May 4 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Laura Snider Daily Camera, Boulder, Colo.



By late this year, Coloradans will be able to generate solar power to offset their electricity use without installing photovoltaic panels on their roofs, or even on their properties.

A bill sponsored by state Rep. Claire Levy, D-Boulder, that allows for "community solar gardens" passed both houses of the Colorado General Assembly last week and is on its way to the governor, who supports the legislation.

The idea behind House Bill 1342, which was backed heavily by the city of Boulder, is to allow people who can't put solar panels on their houses or businesses to buy into community solar installations. These so-called solar gardens will offer subscribers the same benefits as people who install the panels on their roofs, including access to rebates and tax incentives. Solar garden subscribers will also see the electricity produced by their share of the panels show up as a credit on their electricity bills.

"I'm really excited that this is passed, and I think that once the governor signs it and people start thinking about all the ways that solar garden opportunities can be used, I think that interest is really going to take off," Levy said.

 Levy originally imagined that solar gardens would be used mostly by renters, condo owners and people whose homes have shady roofs or a poor orientation to the sun. But in the months since she introduced HB 1342, Levy said she's heard all kinds of creative ideas for using the gardens. For example, the installations would offer an alternative to owners of historic homes concerned about damaging their roofs, or farmers who want to offset the electricity used for their irrigation pumps.

The city of Boulder hopes that the ability to subscribe to a solar garden will increase the amount of renewable energy used in town.

"Meeting Boulder's aggressive climate action goals requires participation from as broad a number of city residents as possible," Carl Castillo, policy advisor for the city, said in an e-mail. "HB 1342 moves us in this direction by expanding opportunities for ownership in distributed solar generation by residents and businesses that cannot access rooftop generation for a variety of reasons."

But despite the fact that the bill's supporters have always said solar gardens will help expand the market for photovoltaics, the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association, which includes many solar installers in Boulder County, expressed concern

over the early versions of the bill.

The association argued that some of the wording in the legislation would create competition between rooftop solar and solar gardens -- ultimately hurting small solar businesses and favoring commercial-scale solar installers. It also argued the bill might have the unintended consequence of reducing the total amount of solar installed in Colorado each year.

Some of the language was changed in the final version of the bill to respond to these concerns.

"There's no question that today's solar gardens bill is a big improvement over the original bill," said Neal Lurie, CoSEIA's executive director.

The governor is expected to sign the bill within the next six weeks, and the Public Utilities Commission is expected to begin hammering out details for the program in September.

Contact Camera Staff Writer Laura Snider at 303-473-1327 or sniderl@dailycamera.com.

Solar gardens guidelines

Though the Colorado Public Utilities Commission will still have to outline some of the specifics of how solar gardens will work, House Bill 1342, which cleared the Legislature last week, gives a broad structure of how installations will work.

Solar gardens must be owned by 10 or more customers.

Those customers cannot purchase more than 120 percent or the average amount of electricity they use each year.

The solar system cannot be larger than 2 megawatts, and the utility does no have to purchase power from more than 6 megawatts of solar gardens per year for the first three years of the program.

During the first two years, 3 megawatts of that power must come from smaller solar gardens that have a capacity of 500 kilowatts or less.

Subscribers must live in the same county where the solar garden is built, unless the county has a population of fewer than 20,000 people. If subscribers move to another address in the same county, they can transfer their subscription to their new address.

The electricity generated by a subscriber's share of a solar garden can be credited to his overall electricity bill.

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