A great way to shrink your carbon footprint

UPDATE (Nov 2021)
We're in our 3rd year as a New York Community Solar customer and I wanted to share a quick real-world update: On average, our panels save about 325kg of CO2 per month - enough for one person to fly one-way from New York to Denver, in Economy. 

Yes, there are definitely some questions¹ here, but I still wanted to do the back-of-the-napkin calculation to see – very approximately – how many months of solar it would take to "earn" one flight.

Google flights recently added a CO2 emissions column to its listings

spreadsheet downloaded from our Community Solar account

==  Original Nov 2019 post:

I fly a lot and yet I absolutely care about the environment. I try to stay big picture and know that my decision to live car-free in a big city and not have children puts me well below the national CO2 average, but still, my flying definitely makes me look for ways I can do more.

When we lived in San Francisco, we installed solar panels on our condominium's roof and had CO2-free power helping to shrink our footprint. But here in New York that just wasn't an option until last year.

Our solar roof install in the heart of San Francisco

Community Solar lets apartment and condo dwellers have solar panels someplace other than where they live. New York recently passed laws enabling it, but it’s taken some time to figure out the right way to make it appealing and accessible to urban dwellers. (California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota all have Community Solar programs, but this is my first-hand experience with New York's).

The simplest approach – where you would spend several thousand dollars buying panels and then pay a property owner to host them – had a lot of drawbacks: what if you move out of state? what if your financial situation is tight? what if you can’t make a multi-year commitment? how do you split your power bill if you have roommates? so a different approach evolved.

Here’s how it works now:

• you sign up for a proposed solar panel project with a community solar organization (CSO for short). The CSO looks over your ConEd bills for the past year and determines how much energy you use and how many panels you’ll need to cover your usage
• when enough other people have signed up (in our case the wait was about 9 months), the CSO builds the project and connects it to the state power grid. The CSO sells this energy to ConEd, and the new laws enable the proceeds from that sale to be credited directly to your residential energy bill from ConEd.
• every month, the CSO connects to your ConEd account to see your actual energy usage and they issue a credit to your ConEd account equal to the amount of the bill. In other words, you still get a ConEd bill but it the amount due will be zero.
• the CSO then sends you a bill for the credits they applied to your ConEd bill. They give you a discount on the amount (it varies, but mine is 10%) – e.g., if your ConEd bill showed $100 of energy usage, you would get a bill from the CSO for $90. (The discount is possible due to renewable tax incentives they’re collecting on your behalf).

Prior to this I was a Green Mountain customer. Their clean energy packages all cost more than ConEd's standard rates, and ever since they were acquired by NRG back in 2010 I can’t help but wonder how much of that price premium is actually resulting in new renewables being built.

With Community Solar, your sign-up directly causes new solar panels to be added to the New York state grid. In our specific case, 89 of us caused 1190 panels to be installed in Brooklyn, near the Van Siclen Avenue J train stop. For me, that feels a lot more concrete and "real" than just purchasing a bunch of carbon offsets.

I also love the fact that program was designed to be accessible to people of all income levels – there's no upfront cost and the minimum contract duration is small – 12 to 24 months depending on which project you join. It also has a cool dashboard to see how much energy your panels have made as well as how much money and CO2 you've saved. We've just finished our first full month and it's all working as promised. I'll keep this page updated if anything interesting happens.

We went through GoCDG to sign up, and our panels are in the Big Apple Solar array. NYSERDA has an informative overview of community solar here.

¹ For example: If I believe all energy everywhere should be 100% renewable, seems dubious to "count" the carbon I would have emitted if we were ConEd customers. Also, I could save a lot of carbon by flying Economy instead of Business Class, 'cuz as the old rule goes, "more comfort usually means more carbon." But in practice I only do that about half of the time. Further, lots of people try to make the argument "well the plane's flying anyway, I'm just taking an otherwise-empty seat, but I think Covid has shown us that if lots of people stop buying tickets, magically a bunch of planes will stop flying, too.