By Michael Kuser

NEW YORK — New York must improve its policies and regulations around distributed energy resources in order to ensure that community solar can help meet Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s goal of 325 MW installed solar capacity in the city and nearly 3,000 MW statewide by 2023.

That was the perspective of participants on a community solar development panel at the Infocast New York Energy REVolution Summit held Aug. 1-3 at Times Square.

“The community solar programs in New York were slow to start, much slower than we originally anticipated because the market signals weren’t quite there for a while,” said Cynthia Christensen of Namaste Solar, an employee-owned cooperative with headquarters in Boulder, Colo., and an office in New Paltz, N.Y. “Investors always like certainty. Good, bad or indifferent, give them certainty.”

Panel moderator Valessa Souter-Kline, policy coordinator for the New York Solar Energy Industries Association said, “Community solar is still fairly new. The order authorizing it [Reforming the Energy Vision (14-M-0101)] came out in 2015, and it’s had a slow start because when the CDG [community-distributed generation] order came out, the state also started digging into some other policy issues, including the value of DER. So there has been some policy and regulatory uncertainty.”

The Value Stack

The state’s Public Service Commission in March issued a Value of Distributed Energy Resources (VDER) order (15-E-0751) that began the transition away from net energy metering and toward an approach that aggregates specific value components. (See NYPSC Adopts ‘Value Stack’ Rate Structure for DER.)

Drew Warshaw, vice president of community solar for NRG Energy, said that the VDER order differed significantly from its draft form.

“As a result, the slow ramp-up that we’ve had is going to continue unless some of the economics around that problem change. In terms of the governor’s and the administration’s goal of 325 MW of community solar — we don’t see that happening without significant changes around the program economics,” Warshaw said.

To incent community solar, “there are any number of levers on the revenue side that the state can pull,” Warshaw said. “I think the [New York State Energy Research and Development Authority] block program is certainly one — and the market transition credit, which is one of the pieces in the value stack of the VDER order.”

City Goals

Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015 launched the OneNYC climate change program, which aims to lower the city’s greenhouse gas emissions to 80% below their 2005 levels by 2050, achieve the best air quality of any large U.S. city and send no waste to landfills by 2030.

Benjamin Mandel, renewable energy policy adviser with the mayor’s Office of Sustainability, said the city is working to ensure that as the market moves beyond net metering, it “has the right kind of signals both in terms of where it benefits utilities and also where does policy benefit and where we want to see DER projects going, including community solar.”

In terms of the installed capacity needed to meet its greenhouse gas mitigation goal, the mayor’s office estimated it would need 7 GW of solar citywide, which is “our entire technical potential,” Mandel said. “For reference, we’ve probably got between 110 and 120 MW installed citywide right now … a stretch goal is to reach 1,000 MW of installed solar capacity citywide by 2030.”

The mayor’s office works with Sustainable CUNY and the NYC Economic Development Corporation to expand access to the benefits of solar energy and other forms of renewable energy. Programs include Solarize NYC — for community group purchasing — and a related program called Shared Solar NYC.

Since 2006, the NYC Solar Partnership program has connected government and industry with oversight agencies that permit rooftop solar projects and with the interconnecting utility, Consolidated Edison. This “has greased the skids” and allowed the city to narrow the disparities in solar adoption between the five boroughs and less dense areas like Westchester or Long Island, Mandel said.

And the city has its own large constituents. Bomee Jung, vice president of energy and sustainability for the New York City Housing Authority, said, “If NYCHA doesn’t meet its goals, it’s not likely that the city’s going to get there without us.”

The housing authority serves about 400,000 people in 176,000 apartments and another 200,000 people through its voucher program, the largest numbers of any city in the country.

Near Future

“You’re going to have a fairly limited market here in the near future for a few reasons,” said Tom Hunt, vice president of corporate development for Clean Energy Collective, which licenses community solar software to developers and utilities.

“You have economics under Phase One [of New York’s Clean Energy Standard] that probably don’t work in at least a few different load zones … and in those load zones where the economics do work, you’re going to have some pretty significant interconnection issues, or siting issues for here in the city,” Hunt said.

“The math will work, the economics will work in Con Edison Zone J [NYC], but the challenge there is siting,” Warshaw said. “We have a service area that produces an amount of community solar at scale that’s really going to make an impact. So that’s the challenge that a company like NRG sees, which is very focused on building out community solar, has the money to invest in New York and feels like a lot of positive things are happening in New York in terms of the climate, the horsepower and the brain power in Albany focused and wanting to do this.”

Some solar developers claim that there’s going to be 2 GW of community solar built in the next 12 months in load zones A through C, but Hunt is doubtful.

“I don’t know that there’s 20 MW within all that that have figured out how you deliver a full program in terms of bringing customers in and billing them, invoicing them, let alone getting utilities on your side so you can bill credits,” Hunt said. “While we’re certainly optimistic about the order and what it means, there’s a lot of work left to be done, and which we think needs to be done in order to make this market sustainable.”