Community Solar News: Clean, Cost-Saving Energy for Sisters of St. Joseph -- NY State Expands Maximum Solar Project Size

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Sisters of St. Joseph installs community solar power system

Project will provide 1 megawatt of power to the 212-acre Brentwood campus.

By Mark Harrington | February 7, 2018 | Newsday Long Island

Long Island’s first “community” solar installation that allows a group of ratepayers to collectively share in the cost-benefits of a large solar array is officially operating in Brentwood.

The new system, the result of a LIPA-approved rule change in 2016, will provide 1 megawatt of power to hundreds of residents and offices of the Sisters of St. Joseph, a 212-acre campus in Brentwood that is home to the Catholic order of religious women.

The project is owned by NextEra Energy Sources and operates under contract to the Sisters. Construction was completed late last year by EmPower Solar of Island Park.

The system will offset an estimated 63 percent of the campus’ energy needs, and save the Sisters of St. Joseph some $22,000 in electricity costs a year, NextEra said. The contracted price of energy from the system is around 14 cents a kilowatt-hour, said Tara Rogers, spokeswoman for the Sisters. That’s well below the approximately 19 cents average LIPA customers pay.

NextEra, of Jupiter, Florida, will maintain the system under a 25-year contract, in which all the power is sent to the LIPA grid, with energy virtually metered and credited to accounts on campus.

LIPA approved “community distributed generation net metering” in early 2016 to allow home and business customers to collectively build green-energy sources and share in the benefits among “members.” It can be cheaper for customers than individual home solar installations because of the members can share in the cost savings of building a larger array, LIPA said.

Community solar has a relatively small impact on the overall LIPA rate base, according to LIPA’s analysis at the time the program was approved. Each 12 megawatts of solar will have $1.95 million cost impact, an amount recovered on the revenue decoupling mechanism on LIPA bills. For the Brentwood project, that means a cost of around $165,000.

The Sisters’ solar array, consisting of 3,192 panels, is located on five acres designated as “degraded woodlands” beside a rain garden. The Sisters have a Sustainable Land Ethic Statement that encourages green building and sustainable uses.

Full article at Newsday

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NY Spurs Community Solar by Upping Project Size Threshold

By Sneha Ayyagari & Miles Farmer  | February 22, 2018 | NRDC

In a win for solar power in New York, the state’s Public Service Commission (PSC) released an order expected to encourage more communities to pursue shared solar projects by increasing the maximum size of community solar projects eligible for credits from 2 MW to 5 MW.

The initiative, known as the Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) proceeding, aims to credit projects for the benefits that they provide to the electric system and to society. Expanding the size threshold will allow solar developers to reduce soft costs by allowing them to take advantage of the economies of scale afforded by including a larger number of panels within one project, and avoiding the need to arbitrarily divide development sites into multiple discrete projects. Put simply, larger community solar projects will now be eligible for a financial credit, allowing communities to build and finance projects more effectively and efficiently.

As explained in a previous blog, the VDER initiative sets credit rates for customers that subscribe to service from Distributed Energy Resources (DER), smaller energy projects that interconnect to the local utility system. These projects are generally located closer to homes and businesses where electricity is consumed than large power plants, avoiding the need to send power through large high voltage transmission lines. The PSC is phasing in VDER in stages, so while its first order setting up the rules for the new program provides a credit framework for community solar projects (the mid-size projects you see atop big box stores, factories, apartment buildings, or adjacent to communities in previously vacant land), it is expanding this framework to include other technologies like stand-alone energy storage and combined heat and power, as well as smaller projects on individual rooftops.

Read more at NRDC.org

PUBLIC HEARING: National Grid Proposal to Increase Electricity Delivery Charges by 17.5% -- Attend the Hearing and/or Submit Your Comments Online!

The NY State Public Service Commission will conduct a Public Hearing on a proposed rate hike by National Grid on August 1st in the Gallery Conference Room at the Central Library in Buffalo [Map].

Two Sessions of Public Hearings: 

• Afternoon Session: 2:00 pm Information and 3:00 pm Public Comments 

• Evening Session: 6:00 pm Information and 7:00 pm Public Comments

National Grid proposes to increase electricity delivery charges by 17.5%, which would add $8.93 to an average customer’s total bill.

PUBLIC COMMENTS:

• View the comments of others: click here

• Submit your comments: click here

Want to Pay for Cuomo's $8 Billion Nuclear Bailout? Comment Today!

It's Time to Hit the Brakes on Governor Cuomo's Extravagant 12-Year Nuclear Bailout

The push for a massive nuclear power bailout in New York just got a lot worse -- and the state agency pushing it doesn't want to consider other options or give the public any time to make our voices heard.

After saying for months that the proposed nuclear subsides would cost only $270 million over 12 years, a new proposal released just a few days ago raised the projected price to almost $8 billion. Yes, you read that right, Governor Cuomo and the New York Public Service Commission now want to spend $8 billion of New Yorkers’ money on bailing out the nuclear industry, and in particular, one company: Exelon. The cost will be paid by every electricity consumer in New York -- residents, businesses, and municipalities -- with higher energy bills.

This may be the largest corporate bailout or subsidy to one company in New York history. And the public has been given only 10 business days to comment on this new expensive plan. They are rushing to try to make a decision by August 1.

IMPORTANT: If we want to stop this, we need thousands of people to comment by Friday, July 22. So I am writing to ask you to please raise your voice.

Click here to comment today.  It's Easy! Just send a form email message or personalize it.


This plan is so much worse than even the original plan to bail out most of New York's nuclear power plants. If it goes through, New York will end up spending two times more money on bailing out dirty, old, dangerous reactors than on building safe, clean, affordable renewable energy. And we would be locked into paying this nuclear tax for over 12 years, until 2029.

The PSC hasn’t even considered other options. They have done no analysis to see what it would look like if we replaced nuclear power in New York with efficiency or renewables. 

The plan is outrageous and dangerous:

• It risks nuclear meltdowns on the shore of Lake Ontario, drinking water for 9 million people, just miles from Syracuse and Rochester.

• It steals billions of dollars from building the clean-energy economy New York needs and deserves.

• And it blocks real climate solutions for over a decade, just to make more and more radioactive waste.

Please send a message to the Public Service Commission and Governor Cuomo now.

Thank you for raising your voice!

Jessica Azulay
Alliance for a Green Economy

Climate Activist, Bill McKibben, looks at Green Energy Solutions in relation to Electric Utility Practices

Power to the People

Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.

By Bill McKibben  | The New Yorker | June 29, 2015 Issue

Mark and Sara Borkowski live with their two young daughters in a century-old, fifteen-hundred-square-foot house in Rutland, Vermont. Mark drives a school bus, and Sara works as a special-ed teacher; the cost of heating and cooling their house through the year consumes a large fraction of their combined income. Last summer, however, persuaded by Green Mountain Power, the main electric utility in Vermont, the Borkowskis decided to give their home an energy makeover. In the course of several days, coordinated teams of contractors stuffed the house with new insulation, put in a heat pump for the hot water, and installed two air-source heat pumps to warm the home. They also switched all the light bulbs to L.E.D.s and put a small solar array on the slate roof of the garage.

The Borkowskis paid for the improvements, but the utility financed the charges through their electric bill, which fell the very first month. Before the makeover, from October of 2013 to January of 2014, the Borkowskis used thirty-four hundred and eleven kilowatt-hours [3411 kWh] of electricity and three hundred and twenty-five gallons of fuel oil [325 Gal.]. From October of 2014 to January of 2015, they used twenty-eight hundred and fifty-six kilowatt-hours [2856 kWh] of electricity and no oil [0 Gal.] at all. President Obama has announced that by 2025 he wants the United States to reduce its total carbon footprint by up to twenty-eight per cent [28%] of 2005 levels. The Borkowskis reduced the footprint of their house by eighty-eight per cent [88%] in a matter of days, and at no net cost.

I’ve travelled the world writing about and organizing against climate change, but, standing in the Borkowskis’ kitchen and looking at their electric bill, I felt a fairly rare emotion: hope. The numbers reveal a sudden new truth—that innovative, energy-saving and energy-producing technology is now cheap enough for everyday use. The Borkowskis’ house is not an Aspen earth shelter made of adobe and old tires, built by a former software executive who converted to planetary consciousness at Burning Man. It’s an utterly plain house, with Frozen bedspreads and One Direction posters, inhabited by a working-class family of four, two rabbits, and a parakeet named Oliver. It sits in a less than picturesque neighborhood, in a town made famous in recent years for its heroin problem. Its significance lies in its ordinariness. The federal Energy Secretary, Ernest Moniz, has visited, along with the entire Vermont congressional delegation. If you can make a house like this affordably green, you should be able to do it anywhere.

Most of the technology isn’t particularly exotic—these days, you can buy a solar panel or an air-source heat pump at Lowe’s. But few people do, because the up-front costs are high and the options can be intimidating. If the makeover was coördinated by someone you trust, however, and financed through your electric bill, the change would be much more palatable. The energy revolution, instead of happening piecemeal, over decades, could take place fast enough to actually help an overheating planet. But all of this would require the utilities—the interface between people and power—to play a crucial role, or, at least, to get out of the way.

An electric utility is an odd beast, neither public nor exactly private. Utilities are often owned by investors, but they’re almost always government-regulated, and they are charged with delivering power reliably and at an affordable price. Utilities are monopolies: since it would make no sense to have six sets of power poles and lines, utilities are granted exclusive rights to a territory. When you buy or rent a house, you automatically become the customer of the local utility, assuming that you want electricity and you don’t plan to generate all of it yourself. To keep the nation’s utilities honest, they are typically regulated at the state level by a public-service commission that sets rates, evaluates performance, and enforces mandates, such as a requirement that a certain amount of power come from renewable sources.

Whereas most enterprises are about risk, utilities are about safety: safe power supply, safe dividends. No surprises. As a result, the industry “has not attracted the single greatest minds,” David Roberts, who has covered energy for various outlets for a decade and is now a reporter for Vox, told me. “If you’re in a business where the customer is the public-utility commission, and after that your profits are locked in by law, it’s the sleepiest business sector there is, if you could even call it a business sector. They build power plants, sit back, and the money comes in.” The entire realm is protected, he added, by “a huge force field of boringness.”

But what has been a virtue, by and large, is now almost certainly a vice. Scientists insist that in order to forestall global warming we need to quickly change the way we power our lives. That’s perhaps most easily done by giant companies with big budgets for new technology; Google, Apple, and Ikea have all announced major plans to switch to renewable energy. For average Americans, however, the biggest source of carbon emissions is their home, so the utilities’ help is crucial in making the transition. And, even without climate change, utilities face a combination of threat and opportunity from disruptive new technologies.

Consider the Borkowskis’ new air-source heat pumps, which use the latent heat in the air (down to about zero degrees) to heat their home and provide hot water. These devices have made it practical for electricity to be used for tasks traditionally performed by oil and gas. Smart thermostats, such as the Nest, allow you to make your home far more energy-efficient—and can even, when connected to the “smart meters” that are now appearing on many houses, permit the utility to turn your demand down for a few seconds in response to fluctuations in the supply of sun and wind. Electric vehicles provide a major new use for electricity and, perhaps soon, the opportunity for huge numbers of idle car batteries to serve as a storage system for reserve power. (Solar and wind power can be a challenge to incorporate into the grid, because they’re intermittent—cloudy days happen, the wind fails. Affordable batteries are essential to making renewable energy widely available.)

“Americans spend eight per cent of their disposable income on all forms of energy,” David Crane told me. Crane is the C.E.O. of NRG, the country’s biggest independent power provider; the company operates more than a hundred energy-generation facilities, selling electricity to utilities that, in turn, sell it to customers. Nobody wants that eight-per-cent figure to rise, Crane said, because when energy prices go up the country tends to trip into recession. But plenty of companies, including Crane’s, would like to see a larger slice of that eight per cent. “I’m interested in electric cars, for instance, not just because of the effect on air quality but because I want to take market share away from oil,” Crane said. “It’s a brutal fight for market share.”

Power utilities now face uncertainty of a kind that traditional phone companies faced when cellular technology emerged. A few utilities welcome the challenge; others are resisting it; and the rest are waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Read the full article at The New Yorker online to learn about McKibben’s interview with the co-founder and C.E.O. of SolarCity. McKibben also interviewed the New York State chairman of energy and finance and learned about his initiative called REV - Reforming the Energy Vision - that is trying to change the rules so that the utilities can both shift direction and make money. 

Click here to go to The New Yorker online.