ALBANY, N.Y. — Celebration of a milestone achieved and concern about hurdles facing the next milestone were front and center as the New York Solar Energy Industries Association convened its annual Solar Summit.

New York reached 6 GW of distributed solar in October, 14 months ahead of the statutory target, thanks to supportive policies, public-private cooperation and more than $3 billion in state support.

There is concern, however, that the buildout effort is growing more difficult because of local restrictions, interconnection difficulty and regulatory delays.

NYSEIA represents 240 companies working in the rooftop and community solar sectors and advocates for changes that will help them reach the state’s next target — 10 GW of distributed solar by 2030.

How best to do this was a recurring theme at the Nov. 6-7 event.

Goal Reached

New York’s 6 GW of distributed solar includes more than 2 GW of community solar, the most of any state. (See NY Surpasses 6 GW of Distributed Solar Capacity.)

It is a bright spot for a state that has struggled to bring larger-scale renewables online and expects to miss its statutory goal of 70% renewable electricity by 2030, perhaps by a wide margin. (See NY Expects to Miss 2030 Renewable Energy Target.)

New York is known as a slow and expensive place to develop generation and transmission but distributed solar with its smaller and more nimble profile has had an easier time than larger-scale solar and wind.

NYSEIA Executive Director Noah Ginsburg told NetZero Insider that extensive groundwork and policy support begun by the state several years ago allowed distributed solar to flourish, but the momentum is threatened.

“As we run into increasingly restrictive local laws, which really have proliferated across the state in the last couple years, and reduced hosting capacity on our electric distribution system, it’s a new set of challenges,” he said. “And the same kind of resolve and proactive approach that we had five years ago to create the conditions for our success, we need to do that again.”

A lot of the low-hanging fruit — the easy-to-develop sites — is gone, and there are other potential problems ahead. The summit was focused on state policies rather than federal, but the election of a president antagonistic toward climate protection and clean energy could not be ignored.

“It’s foundational,” Ginsburg said of federal financial support. “Projects don’t pencil without the investment tax credit.”

Americans support solar, he said, and its economic benefits transcend partisan boundaries.

“So I am hopeful that the federal government’s not going to pull out the rug from under the industry, but to me, what happened with the federal election just highlights the importance of state leadership.”

The agencies leading New York’s clean-energy transition were well-represented at the NYSEIA summit, including the Department of Public Service, Department of Environmental Conservation and New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

NYSERDA Chief Program Officer Anthony Fiore delivered a keynote address highlighting the achievements to date and crediting the public-private partnership for making them possible.

“More than 1 million homes across New York state are being powered by renewable energy sources, and we’re seeing the impact of this on grid reliability,” he said. “This past summer, we saw an 8% decrease in peak demand because of behind-the-meter solar. That’s incredible!”

Panel discussions looked at ways to preserve the momentum.

What Works, What Needs Work

NYSEIA Board President Daniel Montante, co-founder of Montante Solar, boiled the wish list down to four key points: Siting reform; flexible interconnection and interconnection reform; rate design improvements; and targeted incentives for installations that provide tangential value, such as benefiting disadvantaged communities or repurposing brownfields.

That is a tall order, in New York or anywhere else. Montante tried to recruit the crowd at the summit into NYSEIA’s advocacy role in lawmaking and policy writing. “Getting policies like this in place is a big lift, but many hands make work light,” he said. “NYSEIA is the tip of the spear.”

Kelly Friend, vice president of policy at Nexamp, described a culture of support for solar within New York state government and a pattern of state agencies making challenges surmountable. “You had the sustained effort to maintain a long trajectory,” she said. “I think that we can probably contrast markets where it’s not working.”

However, she and other panelists said, there also are some things in the New York market that are not working.

Kevin Schulte, CEO of GreenSpark Solar, said business is mixed for his company — commercial/industrial is thriving but residential is struggling. “We’ve had to start looking at other markets for the first time in more than half a decade, to make sure that we can keep all of our people busy moving forward,” he said.

Finding overlap between grid hosting capacity and permissive local permitting is a challenge, he added.

Friend made the same point about local restrictions: “If we’re going to hit the next [state distributed solar] goal that we’re going to set, we can’t continue this paradigm of getting into regulatory dockets, burning a ton of cash to engage those.”

Schulte said greater transparency from utilities on things like the cost of a transformer or the load profile of a circuit would be very helpful in general and would be critical if there is to be an industry-utility partnership on things such as virtual power plants.

Matt Foran, National Grid’s vice president of account management, said there is some data the utility cannot share, but it will try to be more transparent.

“Starting with project cost data, the SIR reports, we’re endeavoring to share more of that, update our cost estimates more frequently, so that we are sharing that information more often than we have in the past,” he said. “We know it’s a pain point.”

Multiple speakers urged valuation of distributed energy resources such as solar and storage beyond their nameplate capacity and impact on the grid.

Friend said VDER, the Value of Distributed Energy Resources mechanism New York created in 2017, was revolutionary for its “value stack” treatment of an asset’s benefits to the grid.

“But let’s not think about the benefits just on the electric grid,” she said. “What are the public health benefits? What are the other benefits we get from not burning gas and not burning other fossil fuels? And how do we incentivize projects to show up and produce electricity without those externalities? And let’s bake that into the equation of how we incentivize these projects.”

Making Friends

New York has a strong home-rule tradition that complicates state government’s efforts to bring about change. There are more than 1,000 jurisdictions in the state and many different stances on renewable energy, ranging from support to skepticism to flat opposition.

The state in 2020 attempted an end-run around this by creating the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES) and giving it power to override local rules on renewable proposals of 20 MW or larger under an obscure-sounding law called Section 94-c. And it did this through the famously opaque state budget negotiating process, during the COVID lockdown.

This was as unpopular with local governments as one might expect, and increasingly, their response has been to place moratoria and restrictions on wind, solar and storage development.

Ginsburg said NYSEIA estimates 4.6 GW of potential solar development is thwarted by local restrictions.

Matthew Eisenson, senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said a national report by the center found New York has one of the greatest concentrations of restrictive local laws. For a deeper dive, he recommended a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report examining the motivations. (See Renewable Development Faces Regulatory Tangle.)

“There’s an irony here in that community solar generally attracts less opposition than utility-scale solar, but it’s more vulnerable to local restrictions,” Eisenson said.

Sarah Brancatella, deputy director of the Association of Towns, pushed back on the term “restrictive local laws” and on the image of local officials as obstructing the clean energy transition. There probably are some solar haters in local government, she said, but generally, local leaders are trying to do what’s best for their communities.

“Are they restrictive local laws, or are they just land-use laws? Are they just restrictive because we’re not letting developers do whatever the hell they want?” Brancatella asked.

“There’s a lot of sour feelings about 94-c,” she reminded the audience. “There can be a conflation between utility-scale solar and community solar, but the fact of the matter is that you guys are dealing with the reverberations from the way that 94-c was enacted.”

Ginsburg has wished aloud that ORES or something like it could expand its authority to include small renewable projects, and he asked a panel discussion about the idea. Brancatella said she and her membership would oppose that.

Brancatella also pushed back on the idea that local restrictions are as widespread as Eisenson suggested — there are 933 towns, and only about 9% have passed such laws per year since 94-c, she said.

Katie Soscia, executive director of development at Montante Solar, offered some pushback of her own: A map of towns with good interconnection potential and a map of towns that have restrictive laws would probably show considerably more than 9% overlap, she said.

Not coincidentally, areas with interconnection capacity draw the strongest interest from solar developers to the point that some consider saturation.

Jessica Waldorf, interim executive director of ORES, said the state is trying to ease this pressure by creating more opportunities for interconnection.

“One of the things that we can do better as a state, and that we are doing, is through our Coordinated Grid Planning Process and some of the other investments that the Public Service Commission has authorized to date, we’re looking at ways to expand the capacity of the transmission system, to open up new areas to development.”

Influencing People

Proactively expanding transmission capacity before it is needed has been a strategy the state is pursuing, but results are years away.

How to get a 5-MW solar array now stalled in review off the drawing board and into construction calls for a whole different set of strategies.

New York’s towns range from several hundred thousand residents to fewer than a hundred, from Hamptons glitz to Appalachian poverty. So there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing solar power in them. Each project will be different.

There was no shortage of suggestions about what works and does not work from Brancatella, Eisenson, Ginsburg, Soscia, Waldorf, Tony DeFazio of Sustainable PR and David Sandbank, NYSERDA’s vice president of distributed energy resources.

These include:

• • Understand why a town has placed a setback restriction on solar panels — do they not want them nearby, not want them at all, or just not want to see them? Address those concerns.
  • Get feet on the ground for conversations to understand what locals want and do not want. Do this face-to-face — remote digital research is ineffective.
  • Win over the leaders and influencers in the community and use them as the hubs in a hub-and-spoke campaign to build wider support.
  • Do not talk down to communities about their need to contribute to the state’s climate goals.
  • Local officials like the idea of agrivoltaics and of preserving farmland for eventual reuse in farming rather than losing it forever to housing development.
  • Jobs are not an effective selling point as solar projects do not create many local jobs.
  • Ask the closest neighbors what they think — a visual screen around solar panels is all some people really want.
  • Explain the difference between community solar and utility-scale solar — early and repeatedly, without being pedantic.
  • Understand what benefits a particular host community is most interested in, then provide certainty and clarity about delivering those benefits.
  • Provide certainty and clarity about decommissioning a project, as well. The repeated sale and resale of a project from one company to another does not increase confidence that when it reaches the end of its service life, it will be removed as promised.

Making the Case

In the case of community solar, developers can win local approval only to find they still need to win more local support.

New York has high electric rates, and many New Yorkers have trouble paying their bills — as of September, the six investor-owned electric utilities reported nearly 1 million residential customers more than 60 days in arrears on a total of $1.52 billion in charges.

A key aspect of New York state’s support for distributed solar is directing its economic benefits to disadvantaged communities, those that could most benefit from lower power costs.

But it can be hard to recruit members of those communities as subscribers, said Jason Kaplan, chief legal officer of PowerMarket, which connects 92,000 customers to the 980 MW of community energy it manages.

“Definitely there have been challenges because we’re engaging with communities that, frankly, have been historically marginalized from renewable energy for a whole host of reasons, and there’s great skepticism when you go to the marginalized communities and say, ‘Hey, but guess what? I’ve got a product that’s gonna give you just guaranteed savings, and you don’t have to worry about anything else.’”

His solution to recruiting subscribers for community solar is similar to those offered earlier for winning approval to build the installations in the first place:

Enlist the support of trusted local voices to explain the benefits of community solar, then deliver those benefits.

And it has worked in New York, in places like Utica, Dunkirk and Clay.

“We’ve just seen an amazing success when it comes to those partnerships,” Kaplan said. “The town of Clay, we literally had like 800 residents. They were over-subscribing one of our projects, and we’re going to deliver that town’s residents over $130,000 in direct savings.”

This is the promise of distributed solar — collective benefit to the planet and pocketbooks that far exceeds its small individual pieces.

Helping deliver on that promise is the job of NYSEIA’s members, and while it is a business proposition for them, it also serves the larger picture of pushing New York closer to its climate and equity goals, even a few kilowatts at a time.

To cite the most extreme contrast, it can take more than a thousand of these small solar systems to equal the output of a single offshore wind turbine. However, there are nearly a quarter-million sites making up the 6 GW distributed solar total in New York, and just a dozen offshore turbines rated at a combined 132 MW.

There is room for both large and small, and a need for the unique strengths of both, Ginsburg told NetZero Insider.

When he calls for doubling New York’s next distributed solar target to 20 GW by 2035, he is not suggesting the state give up on large renewables but advocating for greater support for what has worked so far.

“The state of New York is projecting, what is it, a 45,000-GWh gap in renewable electricity supply by 2030,” he said. “As much as I have a lot of confidence in the people in this room, I don’t think they’re going to close that gap on their own.”

He added: “I think we really do need a diversified clean energy mix. It’s true that one wind turbine can generate as much power as a thousand residential solar projects. It’s also true that we can build a thousand residential solar projects in a good month, and it takes years to get permits for the large-scale projects.

“To me, the message is we need to be building all these resources, and let’s do it in a smart way.”