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