Yael Gichon: Solar garden cultivation more complex than it might appear

Richard Polk’s Aug. 4 guest opinion, ” Where are Boulder’s solar gardens?” highlights an important challenge facing Boulder’s clean energy transition. As a community, we want to reduce our emissions and develop local solar. Solar gardens within city limits help achieve these goals while also providing resilience benefits and offering solar access to renters and those with ill-suited roofs. Like Polk, we also want more solar gardens here — and like most things, it’s more complex and challenging than one might think.

To understand why there aren’t more local solar gardens, let’s look at one of the city’s recent development proposals that was not accepted by Xcel Energy.

In 2013, Colorado’s first solar garden was installed in Boulder County. Cowdery Meadows provided shares to city of Boulder and Boulder County residents. As solar gardens matured into a more competitive market, developers began siting solar gardens where land costs were lower, in places like Weld County. However, this hasn’t stopped us from trying to develop new solar gardens here in Boulder.

Recently, the city, Boulder County and Boulder Housing Partners collaborated to propose local solar gardens through Xcel’s annual process. We proposed a system where subscriptions from the city and county governments would subsidize participation by our low-income community. We sought this approach because it addressed one of solar energy’s problems — the income gap in installation and participation — and because it increased the city’s local solar. It was a win-win for our community. After partnering with a developer, negotiating financing and selecting sites (some of which were city-owned property), we were disappointed to learn that Xcel did not select our bid.

It’s important to understand Colorado’s solar garden process at a high level. Under the current regulations, all solar gardens in Xcel’s service territory must be selected through Xcel’s Solar*Rewards Community program. With a limited number of gardens allowed through this program annually, this is a highly competitive process with substantially more applications submitted than can be selected. Most winning gardens have come from east and northeast of the Denver area, where they can be built on large, low-cost plots of land. Thus, while our proposed gardens would have been financially beneficial for our community and our garden subscribers, we simply haven’t been able to break through under this system.

This current situation isn’t necessarily set in stone. The state legislature could direct the solar garden process to be opened to more developers and to developments of all sizes, taking the program back to its original goals: promoting locally-based, community systems. The city will continue to advocate for increased community access to solar energy through our legislative agenda and invite the public to contact their legislators directly to ask for the same.

It’s worth noting that if the city begins operating as a local electric utility, Xcel policies would no longer govern solar gardens in the city of Boulder. This is one of the potential benefits motivating the municipalization effort.

The good news is: Solar gardens aren’t the only way to generate more of our energy from the sun. We’re pleased to report that as a community, we’ve been successfully installing solar on our homes, businesses and city-owned buildings.

In fact, we’re on our way to meeting our first big Climate Commitment goal: 50 megawatts of local renewable generation by 2020. Here’s how it all adds up: Our local hydroelectric resources provide 16 megawatts of capacity; since 2011, the city has installed 3.6 megawatts of solar — including a new installation at the water treatment plant; and local businesses and residents have installed an impressive 24 megawatts of solar. This means that between now and 2020, we need approximately seven more megawatts of local solar — and we know that at least 10 are currently in development. On top of this, the city’s solar grant program has helped low- and moderate-income families as well as non-profits install almost one megawatt of solar since 2008. As a community, we should not overlook the remarkable progress we’ve already made together.

Sunshine is one of our most abundant resources. We should find ways to leverage that abundance. While we still have some complications to work out to solve our solar garden challenges, we’ll continue to find ways to support our community — a community that has some of the highest rates of solar adoption per capita in the country. Looking at the big picture, solar’s future is bright in Boulder.

If you’re interested in installing solar on your home or business, contact EnergySmart (energysmartyes.com) for advising services and rebates.

Yael Gichon is the energy strategist for the city of Boulder.