Vermont Legislature SmartTranscripts:

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Okay, all right. This is Wednesday, January 7. This is set at Natural Resources and Energy and we have an interesting combination of topics today. Our original plan to have hearings about the impact from federal actions on Vermont was unfortunately not able to happen today because a lot of people were not available. So in somewhat short order, able to backfill some of the time with other topics, so we will likely be done early today, as we were not able to, I think, feel all the time, but who knows, maybe people will be chatty. We'll see, we'll find out. But we are going to start with Mr. Eddardly Walsh, who did not get to testify yesterday. So on the portable solar bill, S202, so welcome.

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: Thank you. For the record, I've been Julie Walsh with the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. As the chair said, I'm here this morning to testify on the on the board of solar as a concept and s two zero two as a bill. I'm going to share my screen here.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Screen. I don't know.

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: So you'll be hearing from me slightly later in the morning on a different type of solar. But right now, we're talking about the very small, I almost I would consider them microsolar rays that you heard about yesterday, BrightSaber. So I want to get into, you know, obviously you've heard a lot about the technology, the sort of national picture, what's going on internationally on this. So I wanted to take my time to sort of ground this in the context here in Vermont and why in particular we feel like this is a very good solution for Vermont that adds a really important sort of additional component to the solar market that, you know, is not really being served right now. So you know the first thing I want to just touch on briefly, well actually one logistical note, we do actually have one of these systems or sort of two of these systems. We have one with the battery that is actually integrated into it with the inverter, and then we have another that's just the inverter along with a small solar panel, and the hope is that we can briefly go outside and actually take a look at those today so you can get a sense of what these things actually are. The other thing I wanted to just note before we dive into portable solar more specifically, and you'll hear a little bit more about this when we're talking about some larger, more traditional solar arrays later this morning, is obviously the national context right now is solar more broadly is under attack, the tax credits for residential solar in particular are gone as of six days ago after having been in place for a couple of decades. Obviously Oracle Solar doesn't solve that, it can change that, but it does open up a new avenue to go solar, and as per yesterday, you go solar in a way that is more affordable, obviously smaller as well, but even copper, copper, and white, more affordable once it scales up than traditional rooftop solar. So not something that can replace it, but something that is a very good complement and sort of get people's feet wet even without that residential tax credit. So why horrible flooding solar? And this is a big poll thanks for a reason. This is why asked. For us, that's why we're excited about this technology and this bill as legislation. This is not fundamentally for us about getting a lot more solar on land. This is a bill obviously that's related to climate change, but that is not the primary reason to do this. Maybe sort of drift by drift this will add up over time, that's the hope that's what Germany has seen over about a decade of experience with this, but it's not something that's going to happen overnight. Really this is about giving people who right now have literally no options to go solar something that they can do. So I want to dive into that a little bit more, sort of like who right now cannot go solar? So renters are the most obvious category, there are other categories, I'll touch on them, but renters are the most obvious category. Right here what you're seeing is some information around income of renters in Vermont. So on the left, that pie chart, the top left, the light blue, that is renters above area median, above the average. As you can see, that's about one in four renters. About three quarters of renters in Vermont are below median income, and then on the right there's a little bit more detail there, but the sort of bottom line for that part of this slide is the median income for renters is less than half of the median income for homeowners. Now none of this is surprising, there are a lot of other, well, things that you might want to do from a policy perspective because of this information, but from an energy standpoint when we're talking about solar, which is a technology that obviously is great because it's clean energy, but it also has the potential to save people money on their electric bills, which obviously have been going up in recent years, and we're seeing strong upward pressure nationally on electric bills providing some opportunity for these predominantly low income Vermonters to go solar, and right now they have no options, makes a lot of sense to us. If we don't have options for lower income Vermonters to go solar, then fundamentally what we're doing is we're providing more options for upper 50 people to save money and fewer options for lower income people to save money. So one of the many, many things that you could add to the pile, the kind of high cost of being poor idea. So I'm going to get a little bit more into demographics and then just share a few thoughts on this technology more generally, but I want to just give a little bit of background on sort of how we got here, we ended up in a place where there just are no options for renters, for people in condos generally, for people whose neighbor has a large tree and it has like a little spot on their side yard, but not enough for a traditional solar array. For whatever reason, you are not a homeowner, you cannot go solar. So there was a moment in Vermont where there were actually options for people in that situation where we had virtual off-site group net metering, community solar it's often called in the middle of our last decade, that was actually becoming pretty common. There was language in Act 99 of 2014, the authorizing legislation for the current version of net metering that gave the PUC authority to design the program that directed the PUC to ensure that all customers who want to participate in net metering have the opportunity to do so. That's a direct vote from the legislation. We strongly disagree with some of the decisions the agency made, but that's ancient history at this point. What they did in practice with them did not actually ensure that all customers can go solar because they again not they did not technically bar that kind of arrangement, but they made it economically infeasible and so those kinds of arrays became very rare as opposed to more and more. And so this doesn't solve them, it's not something that everyone in this situation is going to be able to take advantage of. I don't know the exact number, you know, ten, twenty, 30% of people in that situation will be able to do this, but it's a lot more than zero which is where we're at now. It's sort of solo wherever it can fit, and you know for some renters it's just a side yard, you know you're renting a mobile home, you can put it up front, you have a small balcony or back deck that's available to you and you can pop a couple of solar panels up. If you have access to an exterior plug, this potentially is an option for you. The other thing that I wanted to touch on just on demographics is there's also an element of inequity from a racial standpoint here. This is I know a very busy slide. All this data, the last slide and the next one as well, are from the Vermont Housing Needs Assessment, mostly US census data. So you're looking at Native American from the left to the right, Asian, Black or African American, a couple of other categories that are not as specific, and then white. And the broad take home from this is obviously every racial category that's tracked has, other than white, has a lower homeownership rate than white homeowners. It's fantastic that three quarters of white homeowners own their homes, I'd love to see that number higher, but when we're talking about structural inequality, and you're in a situation where we have a cost saving technology that is not available to cap of Native American Vermonters, three quarters of Black Vermonters, that reinforces that structural inequality rather than unbinding. And then just a little bit more on the category in the last slide, Black or African American households, because that is the of the tracked category is the lowest homeownership rate. I just want to underscore that a little bit because, and I didn't get the exact rank, but Vermont is consistently the lowest or among the lowest states for Black households as a percentage of homeownership among Black households. So here you have The US percentage, obviously this is a trend nationally, a concern nationally, but in Vermont, we have substantially fewer African American households owning a home and having this sort of technology available to them. Okay. So just a little bit more on just buzzing through this, why to do this, and then I wanna talk briefly about the solutions. If you have any questions, you may have to answer them, and then hopefully, you can go see one of these systems. So why this sort of plug in solar? Obviously it makes solar more accessible to people who are shut out today. You have no or in some cases limited electrical work as you heard yesterday, there's some policy decisions around that for you to consider no or low soft costs, obviously that lowers total costs, and you're talking about technologies that are trending downwards in price over time, so this potentially could be very low cost for people. It allowed people to try out solar, a lot of those renters are going to own homes someday. If they have a panel or two on their balcony, maybe they get a ray on their roof when they own a home later in life. It complements traditional solar well, obviously renters can take systems with them when they go, which is a big barrier right now, even if your landlord says, yeah, go over to solar, who's going to pay $10,000 to upgrade their landlord's house moving back to your kid. And then lastly, I think of this as a way to get people a little bit of solar. It's also a way to give people a little bit of resilience. So renters right now who you could buy a battery system, plug it into your wall, and have that back up if there's a power outage, but you have an emergency parking once the power's out. What these systems allow is once the power goes out you can unplug it from the wall, keep it plugged into the solar, and then charge not charge power your fridge or something like that off of it. The small unit you'll see that we have is about 40 pounds. The way it works is you plug it inside and you plug in whatever you need to charge, it's enough that little system is enough battery for a fridge for a day or two, a typical household refrigerator, not like many months, and if you sort of bring the solar cord through the window you potentially charge it or power it for many days, And that's something that really just isn't available to renters and other people in the situation. Maybe

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: we'll see this one when we take our little mini field trip, but how affordable are they? Like if you're moving, how do they fold up? Is it easy to sit with them?

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: Yeah, so they need it depends on the solar panels you get. A typical sort of residential solar panel is about three feet by about four feet. I can fit one in the back of my Super Forester, but I sort of need to move the front seat up until the light room is not terribly comfortable, but you can certainly fit in the back of a pickup truck at a U Haul, no problem. So that would be the max, the 1,200 watts that you were talking about, that's three of those panels, it's a 400 watt panel. Okay. You can get foldable panels, that's common you know sort of camping setup. You can also get smaller rigid panels, that's what we will show you today, and that's it's 200 watts, it's about half that size, so about two feet by three feet. And so if you're talking about one of the smaller arrays that Cora mentioned yesterday under that roughly 400 watt threshold, you'd get a 200 watt panel probably at 175, and you'd have like two panels sort of above the yay big, those in back here.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: And they're not, are they covered full, are they?

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: They're, I mean you don't want to abuse them, but they're the same kinds of panels that you could put up on a roof, so they have to be rated to deal with hail. Yeah, so that might not be true for the smaller foldable panels that they wouldn't have the same standards that they need to meet, but that's obviously a consideration when you're purchasing them. Anyway, the solution here and this is one of the reasons we're really excited about this. It's not something that costs money, it's not something they need to be on an application for, you don't need to, like, start a new program, we basically just need to get the government out of the way. It's not incredibly onerous to go solar in Vermont right now, but there's a waiting period, there's a small fee, there's a permit and application for interconnection. We've done a lot, the legislature's done a lot in Vermont to make solar fairly easy to get for smaller traditional residential systems. But you're talking about a system that's a tenth or twentieth, like five to 10% of the size of a traditional rooftop array, and so from our perspective, why would we have somebody buy them and sit in their garage for fifteen days and then target them? That's kind of silly, it's an unnecessary barrier, and when you're talking about something that is trying to be as plug and play as possible, any additional barrier you're adding makes it much less likely that it's really going scale. It's going to be something that a lot of people are doing. So no augmentations, current fees, wait time, permission, buy it, plug it in, you're good. As long as it's certified UL, we know it's safe, so let's just let it happen. That's what I got. Summer. Let me try to confirm. Whichever word. Yes. Yes. The system is outside as of the military.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Fantastic. So the plan is to head outside to check out one of these systems. We will go offline for that portion of our morning. But before we do that, any questions for, I mean before we do? Yes, go ahead.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Do you think it's, I'm just thinking of the, maybe that's related to you today, but the picture where the, you know it's on a patio you know I think of that as a big sale waiting in Catchall Gado and yeah Are there requirements to, like, weigh these things down or recommend are they having it up on their own that that's not a concern? The

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: large panel that I described at 400 watt is about 40 pounds. So mean, in a very severe windstorm you could You imagine being a could make a policy decision to have some language about that, obviously. Don't Utah's legislation does not have anything like that, I don't know if there's anything like that.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: With your stated remark, typically.

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: Yeah, and I mean I guess I would say and yeah, this policy decision about how prescriptive do you want to be People are buying something that is affordable but you know still hundreds to a few couple thousand dollars, so I would bet that most people who buy one of these are not just going to like toss it on their lawn. Maybe not everyone though, so it's a valid question.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: But there are also people have grills, people have porch furniture, all these things that could catch on the wind, so we don't have rules that require people to That's quite a

[Unidentified Committee Member]: sale to put a big

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yeah, mean that's fair, in a windstorm one time where I couldn't get our umbrella down on our porch, it's a sale.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: It a actually caught the table with it and smashed the table. So, you know, like things like that happen.

[Ben Edgerly Walsh (Vermont Public Interest Research Group)]: They do.

[Sen. Anne Watson (Chair)]: Yeah. But one of the things that I would be interested in when you go out to check out this system is like, and maybe this won't be, attached to the panel as it is, but like, how do you attach it? Like, are there places for there like brackets or Yeah. Just that it can be attached, like it can be anchored.

[Unidentified Committee Member]: Yes. Try to think about it. I'm sure you want.