Solar Fueling Mass. Clean Energy Growth

Renewable energy is a great source of comfort to both job seekers and the climate, the commonwealth’s energy and environmental affairs secretary said Wednesday.

“This has become a very vibrant part of the Massachusetts economy,” Secretary Richard Sullivan told some 160 people at the DCU Center. His keynote address was part of the Massachusetts Energy Summit, sponsored by the Worcester Business Journal.

Clean energy has experienced 24 percent job growth over the past two years, Sullivan said, with the most significant benefit for the southeastern part of the commonwealth. The same level of growth is expected for another year, he said.

Roughly 5,500 clean energy companies in Massachusetts now employ about 80,000 workers, according to Sullivan.

The Bay State is aiming by 2020 to bring greenhouse gas emissions to levels that are 25 percent below those in 1990, Sullivan said. To achieve that, Massachusetts has committed to investing $2 billion in energy efficiency programs over the next three years.

The investment is expected to yield a $9 billion windfall for utility ratepayers, Sullivan said.

Renewable energy will also reduce Massachusetts’ dependence on fossil fuels, which Sullivan said are particularly expensive for local customers since the Bay State is situated at the end of distribution pipelines. Of the $22 billion spent across the commonwealth on energy each year, Sullivan said some 80 percent of the money leaves the state.

“We’re becoming more energy independent,” he said.

Solar has been vital to Massachusetts’s clean energy landscape, Sullivan said, with the commonwealth exhausting the caps in its initial solar renewable energy credit (SREC) program in just four years.

A new credit program will be rolled out in 2014, Sullivan said, which will aim to provide for stable growth and incentivize solar development in certain segments of the market. Specifically, residential and on-site commercial usage will receive the greatest subsidies, while large off-site commercial projects will be competitively bid.

In addition, Sullivan said the subsidies available to the solar market will decrease over the duration of the decade-long program to account for an anticipated decline in production costs.

The new regulations also take into account complaints that first-round solar subsidies were too generous and put natural gas and other forms of renewable energy at a competitive disadvantage, Sullivan said.

Not everyone in attendance was a fan of the new SREC program.

Middlesex Savings Bank vice president Blain Marchand said declining subsidies will result in a lack of cash flow for investors in later years, and worries that some lenders might be wary about getting on board with the new program.

Sullivan responded that the new proposed regulations are intended to put lending institutions at ease, and thinks the actual decline in production costs over the next decade will more than make up for the smaller subsidy.