By Huck Fairman
As our local weather, and that around the globe, grows more extreme, individuals, companies, governments, and schools have been seeking ways to produce, transmit, and store energy more cleanly and efficiently thereby reducing costs and greenhouse gas emissions. (We, in New Jersey and the Northeast, have been largely lucky, however, with cooler temperatures and sufficient rain, since Hurricane Sandy.)
While many local homeowners and companies have installed solar panels, (New Jersey is third or fourth in the nation) there exists the potential for even greater numbers of installations and costs savings. That potential lies in community solar, where neighbors, companies, and/or towns install and share commonly owned and paid-for arrays on appropriate land, parking lots, or buildings.
(“Appropriate” land means land that cannot reasonably be used for other purposes. Princeton University placed its array on the muddy dredgings from Carnegie Lake, which are too soft for construction or other uses. The town of Princeton has been looking at possibly installing an array near the River Road water treatment plant, as well as on some of its municipal buildings and schools.)
The reasons to choose this strategy are several. The cost of generating power from the larger, community arrays can be 50 to 60 percent of the cost of rooftop solar. Secondly, residents who have too many trees or roofs too old for solar panels can participate in the community solar cost cutting and emissions reductions. If landlords sign on, (and an array can be at or on other locations,) they and their tenants can share these two benefits. The flat roofs of the Princeton Shopping Center would seem to be an obvious candidate for a community array, if Edens, the corporate owner, will lead the way.
In addition, because of the lower cost and greater energy output from these larger community arrays, payback can be sooner. For individual, rooftop owners, the payback can be, depending on a number of variables, between three and seven years. Those residential solar owners with whom I’ve spoken are pleased with their decisions to install arrays, but they urge those considering installations to do their homework and compare both prices and technologies, which can vary substantially.
Finally, because the federal tax incentive (Investment Tax Credit) has been renewed, and because the SRECs (Solar Renewable Energy Credits) have been stabilized, the financial incentives remain compelling.
But in New Jersey, unlike New York State, Maryland, Massachusetts, and other states, community solar is not yet permissible for residential owners. (Municipalities and schools can generate and use what amounts to community solar energy for their own communities of buildings.)
However state Sen. Bob Smith from Piscataway has introduced a bill that will address most of the availability, financing, and valuation issues. But a number of observers warn that such a bill will not be signed into law until we elect a new governor, in 2017.
In the mean time, Sen. Smith warns that the state risks losing out on millions of “federal solar” dollars as well as “thousands of clean energy jobs.” With this awareness, it is to be hoped that statutes will change next year.
That community solar is a good idea is further evidenced by PSE&G itself, which has installed 27 large-scale community installations, which feed into the local grid, providing cheaper, clean electricity. PSE&G’s current mix of power sources is: 40 percent nuclear, 25 percent coal, 20 percent gas, and 14 percent renewable.
Ralph Isso, CEO of PSEG, parent company of PSE&G, wrote recently that “the answer to energy needs of the future is a combination of rooftop and community solar balanced with Energy Efficiency programs.”
The solutions to cleaner and cheaper energy are all around us, and further improvements and innovations are coming. The question is whether enough of the public will encourage and participate to reap the benefits and avoid the repercussions — the costs — from our changing environments.
Huck Fairman is a Princeton-based author who writes about environmental issues in Solutions.
