The community solar provisions are promising, said Kate Daniel, Northeast director for the Coalition for Community Solar Access, an industry group. The current program is limited in scope and, unlike community solar incentives in other states, operates through competitive procurement. That poses a challenge for developers, who must spend time and money on proposals for jobs that they may not get.
Community solar developer Altus Power is based in Connecticut, for example, but hasn’t done much work there because of this dynamic.
“Connecticut has historically been a more challenging market for Altus Power, largely due to policy design and evolving program structures that have made it harder to achieve consistent, scalable project economics,” said Justin Biltz, Altus’ head of policy and government affairs.
The mandate to create a successor program will give community solar companies and supporters a fresh chance to advocate for an approach that will bolster the industry in the long term, Daniel said.
“We think there is potential and opportunity there for a much larger and more robust market with broader participation,” she said. “This opens the door.”
Together, the residential, commercial, and community solar programs will be subject to an $85 million maximum annual spending target. Like many other provisions of the legislation, this part could’ve been worse, solar advocates said.
Originally, the number was proposed as a hard cap, but renewable energy supporters were able to convert it into a softer ceiling: When the limit is reached, it will be up to state regulators to decide whether to extend or modify the program. Residential systems that include storage and are determined to benefit all Connecticut utility customers won’t count toward the cap.
The cap “was ultimately something we didn’t love but could live with,” said Kyle Wallace, senior director of public policy for Sunrun, a residential solar and storage company. The exception for installations with batteries, however, has “created a policy environment where storage can really thrive.”
Other provisions could have a more negative effect on solar development. The law includes a one-year moratorium on solar farms in two towns, East Windsor and Enfield, that are already home to an outsize proportion of the state’s solar capacity. East Windsor recently filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s approval of a 150-acre expansion to an existing solar farm in the town. Though the ban is temporary and geographically limited, it signals to developers that Connecticut could change the rules at any time, taking away opportunities they’ve invested time and money in, Renew Northeast’s Pullaro said.
“That’s just ridiculous,” he said. “It’s a terrible precedent.”
Beyond what ended up in the final measure, some of the proposals lawmakers considered raised even more questions about how serious Connecticut is about incentivizing solar.
Some bills threw up obstacles in the form of soil-testing and fire-safety requirements that some officials and industry interests say were unnecessarily broad. Another would’ve altered the rules governing the Connecticut Siting Council, the body that approves large-scale solar projects statewide, by requiring that its decisions comply with the preferences of individual municipalities. It would, in essence, have allowed cities and towns to veto solar projects, undermining the purpose of a statewide siting board, Pullaro said.
The bill Lamont ended up signing avoids the most extreme of these proposals. And most say it points Connecticut’s solar policy in roughly the right direction. The results, though, depend in large part on how regulators implement what lawmakers laid out.
“On balance, it should move the industry forward, with the big caveat that there’s a lot of process at PURA now to determine how the new programs will work,” Sunrun’s Wallace said. “They have a lot of wiggle room.”
