SOLAR TODAY Blog

By Laurel Varnado
SOLAR TODAY Contributor

Thanks, SOLAR TODAY, for letting me chime in again (see Laurel's March issue feature, "Investing in Solar as a Community"). There are a couple of recent events in the community-renewables arena I'd like to highlight, which are significant in different ways.

The first happened in January '10 when the Florida Keys Electric Cooperative authorized their community solar program for the middle keys. Through the Simple Solar program they're allowing their customers to lease 175-watt panels in a large array for $999 each.  In return, participating customers will receive monthly bill credits for the full retail value of the electricity generated by their panel(s) for 25 years. Assuming a 3% annual increase in the retail price of electricity, the $999 investment per panel should return about $1,280 in total credits over the lease period. This is significant because it's the first utility-sponsored community program I've seen to come from a co-op rather than a municipal utility.  This helps further my suspicion that co-ops are uniquely primed to host these shared systems and we'll be seeing more of them in the future.

The second interesting event I'll note is that the Connecticut Department of Utility Control (DPUC), in February, issued a draft decision that could potentially allow meter aggregation in the state. This issue came to the DPUC when a Connecticut town asked if it would be possible to install a fuel cell at the town's middle school and use the energy produced to offset energy consumption at both the middle school and adjacent high school.  In order to do this, the DPUC would need to rule in favor of allowing meter aggregation for net metering.  Their draft decision summarized an examination of the state's net metering statute and concluded that, indeed, meter aggregation would be permissible. There is a final ruling expected on February 24th but, as IREC considers meter aggregation to be among the best practices for net metering policies, we'll hope that they stick with their first decision.  I think this decision is significant because it could mean that almost every state in New England would have some form of community renewables policy on the books (currently ME, VT, MA and RI all offer at least one). That's an entire region of the country! Once you get past the early adopters and have an entire region on board, I think their enthusiasm can be contagious for the rest of the country.  What are your thoughts? Do you think community-wide investment is going to be the next big solution to increasing renewable energy deployment and if so, what is the best path forward?