In today’s budget climate, cities and towns across the Midwest are highly motivated to explore a variety of options to reduce their operating costs. Solar energy has caught the attention of many local governments as a compelling solution to lower their energy expenditures.
Here are four benefits municipalities can experience by going solar, and how your community can get started exploring the possibility of going solar.
Cost Savings
Solar is now cheaper than buying power from the grid in most places across the country. Since 2010, solar costs have fallen more than 60 percent, and are expected to drop another 35 percent by 2022. While the cost of solar energy continues to fall, electricity costs are on the rise. Municipalities can reduce their costly electric bills by producing their own electricity through solar panels. Those savings can be reinvested back into budgets where its needed.
Increasingly, towns and cities are taking a comprehensive approach to solar, and are strategically evaluating their portfolio of publicly-owned buildings, land, and parking lots to meet their financial and renewable energy goals.
Economic Development
Installing solar panels on one or more of their buildings can help municipalities jump-start the local clean energy economy. Municipalities can boost local clean energy employment by opting to work with local contractors for installation. Municipalities can pair their solar installation with updates to their internal solar permitting practices. This can signal to the community that your municipality is committed to growing the local clean energy economy.
Creating Jobs
The solar industry employs twice as many people as the entire coal industry, employing more than 250,000 people. As many Americans work in solar as in natural gas. Solar jobs are diverse, ranging from installation to manufacturing to sales and marketing. Municipalities can fuel solar job creation in their local community by installing solar on one or more of their buildings.
Going Green
Installing solar can help your municipality meet its sustainability goals by decreasing its consumption of fossil fuel-powered electricity and offsetting its carbon emissions. As battery technology drops in price, many municipalities are considering solar plus storage to use during power outages. These projects are typically designed to protect the most vulnerable citizens in times of crises.
How Your Municipality Can Get Started Today
The first step is to explore a solar power purchase agreement (PPA). A solar PPA is an innovative financial structure which eliminates the top barrier to a nonprofit going solar – access to upfront capital. At Telamon Energy Solutions, we help you pair with a local interested nonprofit or school with a private solar investor, who can take advantage of federal tax programs not available to the nonprofit. The investor will purchase and build a solar array at the nonprofit’s location, and then sells the solar power generated from that array to the nonprofit.
At Telamon Energy Solutions, our focus is on supporting the planning, management, and solar energy generation for municipalities while helping to develop a clear customized government energy strategy tailored to your needs--including PPAs. We streamline system installation, and eliminate the confusion and difficulty of working with multiple subcontractors, by using our own highly trained team of professional solar technicians on every project.
Request Telamon Energy Solutions to perform a free energy assessment of your municipality today.