Solar Energy

The city's climate action plan recommends demystifying solar and renewable energy systems by offering workshops for homeowners to help them better understand types of systems available, what to consider when selecting a system, and available financing and incentives (p. 30). The plan urges the city to promote the use of renewable energy systems, stating that the city is a particularly good location for use of solar energy (p. 30). The city also plans to provide education to the community on the use of renewable energy and identification of opportunities where feasible to develop small-scale, distributed energy (e.g., solar energy) to reduce the amount of electricity drawn from the regional power grid (p. 31). The plan addresses hurdles to solar and energy efficiency installation that state and federal subsidies did not address: high up-front costs and risk associated with recovering those costs, and how they have been addressed through AB 811 (p. 31). The City has plans to develop and implement an AB 811-type financing district which would allow the city to offer property owners financing for solar PV and renewable energy sytems (p. 32). The plan has a table that includes solar figures. If the City installs 1500 kW of solar it will result in a reduction of 1.096 metric tons of CO2e (p. 34).