Bloomberg Reaches for the Sun
Apr 18th, 2008 by Jervey
We’re slow getting to this (call it the post-CP slump), but not a day after Shelly Silver shamefully and cowardly neglected to bring Congestion Pricing to a vote, our refocused mayor turned his attention to solar, noting that CP was but a plank in the broader PlaNYC platform.
Chris Neidl at Solar One breaks it down for us:
Just one day after Albany’s refusal to support congestion pricing, Mayor Michael Bloomberg reaffirmed his strong support for increased solar power deployment in NYC in a keynote address delivered at Newsweek’s second annual Global Environmental Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C.
Next week will mark the year anniversary of the release of PlaNYC, the Mayor’s ambitious longterm sustainability blueprint for development and planning in the five boroughs over the next two decades. While congestion pricing was the component of the plan that certainly garnered the greatest amount of attention over the past 12 months, the proposal was one of over 120 separate recommendations that were introduced in the plan and which pertain to key infrastructure, environmental and quality of life-related categories including transportation, open space development, air and water quality, energy use and climate change.
Counted among the plan’s energy recommendations are some visionary and potentially high-impact policy measures intended to induce solar photovoltaic development in the five boroughs. These include a property tax abatement for solar system owners; the investigation of new varying electricity rate structures favorable to solar deployment (i.e. “real time pricing”); as well as Solar One’s own project to construct Solar 2, a state-of-the-art solar-powered learning and cultural center to be located at our current site in Stuyvesant Cove Park.
As reported by Sewell Chan on the New York Times’ City Room Blog, the Mayor’s address yesterday focused on the City’s plan to install 2 MW of solar PV on 11 public buildings in the near term. This amount would roughly double the amount of solar - private and public - that New York currently has online, and would help galvanize the local market.
(The recommendations can be viewed on pages 112 and 113 of the PlaNYC report, which can be downloaded, here.)
Steve Cohen on the Observer’s blog calls the 2 MW goal “a drop in the bucket,” but ultimately praises the plan because we need to “start somewhere,” and offers that technological advances will make solar a much more effectual solution in the future.
The Times’ Sewell Chan also reported. And the Observer has the actual press release.