A nonprofit in Westchester County recently established the Municipal Solar Buyers Group to help find ways to fund solar installations on public property in an effort to lower government electricity costs.
Sustainable Westchester Inc. is a consortium of about 40 local governments, 17 of which have identified more than 75 publicly owned buildings or parking lots to host solar photovoltaic systems.
Rather than having local governments dole out thousands of dollars to install solar arrays, Sustainable Westchester is arranging for its member municipalities to take part in power purchase agreements that allow them to benefit from electricity savings without having to pay for the solar panels.
Municipalities will pay solar installation companies for energy generated on their property. In such agreements, the hosts of the panels pay third-party developers of installations for a predetermined period, often at a lower cost.
- Leo Wiegman
The newly established buyers group ”” made up of an entity of PNC Financial Services Group Inc. and GP Renewables & Trading ”” will accept proposals until June 17 from developers around the country that are interested in financing, designing and building solar installations. These parties stand to benefit from federal and state tax incentive programs that could pay off significant portions of the installation costs and attract investors to help pay for the upfront costs.
“The challenge is to find solar developers that have good reputations and good balance sheets,” said Leo Wiegman, executive director of Sustainable Westchester. “We”™re optimistic that there will be a number of blue chip firms that will answer this given the potential size of the systems that we”™ve put together.”
Wiegman, who is also the mayor of Croton-on-Hudson and co-owner of the solar company Croton Energy Group, said Sustainable Westchester hopes to see some of the smaller solar systems come online by the end of the year and expects the bigger systems to be installed by the end of 2016.
Sustainable Westchester is the product of two organizations that were created about five years ago ”” the Northern Westchester Energy Action Consortium and the Southern Westchester Energy Action Consortium ””and decided to merge last October.
The new group”™s first leadership meeting was in December and since then Sustainable Westchester has assembled a membership of about 90 percent of the 45 municipalities in the county. Wiegman said the nonprofit is in talks with the remaining localities to include them as members in the consortium.
Each member municipality pays $1,000 in annual dues that currently goes toward paying for overhead costs like legal fees and salaries as the group begins to settle on initiatives like the solar buyers group. Sustainable Westchester is also looking to establish programs focusing on recycling, waste management and transportation land use, specifically improving pedestrian and bike paths.
Eventually, Wiegman said he hopes to attract businesses in the private sector and expand the membership beyond municipalities.
Wiegman said that “once we start to go into the communities and look at sites for the public sector, we think the private sector is going to” want to take a closer look at the benefits of solar installations.
