Massachusetts Department of Energy director discusses Solar for All and SMART initiatives

The Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources (DOER) is juggling multiple initiatives to pick up traction towards their renewable energy goals, including finalizing plans for their Solar for All funding and proposing several changes to the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target (SMART) program.

Massachusetts has set a goal to achieve a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas emission by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050. Massachusetts is also slated to receive USD 156m of federal funding through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Solar for All grant competition. DOER initially applied for USD 256m.

“Even having to reduce our programs by close to USD 100m—USD 156m is still a lot of money, so we’re hopeful that we’re able to retain almost everything we had originally included in our application,” said Samantha Meserve, Director of DOER’s Renewable and Alternative Energy Division, in an interview with NPM.

“Our hope is that we will be able to submit that to EPA this fall, and hopefully early next year they (developers) will be able to start executing on the projects,” Meserve said.

The application centers around five initiatives, which includes two residential initiatives: a zero-interest loan initiative and a residential lease initiative. It also includes a public affordable housing and a private affordable housing financing initiative, which will attract commercial and industrial (C&I) projects, and a low-income community shared solar initiative.

The low-income community shared solar initiative competitively procures low-income community solar projects that are to receive additional incentive. Projects must also meet SMART’s low-income community shared solar eligibility criteria which requires a minimum of 50% low-income residential offtakers. Points are also given to projects that provide deeper savings, such as ones that have anchor tenants that provide community benefits, like non-profits or affordable housing units.

To further support the initiative, DOER is developing a community solar marketplace initiative, which builds upon the traditional community solar marketplace in existence by estimating a customer's subscription size, identifying eligible community solar projects before navigating them to the utility for enrollment, similar to what National Grid and EnergySage have done in Rhode Island and New York.

“The hope here is that this would be an opportunity to create a lot of transparency, a lot of information, but also have one centralized location for Massachusetts residents and businesses potentially to be able to identify community solar projects and then enroll in that project as well,” Meserve said.

As the initiative is in its early stages of development, Meserve said the next step will be soliciting support to build out the platform. Over the next couple of months, DOER intends to procure consultant services to work through all their questions.

“We’ll be working with developers and getting feedback from them and actively engaging them, but I think as far as when the platform is going to be open to be used, I think that is at least a year or so out,” Meserve said.

SMART Straw Proposal

Last month, DOER issued a SMART program straw proposal for 2024, where they recently solicited stakeholder feedback on.

“We know that we really want to be picking up traction towards our 2030 and 2050 goals, and so using this opportunity to evaluate the program and make sure it’s really in line with requirements under Solar for All,” Meserve said.

The proposal seeks to reduce administrative barriers and makes sure the program is “healthy” and going to sustain a bustling solar industry in Massachusetts as Solar for All incentives start to roll in, Meserve said.

“To the extent that developers are interested in working in Massachusetts, I would recommend they follow that proceeding,” Meserve said. “There will be a really good conversation happening there and an opportunity to kind of help shape the next generation of Massachusetts Solar incentives,” Meserve.

The SMART program was established in 2018 as a declining megawatt block program. It was approved with 3200 MW, or 16-200 MW blocks.

The straw proposal proposes moving away from the preidentified block structure and moving to an annual block allocation, similar to the Illinois Shines program, Meserve said. Each year, capacity availability would be announced as well as what the rates would be, following an extensive review of the following year’s rates. The proposal also suggests a 300 MW cap for 2025 and a 300 MW cap for 2026. Behind-the-meter projects under 25 kWh will have no cap under the proposal.

It’s still unclear where they will land in regard to program capacity, as the DOER continues to accept feedback on the proposal.

“We want to send a strong signal to the market that there’s availability for the incentive but again, just want to be cognizant of our ratepayers…we’re just trying to strike that balance,” Meserve said.

Meserve expects the straw proposal will have another draft later this year or early 2025 before it heads through the traditional regulatory process.

The SMART program was last evaluated in 2020.

Technical Potential of Solar Study

Last year, DOER released a tool to help developers, municipalities, and residents identify where solar is most suitable in the state to help inform siting decisions. The tool provides information regarding different kinds of renewable energy suitable for certain areas, funding and program initiatives, and installation assistance.

The potential are calculated estimates and not intended to provide exact amounts of solar that can be built in a specific location.

The tool was developed by Synapse Energy Economics, who facilitated stakeholder engagement and conducted a geospatial analysis to estimate the statewide solar potential. The analysis ranked each parcel for its suitability for different types of solar and scored the parcels for suitability across six categories that include agriculture biodiversity, other ecosystems, embedded carbon dioxide, electric infrastructure, and slope and aspect.

“Most of the feedback has been from municipalities to start, which has been really great, and I expect the developers will come a little bit later on as we start to hopefully see some projects that were influenced by the map come to fruition,” Meserve said.

Meserve said the tool was originally designed as a one-time thing—a snapshot in time—but she’s not ruling out some sort of update down the road.

“I think this will continue to be a piece of data that we reference back to and build upon for years to come,” Meserve said

*This story was originally published exclusively for NPM subscribers last month.

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