Company installs solar and leases it to New Jersey school: you can't do that in Georgia

Sunday, 10 June 2012

Company installs solar and leases it to New Jersey school: you can't do that in Georgia

Schools can't do this in Georgia, because of the Territoriality Law. They can't have a company finance and install solar panels on their property and lease the power from them at a fixed rate. You can't, either, not even on your own private property. Does that seem right to you?

US DoE EERE wrote (no date), NJ School Installs 6.1 MW Solar System,

A 100-year old private school, Lawrenceville School, in Lawrenceville, N.J., installed a 6.1 megawatt ground-mounted system on 30 acres of school-owned farm land. The system features 24,934 SolarWorld solar panels, manufactured at the company's U.S. headquarters in Hillsboro, Oregon. KDC Solar leased the land for the project from the school and owns and maintains the solar equipment. Through a power purchase agreement, the Lawrenceville School will buy electricity produced by the array over the next 20 years.

The school says the Lawrenceville Solar Farm was dedicated 4 May 2012., and adds that they also keep bees on the same land, plus what six megawatts means:

The Lawrenceville School Solar Farm consists of a nearly 30-acre, net metered, 6.1 megawatt solar facility, and honey-producing bee hives, which ring the perimeter of the array. The nearly 900,000 resident honey bees are nourished by a special wildflower mixture planted among and around the solar panels. The Farm offsets 6,388 metric tons of CO2 annually, the equivalent of taking 1,253 cars off the road annually.

The 24,934 solar panels generate six megawatts of energy, covering 90 percent of the School's needs. During the day, the array can produce nearly twice the amount of energy needed by the School. The excess is imported to the local electrical utility, Public Service Electric & Gas (PSE&G) and credited to the School. The School will draw excess energy and all other required energy from PSE&G after sundown.

Here's a PDF with more details.

The big picture is: you can do that in all but about four states. Georgia is one of those four states,

because of the Georgia Territorial Electric Service Act of 1973.

Why is that? Georgia Power and its parent the Southern Company like it that way! They'd rather build unneeded nuclear plants financed by charging Georgia Power customers Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) fees for power they won't get for years if ever, by issuing bonds with $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees ( enough money to build as much solar generation per population as solar world leader Germany has already done), and by NRC-approved cost overruns the Georgia PSC approved passing through to Georgia Power customers.

If you want your local schools to be able to do what Lawrenceville School did; if you want to be able to put up solar panels on your own land and sell power to somebody somewhere else (with the power company taking a cut so everybody profits), now is the time to lobby your legislator or candidate for the legislature, during election season, during a presidential election year when turnout will be high.

Here's a handy list of who voted for CWIP back in 2009 and might want to change their mind now, if enough of us ask them to. Here are lists of every candidate running for the Georgia Senate and the Georgia House.

If you're a Georgia Power customer, you can pay your nuclear Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) bill item in a separate check with a note that you'd rather have solar. You could tell your legislator that, too.