In regularly scheduled meetings Monday night, the city councils of Covington and Oxford each voted to approve solar power purchase contracts (SPPCs) with the Municipal Electric Association of Georgia (MEAG).  Covington will purchase up to 15 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity through MEAG's 80 MW solar initiative scheduled to come online in 2023.  Oxford will commit to 4 MW.

This initiative marks the first time MEAG has included a utility-scale solar offering in its power portfolio.  The association -- which serves 49 municipal electric companies in Georgia -- will contract with a third party vendor to construct and operate an 80 MW solar farm in south Georgia.  MEAG will resell the solar-sourced electricity (and associated renewable energy credits) to cities participating in the project.

The actual capacity Covington and Oxford receive will depend on the total purchase commitments received from all eligible municipal electric companies.  If requests exceed the 80 MW capacity of the project, then each interested city will receive a reduced allocation based on  their percentage of the total requested.

In presenting the MEAG proposal to City Council Monday night, Covington Electric Director Joel Smith positioned the solar opportunity as an important step for achieving the city's goal of 90% emissions-free electricity by 2045.  According to Smith, Covington plans sell the new solar capacity exclusively to large industrial customers via a Renewable Energy Customer Agreement (RECA), giving those large customers the opportunity to meet sustainability objectives and comply with corporate mandates.  One existing Covington customer has already expressed interest in purchasing 50% of Covington's solar capacity under the agreement.

Oxford plans to add the additional electricity to their grid, serving all customers.

Sustainable Newton supporters may recall our MEAG cities (Covington, Oxford, and Mansfield) posed special challenges during our 2019-20 Solarize Newton-Morgan campaign -- due to the standby capacity fee MEAG encouraged those cities to adopt as a hedge against revenue loss from rooftop solar.  The Oxford City Council ultimately voted to rescind their standby fee, and Covington voted to reduce (but not eliminate) theirs. 

In 2019, MEAG had no publicly announced plans for a solar, and you could not even find the word "solar" anywhere on their website.  These solar power purchase contracts with MEAG are a very big step forward in just two short years.

Sustainable Newton remains committed to working with local officials in each of our cities to remove barriers to rooftop solar and to even provide incentives (such as net metering, time of use rate plans, etc.).  But, rooftop solar alone will not reduce greenhouse gas emission sufficiently to address the climate crisis.  We've aligned our climate action plans with Drawdown Georgia, and utility-scale solar is a big part of that plan.

For the Electricity solution sector, Drawdown Georgia has set the following statewide targets for 2030:

• For Rooftop Solar:  295,000 new 5 kW solar roofs.
• For Large-Scale Solar:  10 additional 100 MW utility-scale solar installations and 36 additional 5 MW community solar installations.

Putting last night's votes into perspective, the MEAG solar offering is 80% of one of those utility-scale installations.  And the combined 19 MW purchase by Covington and Oxford represents 2% of the additional utility-scale capacity assumed by Drawdown Georgia in their solution scenarios.

During our solarize campaign, consultants estimated the 85 kW of rooftop solar installed through the campaign would mean 159,460 pounds less carbon being emitted into the atmosphere each year.  Extrapolating that formula, 19 MW of utility-scale solar will result in roughly 35.6 million pounds (or 16,202 metric tons) less carbon emissions annually from electricity generation for our two cities.  This stuff adds up!

We are grateful to MEAG for taking this important initiative and proud of our elected officials and city staffs in Covington and Oxford for stepping up in a big way!  May this only be the beginning of even bigger things to come!!

In March 2019, my husband Billy and I installed 12 solar panels on our roof as part of the Solarize Newton Morgan campaign.  We were super excited to to reduce our carbon footprint, become a little more energy independent, and save money.  Not only did the solarize campaign allow us to get better pricing on installation and materials, but it also did the leg work of choosing a reputable solar installer.  We worked with folks who had already gone solar and others like us who were adding solar for the first time.   It was a great experience. 

Fast forward to today and we can look at the numbers to see how much electricity we're using and how much money we have saved over the last 2+ years. 

By Maurice Carter, Sustainable Newton President

Extreme weather and widespread power outages in Texas are headline news everywhere this week.  As of today, nearly three million customers remain without power, after record-breaking low temperatures and heavy snowfall struck the state.  It's a dangerous situation, and many of us  have friends and/or family directly impacted.

Emotions are frayed and lives remain at risk.  As with any crisis, priority one is restoring power and tending to those in need.  Lessons learned can wait until safety is restored.

But it's a sad reality we must also contend with disinformation about root causes and contributing factors to the energy portion of this crisis.  Specifically, some clean energy naysayers see an opportunity to push a false narrative that these power outages were primarily caused by a wind power failure.  This simply is not true.

For anyone paying even the slightest attention to climate news, these are difficult days not to run screaming from the building.  Then again, this summer, outside is no place to be.

From unprecedented dual hurricanes Laura and Marco striking the US gulf coast last month to the scorching heat and raging wildfires now impacting California and Oregon,  we're inundated with news about extreme weather caused by Climate Change.

Throw in Siberian temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit and collapsing arctic ice shelves in Canada, and it's a little hard to remain hopeful.

OK, nearly impossible.  But, still, hope is not lost.

If you're reading this, climate change is probably already on your mind.  And, if your experience is like mine, chances are good you've had difficulty discussing it with some folks.   Our current climate crisis has been an unwelcome topic in some circles.

Moving past resistance to honest dialog is what tomorrow night's "24 Hours of Reality - Truth in Action"  event is all about.  But, thankfully, the tide is already turning.  I hear it in conversations, and we see it in the very positive response to our Sustainable Newton message. 

But, I was still pleasantly surprised by a report published this week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication declaring:  "Georgia voters broadly support policies to address climate impacts and expand renewable energy in the state, and they want their elected officials to support those policies as well."

Well, this was going to be a final post to wrap up our Solarize Newton-Morgan campaign and tell you all the wonderful things we accomplished with some great local and statewide partners.  More on that further down in this post, but first the really big news: 

Last week, we reported potential good news in Covington, and now it's official.  The Covington City Council voted Monday night to reduce the city’s standby capacity fee for customers with residential solar!!!!  This addresses a substantial roadblock discouraging many Covington residents who wanted to install solar during our campaign.  So, the Solarize Newton-Morgan Campaign is open again for business in Covington.  Residential customers have until the end of November to request a free solar evaluation of their property, with signed contracts due by the end of December.   To sign up or to learn more, visit the campaign website.

This gives customers who purchase their power through the City of Covington the chance to take advantage of bulk purchasing prices for solar and the federal tax credit for 2020. Thanks so much to Mayor Johnston and the City Council for supporting clean, renewable energy options for our community!

Now, about this past year…

When Sustainable Newton partnered with other organizations to launch the Solarize Newton Morgan campaign in the fall of 2018, we were excited to have so many neighbors request a free, no-risk solar evaluation for their property.  By the end of the sign-up period, we had registered 229 property owners interested in considering rooftop or ground-mounted solar.

But, as we worked with our partners Solar CrowdSource and Alternative Energy Southeast (AES) to evaluate each property, we quickly realized we had a problem.  In areas served by utilities like Georgia Power, Snapping Shoals EMC, and Central Georgia EMC, the business case for distributed solar was clear.  Property owners willing to make the upfront investment realized they could save tens of thousands of dollars over the 30-year life of their solar system, usually realizing payback on the investment in eight to ten years.

But, homes and businesses served by municipal electric companies in Covington, Mansfield, and Oxford learned they faced substantial fees on customers with a distributed electric generation capability (solar, wind, hydro, etc.).  These cities purchase power from the Municipal Electric Association of Georgia (MEAG), and MEAG had encouraged its member cities to implement a "standby capacity fee" for distributed generation (DG).  The fee, typically based on the size of the solar system, is designed to collect additional revenue to offset lower power bills presented to solar customers consuming less electricity.  Ostensibly meant to allow these utilities to recover fixed costs to maintain the power grid, the true effect of the fee is to stifle solar adoption in these service areas, by totally destroying the business case and return on investment.