Community Solar Projects Bloom on NYC Rooftops, Despite Pandemic Challenges
Alex Lee, a resiliency coordinator at Cooper Square Committee, is used to educating tenants on rent assistance programs and helping them to get repairs. In his work with an HDFC co-op on Forsyth Street, however, Lee has taken on a special project: encouraging the management to take advantage of financial incentives for installing rooftop solar panels.
Lee has been working with the co-op for three years, and sees the building as a strong candidate for solar. It has a spacious roof — at least in New York City terms — that would not require extensive repairs before a solar array could be installed. While the space couldn’t host an array large enough to power the entire building, Lee is convinced that the long-term savings would be dramatic, as much as $100,000 over the course of 25 years.
Solar installation is a no-brainer for Lee — but he has yet to convince the co-op’s management. However promising the potential for rooftop solar may be, the co-op has other, more pressing concerns, like finding a contractor to replace old windows. The pandemic has also created new priorities and obligations for buildings like the Forsyth Street co-op. “Right now,” says Lee, “solar is the last thing on these folks’ minds.”
Lee is one of many organizers who are pushing to expand solar access in vulnerable communities — which have seen negligible benefits from the nascent solar industry. In a 2017 capstone report by the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, researchers noted that under 2% of statewide solar projects benefitted low income New Yorkers. Organizations like Solar One, Co-op Power, and NY CEC hope to remedy that disparity.
“Our intention is to focus on some of the most exploited and victimized groups, like Black folks, people of color, and people of low income,” says Shakoor Aljuwani, a board member at Co-op Power. “In other words, people who have been most left out of the power conversation. We want to engage them so that they’re right at the table, making the decisions.”
Aljuwani has over fifty years’ experience in community organizing — from his early work advocating for the rights of people of color in the steel industry, to the five years he spent helping New Orleanians to organize for aid after Hurricane Katrina. His work has focused on different issues over the span of his career, but has always involved bringing communities together to discuss their needs and develop empowering solutions.
“Organizing involves door-knocking and having community gatherings,” says Aljuwani. “Planning together, eating together, sharing foods from different nationalities so you build community — a lot of face to face contact.”
Solar advocacy is no exception: nonprofits have typically relied heavily on in-person workshops to spread the word about solar options. Organizers have also strived to build trust with communities by fostering their relationships with houses of worship and tenant associations.
Solar Outreach Goes Virtual
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted this important work, forcing solar organizations to reimagine how they connect with their communities.
“We’ve had to shift our entire outreach strategy so that it’s all virtual, which makes it a lot harder,” says Juan Parra, a senior program manager at Here Comes Solar. In practice, that shift has meant more Zoom calls and social media campaigns — and while virtual tools are helping, Parra would be the first to admit that the results aren’t the same. “We definitely have been behind on our targets for community involvement.”
WE ACT for Environmental Justice has explored new ways of keeping community members connected, like sharing videos of its monthly membership meetings on Youtube. Nicole Pavez, a community organizer at WE ACT, says that the shift to online organizing has made it more difficult to reach individuals who have limited internet access.
“The pandemic really showed the digital divide that exists within the city,” says Pavez. “And that’s been a struggle because most of the work we’ve been doing is digital.”
The awkwardness of virtual outreach has posed a special problem for solar advocates, because the ins and outs of different solar options can be difficult to explain. The difference between solar co-ops and community distributed solar plans is a particularly confusing nuance.
Solar co-ops are created when community members pool their resources and negotiate deals to buy and install collectively owned solar arrays. To sign up for a community distributed solar plan, however, a household does not need to purchase anything, or host a solar array on its rooftop. Individuals can simply sign up for a community solar project through ConEdison. The solar project contributes power to ConEdison’s grid, and the household receives a credit on its monthly electric bill.
“It’s hard to understand how it works,” says Lee. “Sometimes people have trouble differentiating: This is not solar that will get installed on top of my roof. I’ll get credits, but it’s not coming from my rooftop.”
Though community solar projects are free to join, the sign-up process can be difficult to navigate, says Lee. To make things murkier, residents of buildings that do not have direct metered electricity (like some NYCHA buildings) are not eligible to sign up.
A History of Mistrust
In some cases, solar advocates also face the challenge of rebuilding trust with communities that have been targeted by predatory energy service companies (ESCOs) in the past. Until 2016, the renewable energy market in New York was kept largely unregulated in order to encourage competition and prevent monopolies from forming. In this market, ESCOs could buy up energy from third parties and sell it to consumers, hiking up the selling price in order to turn a profit.
Some ESCOs engaged in aggressive door-knocking and calling campaigns, and misled new customers about the relatively high prices of their plans. Although the New York Public Service Commission now audits ESCOs, deceptive practices still abound.
“Someone could be paying ten cents per kilowatt-hour through ConEd,” says Lucy Di Santo, head of special projects at Common Energy. “Then someone comes to your door and says, ‘I can offer you eight cents per kilowatt hour.’ But then, after a few months, they’ll start charging you 15 cents per kilowatt hour. They can basically double what they’re charging you without any repercussions.”
In the meantime, companies like Di Santos’s still have to overcome consumers’ misgivings about signing up for alternative plans. Common Energy does not turn a profit by signing up consumers — instead, solar developers pay the company for its marketing and outreach services. Still, the company might easily resemble an ESCO at first glance.
Pushing Back Against the Pandemic
The pandemic has also caused physical progress to slow at the sites of some solar projects. In 2018, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NY EDC) announced that it had selected a coalition of solar organizations to develop a cooperatively-owned solar array on the rooftop of the Brooklyn Army Terminal. NY EDC expects the project, which is the first of its kind in the city, to benefit over 200 subscriber-shareholders. However, progress at the site has stalled due to the pandemic, according to an NY EDC spokesperson.
The city government’s migration to digital permitting has also made pre-construction processes trickier to navigate. “Virtual permitting is more difficult,” says Parra, “and that means we have to wait a little bit longer.”
Despite these new challenges, solar organizations have continued to develop some new projects during the pandemic. GRID Alternatives, a national solar installer, now works with a public health consultant to review site-specific plans and protocols.
Solar One, Co-op Power, and other partners successfully installed a new solar array at NYCHA’s Carver development on the Upper East Side. The project involved hiring and training 15 affordable housing residents to work on the construction.
Electrical work is currently underway at the Carver site, after which the project will go through its final inspection. Meanwhile, Solar One and its partners are working on construction at a second NYCHA site in Glenwood; when that work is complete, they will move on to a third site in Kingsboro. These three NYCHA solar projects are expected to serve 400 low-income households in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Meanwhile, against the odds, Common Energy has been able to create jobs in recent months. In December, the company hired Karianne Canfield to lead a new, remote team of solar energy advocates. “Being able to offer jobs during the pandemic is exciting,” says Canfield, who expects to expand their team to include two hundred renewable energy jobs in the next six months.
An Uncertain Future
Many of these gains for equal-access solar power have been made possible by new government incentives. In 2017, the Public Service Commission laid out a new framework for the distributed community solar market, creating a compensation mechanism for new projects. In June, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority updated its operating plan to expand financial incentives for community solar projects that benefit multi-family affordable housing residents.
Incentives like these are critical when it comes to financing new projects, but are generally structured to decrease as the market matures and more solar projects are developed.
“We’ve seen some incentives start to dry up,” says Parra. “Without them, a lot of these projects won’t be feasible, especially for smaller development teams like ours that don’t have deep pockets.”
For Aljuwani, the limited availability of financial incentives increases the urgency of community activism work. “We need to come together to build the broadest and strongest cooperatives possible, so that we can work at scale and be able to compete with some of the big companies that are coming in,” he says. “The most important thing is to go into communities that have already been called and marketed by big organizations, and to distinguish ourselves by being connected to trusted partners in those communities.”
Lee, who is still energized about the range of solar options for low to moderate income households, believes that the pace of progress will accelerate when it is safer for communities to gather in person.
“Once we shift out of this remote work environment and have in-person meetings, that’ll help big time,” he says. “In-person outreach, door-knocking — once all of that stuff is back in full swing, or semi-full swing, things will improve.”
