Imagine all of those parking lots covered with solar panels, generating renewable energy

If you haven’t been to the Ikea in White Marsh, outside Baltimore, for a while — or at all during the pandemic — you’ll be surprised to see solar canopies covering the parking lot there. I devoted a recent Baltimore Sun column to the topic of large companies with large parking lots turning them into solar fields. Imagine if Walmart, for instance, did this everywhere. (The retail giant has more than 5,000 stores in the U.S. and twice that number worldwide.) While Walmart and other corporations have made pledges to be 100% powered by renewables in the near future, more need to get into this. Only 3% of the nation’s electricity comes from the sun, and the climate clock ticks louder every day.