No less a personage than Arnold Schwarzenegger blasted a proposal that would increase electricity costs for rooftop solar-power generators, arguing that this was no time to erect barriers to green energy, given California’s record droughts and catastrophic wildfires. The former governor caught everyone’s attention with his detailed critique, which was launched from the editorial pages of the New York Times, 3,000 miles away from his intended target: the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC).
“The model as proposed pounds the nail into the coffin of any rooftop solar,” Alelia Parenteau said. She leads the City of Santa Barbara’s Clean Energy program, through which the city buys green, carbon-free energy to power the electricity grid and plans the city’s solar micro-grid-based future.
Already, 1.3 million California rooftops host solar arrays, “supplying 9 percent of the state’s electricity in 2020, more than nuclear and coal put together,” said John Perlin, who advised on UC Santa Barbara’s first solar installations. About 1,700 of those rooftops are in Santa Barbara. With land scarce and the city mostly built out, rooftops are the best and only location for local green power, Parenteau said, adding that the proposed rules would cause the city’s programs to lose their economic viability. Her office had identified 35,000 suitable rooftops that, if they contained solar arrays, could meet the city’s electricity demand through rooftop solar alone.