Nothing significant for the environment has yet passed in this Legislative session, and this is an outrage! Pueblos, schools, religious organizations, non-profits, etc. need to be able to meet their communities’ needs with low-cost solar to save money, align our energy needs with our values, and to invest in the POWER of our communities! And to bring hope to people, because we are doing something good and local: to expose the vision of what’s possible! Not to rely on the same corporations that fueled the climate crisis to solve the climate crisis.
Tomorrow at 9:00AM Community Solar will be heard in HSEIC. This is a critical moment - a Do Pass is by no means assured. We are asking you to do everything possible to get the message to the Representatives on this committee and to all the Representatives who will hopefully vote soon on the House floor to get this bill to the Governor's desk.
Ask them to imagine: The deployment of solar in a myriad of different sizes and creative fashions: from churches being an anchor tenant with parishioners being individual subscribers, to a school being an anchor tenant and families buying up individual subscriptions, to a non-profit getting a Department of Energy grant to subsidize 50-100 low-income family subscribers who will have a permanent hedge against rising electric utility rates because they will be paying a stable rate for ten years while the non-profit has a stable source of income that provides service back into the community - win/win/win, and more. The possibilities are endless - so is addressing the climate challenge with local bold solutions! Jobs would be created!
If any amendments please consider:
Restoring renewable energy credits (RECs) to subscriber orgs - these renewable energy credits belong to the subscriber organizations that paid for and built the project, not the utility.
Removing the requirement of 30% low income subscribers per project; a statewide target is good though.
Remove utility ownership of “community” solar projects; the investor owned monopoly utilities have plenty of large scale projects - this is about community taking care of its own energy needs and doing it responsibly. 86% of PNM’s portfolio is fossil fuels and nuclear in the land of the sun Zia. They can’t be trusted to get us to where we need to go with profit as their only duty.
We have nine days left to focus our actions, our message, our energy and make some small headway on the climate crisis. We have nine years left to head off a catastrophic collapse of our ecosystem. We cannot afford to waste a single one.
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