INTERVIEW: NYSEIA Director says bill will unlock upstate solar for downstate customers
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Community Distributed Generation Legislation
The New York Solar Energy Industries Association (NYSEIA) is pushing to unlock solar energy for millions of New Yorkers through proposed legislation that would authorize the transfer of community solar bill credits across utilities.
The legislation, which recently passed in the Senate and is now under consideration in the Assembly, would direct utilities to file a model tariff for the transfer of bill credits for community distributed generation (CDG) facilities in one utility territory to the accounts of subscribers in other utility territories.
Shyam Mehta, NYSEIA Executive Director, told New Project Media that some of the primary barriers to going solar in New York City and surrounding suburbs include limited land space, a large tenant community that often cannot find adequate or structurally-sound roofspace atop apartment buildings or multi-family housing, and financial constraints for low-to-moderate (LMI) customers.
“For community solar it’s a similar situation,” Mehta said. “What community solar means downstate, whether it’s New York City or Long Island, is different because of the lack of feasible groundspace to site these systems. So when you look upstate and the rest of the country, by solar they mean systems that are mounted on the ground between 2 and 5 MW generally, and there just isn’t land in the NYC area to really site these kinds of systems there. It’s like looking for needles in haystacks. And certainly the obvious suspect in general when it comes to barriers to deploying solar is on the financial side and compensation. But that is absolutely not the case for community solar in NYC. It’s definitely not a money issue.”
Mehta cites generous incentives, both through NYSERDA’s NY-Sun program as well as its VDER (Value of Distributed Energy Resources) mechanism for distributed energy systems, which compensates users through CDG community credits.
But Mehta also notes that solar deployment in Con Edison territory, which serves 10 million customers across NYC and Westchester, has been relatively flat over the last several years.
“That is not the kind of deployment volume that can really unlock access to solar energy for the vast majority of New Yorkers,” he said. “What this will do is allow customers in one utility territory to subscribe to community solar projects in another utility territory, which is currently not allowed. So if I’m a Con Edison customer located in the city and there are dozens of community solar projects sited in the Hudson Valley, I can’t subscribe to those projects. That’s exactly what cross-utility editing would solve– to allow people to connect the upstate supply of community solar projects to downstate demand. That is beneficial to projects upstate as well. Something to keep in mind is that two-thirds of the population of the state is located downstate. The vast majority of CDG community solar systems–90 percent-plus if you look at the pipeline or the volume of existing projects that are operational–they’re not located downstate, they’re located in the Hudson Valley and north of that.”