CITIZENS ENERGY HAS changed with the times.
Once known for giving heating oil away, the nonprofit company founded by Joe Kennedy II – and now managed by his son, Joe III – has turned to leveraging solar power to drive down electricity bills for low-income consumers.
A project the company developed on a former Superfund site in Ashland was recently named one of the five grand prize winners in the so-called Sunny competition, a US Department of Energy program that recognizes projects that promote community solar.
Community solar is equal opportunity solar. Most solar projects are fairly one dimensional. A homeowner puts a solar array on the roof and saves money over time by using less power from the grid and occasionally selling excess electricity into the grid. Solar developers operate similarly; they build a solar farm and sell the electricity into the grid.
These sorts of projects favor those who own solar-friendly properties or homes and can come up with the upfront investment to install solar panels. But what about people that don’t have the upfront investment or the solar-friendly properties? What about people that rent?
Community solar is solar financed by a group of individuals who then share the benefits. Citizens Energy has taken the concept a step farther, distributing the benefits to people who have no financial skin in the game but meet income requirements.
“It’s like every person gets a panel or two from our solar farm,” said Hannah Goetz, a spokeswoman for Citizens Energy.
As the Citizens Energy website says: “No Cost. No Fees. No installations. No obligations. No credit checks.”
Customers participating in the program must either receive a residential assistance discount rate from their utility or have a service address in an environmental justice zone, according to the Citizens Energy website.
The six-megawatt solar farm in Ashland produces electricity that is fed into the grid, generating either a direct payment from the local utility or a bill credit. Nearly half of the money goes to the company that operates and maintains the solar farm. The other half goes, in the form of bill credits, to the participants in the community solar program. The bill credits, split equally among the participants, are used to reduce the size of their electricity bills – but the participants are required to return half of the money they received in credits to Citizens Energy.
Once all the payments are trued up, roughly half of the revenues from the solar farm go to the operator of the solar farm, a quarter go to Citizens Energy, and a quarter go to the community participants. It adds up to about a $400-a-year bill reduction for the community participants.
According to Goetz, the savings are even greater on Cape Cod, where Vineyard Wind, the nation’s first industrial scale wind farm, is covering the Citizens Energy share of the credits, allowing all of the savings to flow through to participants. The Vineyard Wind subsidy is being provided as part of a resiliency and affordability fund.
Citizens Energy currently operates seven solar farms – six in Massachusetts, including the one in Ashland, and one in New York. The company has about 3,000 customers, about 650 of them on Cape Cod.