{"id":40,"date":"2013-03-10T17:23:22","date_gmt":"2013-03-10T21:23:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/solar-dublin-high-school-groundbreaking-tomorrow.html"},"modified":"2013-03-10T17:23:22","modified_gmt":"2013-03-10T21:23:22","slug":"solar-dublin-high-school-groundbreaking-tomorrow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2013\/03\/solar-dublin-high-school-groundbreaking-tomorrow.html","title":{"rendered":"Solar Dublin High School groundbreaking tomorrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\n<\/a>\nDublin gets the jump on the rest of Georgia again:\nDublin High School will get a megawatt of solar electricity\nthrough a lease agreement with a private company\nusing local government bonds to get around Georgia’s special financing problem.\n<\/p>\n

\nKenny Burgamy reported for for 13wmaz.com Thursday,\n\nSolar Plant To Be Located at Dublin High<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nDublin High School of Dublin City Schools will soon implement\n1 megawatt of solar energy.\n<\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\nThe 4,000 panel solar power plant will be the largest in Central\nGeorgia and is expected to save the school 40 percent in energy\ncosts.\n<\/p>\n

\nDublin City Schools Superintendent Chuck Ledbetter told 13WMAZ, “The\nfacility will be built and owned by private business and the school\nsystem will lease the solar power plant, saving us money in energy\ncosts.”\n<\/p>\n

\nThe original plan was developed more than 15-months ago by German\nbased MAGE SOLAR, which has a plant located in Laurens County.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThe story has been carried by\nGPB<\/a>\nby\nAthens Banner-Herald<\/a> via AP.\n<\/p>\n

This installation is similar to but slightly different from\n\n\n\n<\/a>\n\nthe 6.1 MW solar installation at Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.<\/a>\nIt’s also similar to and different in the same way from\n\nwhat Dr. Sidney Smith has been doing near Savannah.<\/a>\nSame similarities to and differences from what I’ve been recommending for\n\nSolar Lowndes High<\/a>, where you can see plenty of rooftop and parking lot\nroom for solar panels.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe difference is the financing:\ninstead of private financing, like in New Jersey,\nLiz Buckthorpe of\nWRBL.com<\/a>\nidentified the source:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nDublin City Schools announced Tuesday that bonds from the\nDublin-Laurens Development Authority will finance the plan to make\nDublin High School middle Georgia’s largest solar power provider.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nAnd Dublin-Laurens County has a press release:\n\nGroundbreaking for Dublin High School Solar Project<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n\n\"Groundbreaking<\/a>\nPlease join Dublin Schools Superintendent Dr. Chuck Ledbetter,\nPublic Service Commissioners: Laurens “Bubba” McDonald, Doug\nEverett, and Tim Echols for a groundbreaking ceremony for the new\nSolar PV-Project at Dublin City High School on Monday, March 11th\nfrom 3pm to 4:15pm at the Dublin High School Auditorium located at\n1127 Hillcrest Parkway, Dublin, Georgia.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nSo who is the “private business” that will build and own the solar installation?\nIn muddled marketing typical of\n\nGeorgia Solar Utilities (GaSU)<\/a>,\nthere’s\n\na facebook event by GaSU<\/a>,\nyet I’m told (by Ted Terry) that the company involved\nwith the Dublin high school project is actually\nGaSU CEO Robert Green’s other company,\n\nGreenavations Power, Inc.,<\/a>\nand neither company website appears to have anything about this event.\nHowever,\n\nthe flyer from Dublin<\/a>\ndoes name Greenavations.\n<\/p>\n

\nI’m all for GaSU’s blows-against-the-empire efforts to go around\nGeorgia Power in deploying solar power (unless they end up interfering\nwith distributed rooftop solar), but I wonder if secrecy and confusion\nare really helping, considering actually none of this seems to be a secret.\n<\/p>\n

\nDr. Smith last year already set up a\n\nGeorgia Energy Trust Fund<\/a>\nwith bonds whose interest goes to a county, so as to decrease expenses.\nSure, those are Georgia bonds, bought by Dr. Smith’s company.\nThis Dublin deal uses bonds floated by the local governments.\n<\/p>\n

\nBut there’s nothing new in that idea, either. As readers of this\nblog know, bonds have financed the local county palace here,\nan expansion of the hospital, and numerous other things.\nI have explicitly pointed out\n\nin the context of financing regional Internet service<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\n“Any or all of the local city governments, the Lowndes County\nCommission, or the Industrial Authority can float bonds.”\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nRegarding solar power,\n\nI remarked<\/a>,\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nValdosta or Lowndes County could do a loan program for real clean\nrenewable energy! or the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial\nAuthority (VLCIA) could do that using some of its $15 million in\nbonds and other debt, assuming it hasn’t already spent all of it on\nlocking up land.\n<\/p>\n

\nOr Georgia Power or Colquitt Electric could do that,\ngiven that dozens of other electric utilities around the state already do.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nRegarding that VLCIA land,\nI even pointed out in the local newspaper that\n\nVLCIA could raise money without issuing more bonds<\/a>:\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nMaybe some of the 577 acres of mostly unused land VLCIA bought with\n$15 million in bonds could be sold, since many of the lots are too\nsmall to trade to incoming industries….\n<\/p>\n

\nYou could help lead the region in the fastest growing industry in\nthe world. With two solar PV manufacturers in Georgia plus south\nGeorgia sun, rooftop solar can bring jobs from delivery, to\ninstallation, to architects, to professors to study renewable energy\nthroughout the region.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nNow I didn’t write those things about bonds because I’m a financial expert:\nI’m not.\nI wrote them because they’re so obvious anybody familiar with local\ngovernments already knows them.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nSure, GaSU has very sophisticated models of how to raise and use bonds\nfor financing solar projects,\n\nas Robert Green described at length in Savannah in December<\/a>.\nBut it’s not as if Georgia Power and Southern Company don’t\n\nalready know a thing or two about bonds<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nI hear GaSU’s bill to simplify this sort of thing is expected to\nappear in both houses of the Georgia legislature this week,\npossibly also tomorrow.\nI guess we’ll see what’s in it.\n<\/p>\n

\nHowever, I still get the same answer to the question\nI asked back in November:\n\nGaSU wins at GA PSC, but will GaSU help all of us win in the legislature?<\/a>\nSpecifically, would GaSU help pass \nSB 51<\/a>\n\n<\/a>\nto do what Dr. Smith and others have been trying to do:\n\nenable a commodity market in solar power<\/a> where you or I could get\nprivate financing (from SolarCity or local banks or wherever)\nto put up solar panels and sell the excess through the grid to Atlanta\nor points north, with our local utility taking a cut?\nThe answer appears to remain no, GaSU is not interested in that.\nAnd\n\nSB 51 never made it to a floor vote<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\nNow once again I admire Robert Green’s demonstrated ability to\nget around that antique 1973 Georgia\n\nTerritorial Electric Service Act<\/a>\nthat is the source of all this trouble with solar financing.\nAnd yes, he seems quite good with financial projection spreadsheets.\nBut there’s nothing special about the general idea of local governments\nfloating bonds to support local services.\n<\/p>\n

\nAnd I must once again applaud Dublin and Laurens County for doing\nwhat Valdosta and Lowndes County hadn’t even thought of.\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nBut I still don’t see how GaSU’s plan to form a solar monopoly\nfor Georgia or even this Greenavations plan for high schools\naddresses\n\nthe need for jobs in rural Georgia<\/a>\nand the need for electrical bills reduced at houses and businesses.\nSure, reducing how much revenue a school district needs to raise\nwill eventually maybe lower local taxes.\nBut there are much more direct paths like what Houston is doing with\nweatherizing, insulating, and solarizing all houses in a neighborhood\nthat agree to get it done.\nHow does the GaSU approach help with that?\nAnd if GaSU actually succeeds in establishing a solar utility monopoly\nfor Georgia, won’t that impede rooftop solar?\n<\/p>\n

\n\n<\/a>\nHint: bonds could be used to raise the money for such services,\nperhaps delivered through\nenergy efficiency rebates and loans like Austin,\nTexas is doing.<\/a>\nAs San Antonio, Texas has realized,\n\nRooftop solar is the most direct route to clean energy industries<\/a>.\nIt would be nice to hear GaSu or Greenavations address these issues\ninstead of shrugging them off as somebody else’s problem.\n<\/p>\n

\nMeanwhile, congratulations to Greenavations, MAGE Solar, Dublin, and Laurens County for getting this one done!\n<\/p>\n

\n-jsq\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dublin gets the jump on the rest of Georgia again: Dublin High School will get a megawatt of solar electricity through a lease agreement with a private company using local government bonds to get around Georgia’s special financing problem. Kenny Burgamy reported for for 13wmaz.com Thursday, Solar Plant To Be Located at Dublin High, Dublin […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,40,263,14,15,264,265,16,8,18,2,19,20,312,267,21,22,23,24,53,178],"tags":[8736,275,8717,271,269,277,8704,8705,8754,8755,8706,272,102,8701,8708,101,8699,273,8709,8702,8710,256,8760,12,7,279,8757,8711,8712,8713,274,8714,108,8725,100,6,8749],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-community","category-dublin-ga","category-economy","category-education","category-energy-conservation","category-energy-efficiency","category-environment","category-georgia","category-georgia-power","category-government","category-history","category-law","category-lower-rates-for-customers-llc","category-mage-solar","category-planning","category-politics","category-renewable-energy","category-solar","category-sustainability","category-vlcia","tag-activism","tag-bond","tag-community","tag-dublin","tag-dublin-high-school","tag-dublin-laurens-development-authority","tag-economy","tag-education","tag-energy-conservation","tag-energy-efficiency","tag-environment","tag-ga","tag-gasu","tag-georgia","tag-georgia-power","tag-georgia-solar-utilities","tag-government","tag-greenavations","tag-history","tag-lake","tag-law","tag-lease","tag-lower-rates-for-customers-llc","tag-lowndes-area-knowledge-exchange","tag-lowndes-county","tag-lowndes-high-school","tag-mage-solar","tag-planning","tag-politics","tag-renewable-energy","tag-robert-green","tag-solar","tag-southern-company","tag-sustainability","tag-ted-terry","tag-valdosta","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-E","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}