San Francisco’s wildly popular solar rebates are in danger of being cut.  Since 2008, the GoSolarSF initiative has quadrupled the number of solar roofs in San Francisco. The program offers residential rebates of $2000 to $7000 depending on the homeowner’s income.

GoSolarSF is exactly the kind of smart, environmental leadership that makes San Franciscans proud. But the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has proposed cutting the program by 40%. What a shame that would be — with more and more homeowners across California going solar, how tragic it would be for San Francisco to be left behind. Come on PUC, we’re counting on you to show the kind of leadership we’ve come to expect from you.

Learn more about how GoSolarSF has been a net gain for San Francisco’s economy, and sign the petition to save it.

On Tuesday, the California Assembly passed a law requiring utilities to get 33% of their power from renewable energy by 2020.  The 55-19 vote was what you’d have to call a landslide and yet another indicator of the growing power of solar (pardon the pun, but I’m giddy with excitement over the news).  Governor Brown, who campaigned on this very issue, is expected to sign the bill.

The 33% standard is second only to Hawaii, which mandates 40% by 2030. Other states with comparable standards include Colorado and New York, both of which set targets of 30% by 2020 and 2015, respectively.

Thanks to all of you who made your voices heard and to all of the amazing advocacy and industry groups who have been pushing for a more aggressive renewable energy target for years. We will all continue to work together to make our state and our nation a solartopia.

–Erica Etelson

Pretty please with sugar on top… Send your Assemblymember an email telling them how important it is that we get to 33% by 2020.  Thanks!

–Erica Etelson

If you lease panels from Sungevity, you know that the ability to put solar on one’s roof without huge upfront costs is key.  Unfortunately, the Solar Lease is not yet available in all parts of the country.  That’s where the PACE program comes in.

In the last couple of years,  local governments in 25 states have set up Property-Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs as financing mechanisms to help their residents go solar or make major energy efficiency improvements.  The PACE program fronts homeowners the money to install solar and the homeowner pays back the city over 15-20 years through a special assessment on their property tax bills.

Sounds pretty good, right? But here’s the problem: Last July, the Federal Housing Finance Agency told Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stop underwriting mortgages with PACE assessments. Since Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee half of all U.S. mortgages, their policy struck a crippling blow to PACE.

PACE advocates have organized a Congressional policy briefing on February 10: Ask your representatives to attend. Until Sungevity serves all states, homeowners and the planet need PACE.

Sometimes I hate Gallup polls–like the one last year that found a 10% decrease in the number of Americans who believe that the effects of climate change are already being felt.  But sometimes Gallup polls make me smile, like the one that came out last week showing that a whopping 83% of Americans think Congress should pass an energy bill that provides incentives for using solar and other forms of renewable energy.

Such widespread support for federal policy is rare indeed. There’s more of a consensus around solar than around the seven other potential Congressional actions Gallup polled, including getting the heck out of Afghanistan (72%), approving a free trade agreement with South Korea (53%), and expanding drilling and exploration for oil and gas (65%).  There’s still a depressing amount of support for fossil fuels but considerably less than for renewables.  Dare I say the tide is turning?

So if you thought that your conservative Uncle Elroy or your apathetic cousin Fran would never in a million years go solar, think again. What if Uncle Elroy or Cousin Fran knew that they could save money by leasing solar panels? According to Gallup, now’s the time to spread the gospel of the Solar Lease. How many homeowners do you know?

–Erica Etelson

The only way to ensure that every investor-owned utility in California reaches 33% by 2020 is to pass legislation making the requirement crystal clear. Contact your legislators and let them know that 20% isn’t good enough for California and isn’t good enough for the planet.

–Erica Etelson

Our holiday wish came true–Congress voted to extend the Treasury Grant Program (which was set to expire this year) through 2012. This means that, for at least two more years, investors and businesses will have a big tax incentive to go solar, and we can look forward to tens of thousands of new job and the displacement of 4.5 million metric tons of greenhouse gases (the equivalent of taking a million cars off the road for a year).

As more and more Americans become aware of the benefits of solar power, we’re optimistic that, by 2012, Congress will see fit to renew the TGP indefinitely. In the meantime, we’re the grateful green sheep of the energy family — happy to be tossed a few crumbs and prepared to thrive on them and oust the family favorites (coal and gas).

We at Sungevity wish you a sunny holiday aglow with solar-powered LED holidays lights. If you’re not yet a home solar maven, we look forward to converting you in 2011–with the money you’ll save, Christmas 2011 will be festive indeed!

–Erica Etelson

How would you like it if your utility paid you a fair price for all the extra solar energy your rooftop system produced?  Would you be inclined to, say, supersize your system and generate solar power for your neigbhors?  Of course you would!  And that’s why solar advocates have been pushing for years to require utilities to implement Feed-in-Tariffs that would do just that–encourage people to buy more solar than they need and sell the excess back to the utility.

Like many great environmental policy ideas, the Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) is the victim of a disabling blend of political inertia and misinformation.  As this blog has lamented before, FIT critics argue, “Sure, the FIT is great for solar power investors but lousy for everyone else who will have to pay higher utility bills.”

The unfairness argument is sorta true:  Ratepayers without solar will have to pay a little more each month, but the operative word here is “little.”   A report just out about Ontario’s new FIT program (which, by the way, is expected to create 70,000 new jobs) concludes that the average ratepayer will be saddled with an added monthly charge that is less than the cost of one glazed donut (with sprinkles).

Now, maybe baked goods in Canada are pricier than I realize, but I’m guessing the Canuck FIT premium is about the same as the added FIT cost predicted for the proposed FIT program in Los Angeles–48 cents!  Are we really quibbling over 48 cents?  Are we really entertaining the notion that creating thousands of green jobs and curbing climate change isn’t worth 48 cents?  Really?

Kudos to Ontario for making big solar strides…we hope to see FITs rolling out all over North America in the years ahead.

–Erica Etelson

Climate activists and policy wonks are gathered in Cancun this week for the latest round of global climate talks.  Expectations are low.  In the meantime, one bright spot is California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, which survived a fierce oil industry attack in November (Prop 23).  The devil, however, is in the details, and the California Air Resources Board is now in the process of figuring out how exactly carbon emissions will be priced and capped in the Golden State.

One of the pretend solutions to climate change is burning ‘biomass’ to generate electricity instead of fossil fuels.  ‘Biomass” has a pleasant eco-friendly ring to it but, upon closer inspection, it’s a dangerous boondoggle (I’m not sure what exactly a “boondoggle” is but it’s a great word, isn’t it?).  Biomass is any natural material you can burn–food waste, cow poop, crop residue, forest debris.  In certain limited situations, it may make sense–for example, I know a walnut farmer who generates all his own electricity using discarded walnut shells as feedstock.  But, in general, what biomass proponents like to think of as “waste” is actually vitally important materials needed to replenish agricultural soil and forest floors–as these materials decompose (in a compost bin or simply left to slowly rot in the forest), they release nutrients back into the earth. If we interrupt this process by burning these materials, we’re essentially mining nutrients from the earth without replacing them.  That’s a practice with an inevitably ugly endgame.

This just in from sungevity.org partner, the Center for Biological Diversity. If you love your California forests, please help protect them–allowing trees to be clearcut and burned as “biomass” is not the solution to climate change…

On December 16, the California Air Resources Board will consider adopting a cap-and-trade program that would allow industrial polluters to purchase carbon “offset credits” instead of reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions.

Under the current proposal, a large number of those carbon offset credits could come from forest management projects that allow clearcutting. This not only subsidizes the most environmentally damaging logging practices, but also threatens to incentivize the conversion of natural forests into tree farms.

The proposed cap-and-trade rule also would allow industrial polluters to avoid greenhouse gas emissions limits by burning forest “biomass” — including whole, live trees — to generate energy. Biomass combustion would be exempt from the carbon cap, even though the actual greenhouse gas emissions would be even higher than burning fossil fuels.

This not only would encourage the logging of California’s forests to provide fuel for industrial and electrical power generation, but also would risk increasing overall greenhouse gas emissions. Please take one minute today to tell the California Air Resources Board that the cap-and-trade program must not be allowed to threaten forest ecosystems.

–Erica Etelson (with extensive plagiarizing from the Center for Biological Diversity)

The Treasury Grant Program (TGP) is a small, little-known component of the 2009 Recovery Act. TGP provides businesses that invest in renewable energy a 30% cash grant  (parallel to the 30% tax credit tax credit individual taxpayers get when they go solar at home).  But the TGP is set to expire at the end of the year, unless Congress votes to extend it.

The TGP has awarded a total of $396 million for commercial solar projects, and the results are enough to make a coal lobbyist blush:  TGP grants have created 20,000 new jobs, and the funded projects together generate 200 MW of solar electricity.  $396 million is a pittance compared to the $73 billion in subsidies the fossil fuel industries raked in between 2002 and 2008 or the $14 billion for ethanol during that same period.

Extending TGP through 2012 is crucial for ensuring continued growth of solar during the remainder of the recession.  Congress will be voting on this soon so send your senator an e-mail today!  Let’s make sure all the little boys and all the little girls across the land get solar in time for Christmas.

–Erica Etelson