State & Stakeholder Newsletter, March 10, 2010
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Volume #9, Issue #5
Editor: Jane Pulaski
The IREC State & Stakeholder Newsletter is a foremost resource for current information on workforce training, credentialing programs, state activities and best practices on renewable energy and energy efficiency. This free newsletter is distributed semi-monthly to email subscribers and published on IREC’s website. If you have comments or if you would like to submit a news item, email Jane Pulaski. To subscribe to this newsletter, click here and follow the instructions.
If you want the best news about what’s going on in the states and cities, Read the State & Stakeholder Newsletter (March 10, 2010)
From the editor:
I just returned from San Francisco, the land of delicious aromas, influential people, lush vegetation, and (currently) severe budget deficits. Still, that doesn’t deter Danielle Murray and Jade Juhl with San Francisco’s Solar America City. The City’s recent Special Project Award to develop innovative solar financing alternatives, like Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) and PACE financing, for the affordable housing and small commercial communities is on track. “We’ve got hurdles, but strong support from the Mayor,” said Juhl.
North Carolina Solar Center’s Laurel Varnado, editor of IREC’s Connecting to the Grid Newsletter and Kevin Fox, partner of Keyes and Fox, authored insightful articles about community solar in the March 2010 issue of Solar Today. Like the PACE programs from 2009, community solar is quickly becoming one of the darlings of innovative solar models for the new decade. Laurel’s piece, Investing in Solar as a Community, discusses that though municipal utilities have claimed early success with this model, acceptance is now coming from more traditional utilities and decision makers. You can continue the conversation via Laurel’s blog.
In Getting the Policies Right, Fox suggests that by drawing on best practices from community solar programs, IREC is a natural to develop a community solar model, a natural extension and complement to its highly regarded and influential net metering and interconnection model rules.
There’s been a spate of really good webinars lately. IREC and our friends at VoteSolar hosted a webinar on March 8th about jurisdictional issues and feed in tariffs. Kevin Fox’s Power Point and an audio file of the webinar are available on the VoteSolar website.
The Solar Foundation’s Webinar Wednesday series features two more for March. On March 17, the community solar conversation continues with IREC’s Kevin Fox, VoteSolar’s Gwen Rose and Andria Jacob from Solar Now. On March 24, Jenn DeCesaro from DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program will discuss how utility ownership models are pushing the solar market. There’s no fee for these webinars, and registering once will register you for all the webinars in the series.
Charting your solar course, in the April/May 2010 issue of Home Power Magazine, is a one of the most comprehensive, easy-to-understand articles about renewable energy training I’ve seen. Don’t be intimidated by the 11-page article; consider it the preface as you begin to understand what a quality renewable energy training program should look like.
Finally, DSIRE reports on the latest in state incentives activities, from a nearly doubling of California’s aggregate cap on net metering (from 2.5% to 5%) to a fresh batch of funds from Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources for the Minnesota Solar Energy Legacy Program.
As always, thanks for reading. I welcome your comments and suggestions.
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Read the State & Stakeholder Newsletter, March 10, 2010
