated land and closed landfills which aren’t suitable for many other reuses. Some 21 projects of this type were greenlit last year.

Other notable projects include in Albuquerque, New Mexico where an on-site solar project is being set up at a local public high school, and a community solar project on a closed landfill in Ann Arbor and Pittsfield Township, Michigan.

The data was drawn from the Local Government Renewables Action Tracker, a tool created by policy experts from RMI and World Resources Institute, which has been monitoring the clean energy transition of cities, counties, community organisations and tribal governments for the past seven years.