California officials have voted to allow Sacramento-area developers to build homes that don’t come equipped with solar panels. Solar installers and environmentalists say this will undermine the state’s first-in-the-nation home solar requirement.
Clean energy advocates are talking about what comes next — and warning that climate change demands faster action.When the commission first approved the residential solar requirement, it gave builders the option of supplying power from an off-site “community solar” facility, mollifying critics who said rooftop panels would price some home buyers out of the market. Environmentalists figured the option would be used sparingly, by multifamily developments without sufficient space for rooftop solar.
Steven Lins, SMUD’s director of government affairs, said the utility is committed to net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 and plans to invest more than $6 billion to achieve that goal.by the solar industry, that rooftop solar causes energy bills to rise for customers who can’t afford their own rooftop systems. The less revenue a utility gets from solar customers, the “cost shift” argument goes, the more it will have to raise rates for everyone else to pay the costs of running the grid.
“We’re looking at all the customers, and trying to optimize our system for them,” Lins told the Energy Commission.The changes proposed by SMUD didn’t convince critics from several prominent environmental groups, including Sierra Club California and the Center for Biological Diversity. They argued that the solar projects SMUD plans to use for its program are too large and generally are too far from residential neighborhoods to be considered true “community” solar facilities.
“SMUD’s proposal simply does not deliver any of these benefits of true community solar,” Cullum wrote.
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