Solar development has surged since last year’s climate and healthcare bill, which boosted tax breaks for renewable-energy projects. In the year since the bill became a law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, U.S. companies have announced plans for more than $100 billion of domestic projects, including solar installations, energy storage systems and panel factories, according to a report by the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie.

Solar installations made up 35% of all new utility-scale generation capacity in the first half of the year, according to the Energy Information Administration. It expects the U.S. to add 25.2 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023, enough to power upwards of five million homes and more than from new wind, natural gas and nuclear generation combined.

That doesn’t count small-scale installations, often on rooftops, which account for about a third of U.S. solar output, the EIA estimates. Those are proliferating, too.

Greater solar-generating capacity has helped keep prices for natural gas and coal down this summer and power bills in check despite all the electricity needed for air conditioning. When triple-digit temperatures baked Texas last month, record solar production in the state kept its least efficient natural-gas plants offline and held local fuel prices below the national benchmark. 

Development plans could be scuttled by the difficulty of adding long-haul transmission lines, legislators who favor fossil fuels, rising prices for renewable power and supply-chain problems. 

But tax breaks that can add up to 70% of development costs and market share left by retiring coal plants and inefficient gas-burners have solar developers looking for places to tilt photovoltaic panels toward the sun.

They are finding receptive hosts among the country’s biggest property owners, such as timber companies PotlatchDeltic and Weyerhaeuser, and self-storage giants Extra Space Storage and Public Storage, which have thousands of acres of rooftops.

A solar developer paid PotlatchDeltic about $7,500 an acre, a $14 million total, last year in the forest-product company’s first deal. The price was roughly 10 times greater than what the land was worth growing trees. Plus, the trees had to go, so PotlatchDeltic made its usual money on the logs.

The company now has about $200 million of land sales and leases lined up with solar developers on roughly 20,000 acres and is searching its 1.6 million acres in the Southern U.S. for additional sites near transformers and high-voltage lines, Chief Executive Eric Cremers said.

Those deals will take roughly 1% of the company’s land out of wood growing, but the $200 million amounts to about 4% of the value of its stock and debt, Cremers told investors on a call earlier this month. “That’s a pretty good trade,” he said.

Weyerhaeuser, America’s largest private landowner, expects its first utility-scale solar project to go online at year-end and is scouting locations for more, a spokesman said. 

, another big timber owner, has long-term leases and options with solar developers on about 26,000 acres in six Southern states, including Texas, where workers are installing an array on 583 acres, said CEO David Nunes. Before striking deals, Rayonier studies the financial and environmental trade-offs of replacing its pine plantations with solar farms. 

“The efficiency from an emissions-reduction standpoint is so high because you’re basically replacing coal-fired or natural-gas-fired electric generation,” Nunes said. “It’s many times more beneficial than the lost carbon sequestration you would otherwise be getting growing timber.”

In towns and cities, where there is much less room than in the rural South, solar developers are covering the roofs of self-storage buildings.  

U.S. renewable power generationSource: U.S. Energy Information AdministrationNote: Solar includes small- and utility-scale.

2014’15’200100200300400500600700800900billion kilowatt hoursOtherWood and wood fuelsHydroelectricWindSolar

Extra Space started the year with solar systems at 55% of its wholly owned properties and many more on the drawing board.

Public Storage has about 150 million square feet of vacant rooftop space—more than 3,400 acres—and needs only about 15% of it to generate enough electricity for its own needs. An initiative is under way to put panels on another 1,000 roofs by 2025.

“That’s an important program to offset our utility costs, lower our carbon emissions and to drive rental income from the vacant rooftops,” Public Storage finance chief Tom Boyle told portfolio managers at a recent real-estate investing conference.

Public Storage said this month that it would install arrays at 133 properties in Maryland, New Jersey and Illinois and make discounted power available to nearby low- to moderate-income households, projects that are encouraged by the climate bill with additional tax credits. Extra Space has a similar program in New Jersey. 

At Tanger, more than a million square feet of solar panels share rooftops with gardens and beehives, all part of the outdoor-mall operator’s effort to appeal to green investors and environmental-minded customers while cutting its utility bills. 

The power is used on site, and Tanger expects to have enough installed by the end of next year to offset 20% of its energy consumption, said operations chief Leslie Swanson. 

Tanger used to lease its rooftops to developers, she said, but has lately installed its own arrays atop malls in Florida, Texas and Arizona, and it also shaded the Arizona parking lot with panels.