Please join us if you can!
Energy “know-it-all” Mike Winka and Sustainable Princeton’s Executive Director Molly Jones will speak on “The NJBPU New Jersey Community Solar Energy Pilot Program: Bringing Open Access to Solar to Your Neighborhood.”
Mike is a member of the Lawrence Township Green Team, Sustainable Lawrence, and Mercer County Sustainable Coalition and has worked for New Jersey state government for over 38 years. In 2003 he was named Director of the newly organize Office of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (NJBPU). He managed New Jersey’s Clean Energy Program through 2012 and is currently Senior Policy Advisor. Mike assisted in the development and implementation of a number of New Jersey’s Energy Master Plan and worked on the state’s joining in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). At NJDEP he managed the first statewide Sustainability/Greenhouse Gas Action Plan. This was the nation’s first Plan with an economy-wide total greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal. The goals in that Plan were achieved and the economy is still humming along.
Most importantly Mike has worked in developing New Jersey’s solar program. Starting from virtually zero in 2003, this year New Jersey reached a milestone with more than 100,000 solar projects installed in the State. These installations provide almost 5% of the state’s electricity needs. The majority of these systems are installed on homes and businesses. The benefit of these systems is the electric meter to spin backwards, offsetting the energy used onsite. This is called net metering. Because of programs like New Jersey’s solar incentives, solar has achieved a 3-fold reduction is cost since 2003. Today solar is on the verge of being cost effective without incentives just with the benefits of net metering. So today it makes sense for all New Jerseyans to install solar. However not all New Jersey home owners or businesses can put solar on their property.
Molly Jones joined Sustainable Princeton as the Executive Director in January 2017. Previously Molly spent the prior 10 years as a fundraising and non-profit management consultant, contributing to the notable progress of multiple local and California-based non-profits, including the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association, Morven Museum & Garden, Princeton in Latin America, the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Virtual Science Center and the California Science Center. Molly will share community perspective on evaluating the various approach options to bringing Community Solar to your town.
The evening’s presentation will provide a basic understanding to encourage your town’s consideration of entering the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) Community Solar Pilot Program. This new BPU pilot program allows any customer of an electric public utility to participate in a solar project. Unlike a traditional net metered system, the community solar system does not need to be directly connected to the community solar subscriber’s electric system. Instead, the system can be located anywhere in the subscriber’s electric utility service territory. The community solar facility could be on a neighborhood parking lot, a municipal landfill across the state or an industrial warehouse roof shared between commercial and residential customers. It could be on the common space of a condo development or on an affordable housing building, with the power divided among the building’s low- income residents. For further information See http://njcleanenergy.com/renewable-energy/programs/community-solar or https://www.nj.gov/bpu/pdf/rules/14%208%209%20Community%20Solar%20Pilot%20Rule%20Adoption%20-%20Advance%20Draft%2021119.pdf
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