January 21, 2009
You already know you’re a solar citizen; how would you like to be a solar hero?
You could do what ordinary townspeople have started to do around the country: make the case to their town government that their municipal buildings would benefit from being powered with photovoltaics. And that benefit would extend to the entire town.
If you can get on your town’s agenda for half an hour, we’ll help you do the rest. And you don’t have to be an expert in solar power, electrical engineering, or public finance, either; just a citizen. (more…)
January 20, 2009
A new way of paying for solar installations just launched in Berkeley, CA could well spread to the rest of the country before long. The idea, known in the Californian city as Berkeley FIRST*, sold out its first round of financing within nine minutes in November!
Berkeley FIRST is a financing mechanism that allows participants to install a PV array on their home without having to find the capital for it in advance. Instead, the city pays for system purchase and installation (some $28,000), and the property owner reimburses the city, typically over a period of twenty years, through extra property tax payments. And while the total payments will eventually exceed the overall cost of the installation, those payments will be largely offset by savings the owner enjoys in his electricity bills.
Cisco DeVries, chief of staff to Berkeley mayor Tom Bates when the program was conceived, noted that solar installations were not happening fast enough to help the city reach its climate change goals. “We needed to find a way to help people finance solar and energy efficiency programs in a way that eliminated the high upfront cost,” said DeVries. (more…)
January 7, 2009
Among the many superlatives that applied to 2008 was that of the election year that made most use of Internet-based communications. That’s not to say it was the first election in which campaign literature was distributed via the web; it was more than that. In 2008 every candidate in the country had a website, blogs both well-known and obscure filled the ether with information and opinion, news sites of all stripes told us of candidates’ speeches before their echoes died away, and advocacy groups (including Solar Nation) turned issue-specific spotlights on incumbents’ records.
In some instances we, the citizens, were invited to submit our ideas, fears, questions and suggestions directly to candidates’ sites; in the case of the President-elect’s transition team site, this process is still continuing in its ‘Open for Questions’ feature. And assuming the transition organization is not just paying lip service to the ideal of citizen interaction, this feature holds promise for a government that truly interacts with its people—round one of ‘Open for Questions’ received nearly one million votes from its audience.
It’s unlikely that many of those citizens who’ve submitted their thoughts and opinions to change.gov believe that their ideas will be picked up whole and turned into executive orders by the new Administration, so we’re bound to ask what value they think will accrue to them from the exercise. And that question can be enlarged to address the whole subject of grass roots advocacy: what is its value, and how—if at all—does it affect the legislative process? How much notice do regulators and legislators take of mass communications sent to them from the public via advocacy groups? For those of us in the non-profit advocacy world it’s a supremely important question; our raison d’être depends on these questions having some sort of robustly positive answer.
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