How to run your house on clean electricity, no solar panels required

Source: The Washington Post  |  By Emma Foehringer Merchant

For many Americans, rooftop solar panels just aren’t an option, whether that’s because they live in apartment buildings, their homes are too shaded, or they don’t qualify to lease or finance them. Even homeowners who can have panels may be intimidated by the process of finding the right supplier or the decades-long contract commitment that comes with the equipment.

Though these options — called community solar and community choice aggregation — are steadily growing in popularity, they’re still relatively obscure for the average consumer. When they’re done well, they offer users greener energy at a lower cost than the electricity provided by big utilities. But the power system is complicated, and finding the right program — and understanding exactly what type of electricity you’re buying — requires some research. “It’s hard for most customers to know what’s really meaningful,” says Matthew Freedman, staff attorney at the Utility Reform Network in California.

Still, customers should ask about the projects that their CCA counts as renewable electricity, says Freedman, the attorney at the Utility Reform Network. Some utilities and CCAs contract with nearby wind and solar sources. Others buy renewable energy credits from faraway projects, which have much less of an effect than investing in new renewable projects constructed nearby.

“There’s no guarantee that an individual CCA is going to have a superior environmental footprint to the utility,” Freedman says. “The key thing for people to focus on is: … How much new infrastructure has the CCA created that generates clean electricity?”